[This is a homily I gave on the feast of Theophany in 2003. In the Byzantine tradition, this feast is always celebrated on January 6. The mystery is the manifestation of God (which is what "Theophany" means) as Trinity on the occasion of Jesus' baptism.]
When we celebrate a feast, the readings that we are given by the Church are supposed to do two things. The Gospel is supposed to tell us what happened. And the Epistle is supposed to show us how “what happened” applies to us and what effect it has in our lives. That’s how we’re going to look at this mystery today. First, we’ll look at the Gospel (Mt. 3:13-17) to see what happened.
We pick up where we left off yesterday [in the vigil Liturgy], with John the Baptizer about waist-deep in the Jordan River, and the long stream of sinful humanity coming to him to be baptized. Now John probably knew some of these people, and knew the types of people that were coming—probably mostly crusty old fishermen and merchants and farmers and prostitutes and publicans. And so he’s going along, one after another: this guy; this farmer; this fisherman; this tax-collector; this Son of God… Wait a minute! Son of God? What is He doing in this line of sinners, coming for baptism?
Now he may not have really known the full extent of what it means that Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, but he knew that He was the Christ, the Messiah, and all of a sudden he sees Him standing there, in front of him, and he doesn’t know what to do! It’s easy enough to dunk hookers in the water, but what do you do when the Messiah is standing before you?
So John pulls Him over and says, “Look. You should baptize me!” But Christ said, “I want you to baptize Me anyway, because this fulfills the righteousness of God.” And that righteousness of God is expressed in the Incarnate Christ identifying with sinful humanity. Christ did not share in our sins, but He came to bear our sins: in his own self, in his own body, on the Cross. But He came, not to say, “Here I am, the King, and I want everyone to worship Me.” He came very humbly, and didn’t even distinguish Himself from anybody else who was standing in line for baptism, in order to express his solidarity with us, the sinful people He came to save. He came for baptism as a way of identifying with us. So John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, just like everybody else he was baptizing.
Then something very amazing happened. And, depending on which Gospel you read, this is something that Jesus experienced, or John experienced, or probably both of them experienced (since we have different accounts: that Jesus saw this Himself, and that 
John was a witness to it, too). Otherwise, if it was only Jesus’ private, inner, Trinitarian experience, we could hardly call this feast “Theophany”—it wouldn’t be a “manifestation of God” if it was manifest to no one who could tell us anything about it! But it was manifest, at least to John. When Jesus was baptized, the heavens opened, and the Spirit of God descended upon Him, and the voice of the Father said, “This is my beloved Son.” Now at that moment, I’m sure that a lot of things became real clear for John. That was an experience of immense profundity. He probably just saw how heaven and earth were, all of a sudden, one in the great embrace of God; and he saw the deeper mystery of who this Messiah was whom he just baptized, and who had asked to be treated like one of the sinners.
As it says in the Gospel according to St. John, God had actually predicted this. I’m sure He didn’t give him all the details, but John said: “The One who sent me baptizing told me, ‘When you see the Spirit descend on someone, that’s the Son of God, that’s the chosen One.’” Then he says, “I have seen, and so I know, and now I testify.” It was manifested to John, and John now testifies.
We see, then, what happened there at the Jordan. Now we want to look at the Epistle to see what that means for us. We can stand in awe at the experience that John and Christ had at that moment, and give thanks, but then there has to be some bridge into our own life.
What we see in the Epistle (Titus 2:11-14 & 3:4-7) are several points that apply to us here, very concisely and directly. This is in a Trinitarian format, which corresponds to the Gospel. “When the goodness and loving-kindness of God appeared…” OK, there’s the Father. “…He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit…” OK, there’s another One, the Spirit. “…which He poured on us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior…” There’s the whole Trinity. “…so that we might be justified by his grace, and become heirs by hope in eternal life.”
That’s the whole business in a nutshell. That is what was happening; that is the essence, the grace, which is communicated through the mystery of what we read in the Gospel about the baptism of Jesus. It starts out with the loving-kindness of God, who manifested our salvation. He did so because of his great mercy. He did not look at all these sinners coming to be baptized, and say, “It’s because of your righteous deeds that you’re going to be saved.” I mean, God is a God of truth, so He couldn’t say that. There were no righteous deeds down there that He could’ve collected, to justify humans being saved. So, it’s because of his mercy that He opened the heavens, and said: “Behold My Son. He’s the One who is going to save you by grace.”
So He saved us by his mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. Now, it’s kind of strange to say, “We are saved by washing.” Certainly our hygiene is improved by washing, but are we really saved by washing? Now how could it be that water is going to save us?
Well, I think that we can illuminate this mystery a little bit by an experience of our own Brother Symeon. The other day, when he was working with our water system, he stuck his hand into the water in one of the tanks and got a shock! Due to a short in the pump or something, the water in the tank had become electrified. That was something of a—maybe not a theophany, but some sort of epiphany to Brother Symeon, to have that electric current running through him, coming out of the water.
Well, what happens when Jesus goes into the water? He “electrifies” it, so to speak. Actually, energizes it. He brings the Divine Energy of the Holy Spirit into the water. Jesus Christ is the Live Wire of God, sent and plunged into the waters of this world to sanctify them and to make them capable, through the energy of the Holy Spirit, to actually renew us, to save us, to re-create us, to make us “reborn” sons and daughters of God.
And when the name of Jesus is invoked, and the power of the Holy Spirit is invoked over water—when that is done in the right context, and by those ordained to do so, then the water is given that energy. It is divinely energized, “electrified” water that can effect the miracle of salvation, of initiating people into the Kingdom of God. That’s what happens when we bless baptismal water: it receives that power of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. The Bible says that baptism is the “washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5), and “regeneration” means being born again, so let’s make it clear that the Bible says you are born again by the sacrament of baptism! [see also John 3:3-5]
This is “poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ,” through our whole sacramental life. It’s this outpouring of grace through Jesus Christ, and because of the incarnation, and because of his baptism in the Jordan, and all the mysteries of his life, especially his death and resurrection, that we can live this new life, and that we can become righteous by his grace.
Remember, just a couple of verses before: “Not by our own righteousness”—because we have none, but we can become righteous by grace, poured out on us, through Jesus Christ, so that “we become heirs, in hope, of eternal life.” That’s the bottom line; that’s what it’s all about. He said that all this leads to the destiny that God has willed for us: that we have eternal life.
So, let us—as we reflect on this mystery of what happened with John in the Jordan, with Christ in the manifestation of the Holy Trinity, and of what happens in our own life through our baptism, our faith, through God’s mercy, through the contact with the energized water—realize that when we drink this water (we’re going to have the Great Blessing of the Waters after the Liturgy), this is really something special.
This is something symbolized by the three-branched candle as we plunge it into the water, that Trinitarian Divine Energy is being communicated to that water. And when we drink that water, and bless things and people with that water, something really happens. There’s a mystery that we take into ourselves, and we should allow ourselves to be transformed by it, to be electrified, so to speak, by this grace-bearing water.
So, as we go on in our lives, we will grow in this Trinitarian communion, especially through the sacraments and through prayer. In these coming days especially, in our contemplation of this mystery, let us go into the depths of our hearts in our meditation and prayer. If we go deep in faith and in love and in openness, we will see, within us, in our own hearts, the heavens open, so to speak, and the Father will bless us, and pronounce that benediction on us that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And the Spirit will be manifested, will descend upon us, will anoint us, and so we can go forth in the name of Jesus Christ and live in joy, because we have become heirs in hope of eternal life.
