On the Day of Lights

On the day on which our Lord was baptized. Now I recognize my own flock; today I see the Church in its familiar form, when you have turned in disgust from the business of fleshly cares and have run together in your full number to the service of God. The people crowd the house, filling it to the inner sanctuary, and fill the space outside in the forecourts, as many as cannot be held within, like bees: some work inside, while others hum round the hive outside. Do so, then, children, and never give up this zeal. For I confess that I feel a shepherd’s feeling: seated on this high lookout, I want to see the flock gathered all round the foot of the summit. And when it is so with me, I am filled with a wonderful eagerness and toil gladly at my discourse, as shepherds do at their pastoral songs. But when it is otherwise, and you go wandering the wandering outside, as you did lately on the past Lord’s day, I complain bitterly and welcome silence; I plan flight from here, and look for the Carmel of the prophet Elijah, or some uninhabited rock. For to the disheartened, somehow, what is solitary and away from others is dear. But now, seeing you keeping festival all together with your very households, I am reminded of a prophetic oracle which Isaiah sang long ago, proclaiming in advance the Church rich in children and with many offspring: “Who are these,” he says, “that fly like clouds, and like doves with their young to me?” And not only that, but also this: “The place is too narrow for me; make room for me, that I may dwell.” For these things the power of the Spirit foretold of the populous Church of God, which in later times was to fill the whole inhabited world from end to end of the earth. The circling course of time, then, has come, bringing round the memorial of holy mysteries that cleanse man, which wash from soul and body sin that is hard to wash away, and lead us back to

the beauty of the beginning, which God, the best of craftsmen, formed in us. And for this reason you, the initiated people, who have experienced the good things of our faith, are gathered; and like good fathers you are bringing along the one still inexperienced, leading the uninitiated by instruction and introduction to the full apprehension of true religion. I rejoice with both: with the initiated, because you have been enriched with a great gift; with the uninitiated, because you hope for a fair expectation: remission of accounts, release from bonds, kinship with God, the free speech of a free man, and, instead of a slave’s lowliness, equal honour with the angels. For these things, and whatever follows from them, the grace of the bath pledges and gives to us. Therefore, putting off the other themes of the Scriptures to other occasions, let us keep to the present aim, bringing as gifts to the feast, as far as we can, what is proper and suited to it; for to each festival its own is dear. So we greet a wedding with nuptial songs; to mourning we bring the customary funeral laments; in business we speak seriously; at banquets we loosen the tightness and strain of the soul; and we keep each occasion untroubled by what belongs to others. Christ, then, was born a few days ago, he who was begotten before all being, perceptible and intelligible. Today he is baptized by John, to cleanse the one who had been defiled, to bring the Spirit from above, and to lift man up to heaven; so that the one who fell may be raised up, and the one who threw him down may be put to shame. And do not wonder if God took such pains over us that he worked out man’s salvation with his own hand. For with the care of the evildoer we were plotted against, and with the forethought of the Creator we are saved. The wicked and envious one, devising sin as a novelty against our race, dragged along the serpent as a covering worthy of his intent, the unclean entering into one like himself, the one earthly and of the underworld in his will taking up residence in the creeping thing. But Christ, setting right that one’s wickedness, takes up the whole man and saves man, and becomes the type and pattern for all of us, so that he may sanctify the first fruits of every action and leave to his servants zeal for what was handed down, beyond doubt. Baptism, then, is the cleansing of sins, the remission of offences, the cause of renewal and rebirth. And understand rebirth as perceived by thought, not seen by the eyes. For we shall not really, after the Hebrew Nicodemus and his rather gross understanding, change the old man into a little child, nor refashion the wrinkled and grey-haired into the tender and young by bringing the man back again into his mother’s womb; but the one branded with sins and grown old in evil practices we bring back, by royal grace, to the innocence of the infant. For as the newborn child

