Baptism beginning of our divinization by grace

We should need to have the same gift of words possessed by our saintly predecessor Gregory the Theologian, who in his sermon on the Holy Epiphany – insuperable both theologically and poetically – expresses in incomparable manner the genuine faith of the Church on Holy Baptism handed on since early times

by Bartholomew I, Ecumenic Patriarch of Constantinople

On these pages, the early 11th century mosaics of the monastery of Hosios Loukas, Daphni, Greece; The Baptism of Jesus

We should need to have the same gift of words possessed by our saintly predecessor Gregory the Theologian, who in his sermon on the Holy Epiphany – insuperable both theologically and poetically – expresses in incomparable manner the genuine faith of the Church on Holy Baptism handed on since early times, and referring to the revelation of the Trinitarian God at the River Jordan illustrates with moving magnificence the greatness of the love of the Lord for mankind, which through the sanctification of material elements, such as water, make participation in the divine life possible to us wayfarers on this earth.
Many are the theophanies that – in its various mythic religions – mankind has known since ancient times and they reveal the extremely deep but unappeased thirst of the human mind to reach communion with its Creator. The Church, Body of Christ, that lives the fulfilment of the prefigurations and visions of the Old Testament, starting from the manifestation of the Trinitarian God by the River Jordan at the moment of the baptism of Jesus, has never ceased to experience divine manifestations, of diverse intensity, thanks to the merciful bounty of God, friend of mankind.
From the moment in which the God Logos «made himself man so that man might become God», as Athanasius the Great said, he has gradually revealed the mystery of the divinization of mankind, certainly not by nature but by grace, through the uncreated power of the Holy Spirit, and has given himself to the faithful as example: «Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you may follow his footsteps» (1Pt 2, 21).
Baptized himself in the Jordan, he taught in that way the necessity of Baptism as fundamental and introductory sacrament for the incorporation and grafting of the faithful onto the beautiful olive tree of the Church, and has repeated, in his famous nocturnal dialogue with the disciple Nicodemus, that, «unless one be born again of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the kingdom of God» (John 3, 5). In the same way, each of us, when we receive Baptism, is purified in mysterious fashion of the stain of sin, and, spiritually reborn, has from that moment onwards the possibility of sharing dynamically in the life of the Church, where living in purity of spirit and body he can experience already now the divine manifestations, and the final divine manifestation which they will enjoy who become sharers in Paradise, according to the marvellous description of John the Evangelist in his Apocalypse (chap 21 and 22).
When we speak of divine manifestation we do not mean a condition produced by the imagination, but a total participation of the whole human person, body and soul, in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In such participation, it may happen that one experiences only inwardly the working presence of God or it can happen that one lives even bodily a change that cannot be described in human words. That is what happened to the holy apostle Paul who was first to experience the fact (2Cor 12), and found himself incapable of describing it, since it was a foretaste, one of minimal intensity, of Paradise.

above, The Nativity

Similar gifts of grace have been and are again experienced by very many saints of the Church, both early ones and contemporaries of ours, who did not seek them, given that the manifestation of God constitutes an extraordinary event, conceivable only as gift of God, and cannot be the outcome of special technical efforts that in some fashion force God to reveal himself.
Such a spiritual vision and condition demand an absolutely evangelical life according to the promises pronounced at the moment of our Baptism, when «we have renounced Satan and we have been united to Christ». And since, in any case, because «we live in the flesh and dwell in the world» and we besmirch the unspotted garment of Baptism both because of human weakness and through temptation by the devil, the merciful Lord has given us a second Baptism, that of repentance and of tears. Indeed, as for the worth of this «second Baptism», Saint Gregory of Nyssa writes that «the tear that drops has the same force as the washing of Baptism, and a wail of contrition restitutes the grace that for a little while was lost».
In what we have said very briefly here, we have tried to show the unbroken faith that the Holy Mother, the Great Church of Christ, lives in terms of the meaning of the manifestation of God, in the first place at the Jordan and then in the daily life of the faithful. Our descent from Adam, our lapsed progenitor, has of course made us inherit many negative consequences that hinder us on the path for achieving direct vision of the face of God. The merciful Lord, however, with his ineffable Incarnation and the whole of the divine Economy, grants us the possibility of shedding the old corruptible Adam and of robing in Him of the New, according to the words of Paul: «We who are baptized in Christ, we are robed in Christ». So sings the Church on the radiant day of the feast of the Epiphany, with joy in our hearts, awaiting the renewal of this corruptible world at the moment of the second coming of the Lord, who with the sanctification of the waters also inaugurates return to the primordial beauty of creation itself, that suffers with us till Christ be all in all.