is free of charges and punishments, so too the child of rebirth has nothing to answer for, released from his accounts by royal bounty. This benefit is not granted by the water (for then it would be higher than all creation), but by the command of God and the visitation of the Spirit, coming mystically to set us free. Water serves to show the cleansing. For since we are used to washing with water the body that has been fouled with dirt and mud, and so making it clean, for this reason we employ it in the mystic rite too, showing the bodiless brightness by a perceptible thing. But let us rather, if you please, persist more minutely in our inquiry about the bath, beginning as from a spring with the precept of Scripture: “Unless one is born,” it says, “of water and Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Why both, and why was the Spirit alone not thought sufficient to complete baptism? Man is compound and not simple, as we know precisely; and therefore remedies akin and similar to this double and conjoined being were allotted for its healing: for the visible body, perceptible water; for the invisible soul, the unseen Spirit, called by faith, present ineffably. For “the Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear its voice, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes.” It blesses the body that is baptized and the water that baptizes. Therefore do not despise the divine bath, nor belittle it as common because water is used. For what works in it is great, and the things performed are wonderful because of it. For this holy altar too, at which we stand, is by nature common stone, no different from the other slabs that build our walls and adorn our floors; but since it was consecrated to the service of God and received the blessing, it is a holy table, an undefiled altar, no longer touched by all, but only by the priests, and by them with reverence. The bread again is up to then common bread; but when the mystery consecrates it, it is called, and becomes, the body of Christ. So the mystic oil, so the wine: though of little worth before the blessing, after the sanctification of the Spirit each of them works in its own way. The same power of the word also makes the priest august and honoured, set apart from the commonness of the many by the newness of the blessing. For yesterday and the day before he was one of the many, one of the people; suddenly he is appointed leader, president, teacher of true religion, initiator into hidden mysteries; and he does this without being changed at all in body or form, but, while outwardly he is the man he was, he has been transformed in his invisible soul

for the better by some invisible power and grace. And so, turning your mind to many things, you will see that the visible things are contemptible but what is accomplished through them is great; especially when you gather from ancient history what is akin and similar to the matter in question. The rod of Moses was of nut wood. And what else was it but common wood, which any hand cuts and carries, shapes as it pleases, and gives to the fire at will? But when God willed to accomplish through it lofty miracles beyond words, the wood was changed into a serpent. And again elsewhere, striking the waters, he now made the water blood, now made a countless brood of frogs gush forth. And again he cut the sea, divided to its depths and not flowing together. Likewise the mantle of one of the prophets, though it was a goat’s skin, made Elisha [renowned] throughout the world. And the wood of the cross is saving for all men, though it is, as I hear, part of a contemptible plant, less honoured than most. A bramble bush showed Moses the appearance of God; the remains of Elisha raised a dead man; clay gave light to the man blind from the womb. And all these, being lifeless and senseless matter, were the means of great miracles, because they received the power of God. By the same line of reasoning, water too, being nothing else than water, renews man to spiritual rebirth when the grace from above blesses it. But if someone, doubting and disputing, again gives me trouble, continually asking and inquiring how water, and the initiation performed in it, can give rebirth, I shall say to him most justly: “Explain to me the manner of birth according to the flesh, and I will explain to you the power of the regeneration according to the soul.” You will say perhaps, as if giving an account: “The cause, the seed, makes the man.” Then hear from us in turn that water, when blessed, cleanses and enlightens man. And if you again retort with your “How?”, I shall cry back at you more loudly: “How does the moist and formless substance become a man?” And so the argument, advancing through the whole creation, will be exercised on each thing: How heaven? How earth? How sea? How each particular thing? For everywhere human reasoning, at a loss in the search, takes refuge in this syllable, as those unable to walk take refuge in a seat. And to put it in brief: everywhere the power and working of God is incomprehensible and not to be reduced to rules of art, easily giving being to whatever it wills, but hiding from us the detailed knowledge of its working. Therefore blessed David too, once fixing his mind on the magnificence of creation and filled in his soul with baffled wonder, uttered that saying which all sing: “How great are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you have made them all.” For he perceived the wisdom, but the art of the wisdom he did not …

Leaving aside, then, all curiosity about what is beyond human power, let us rather seek what does allow a partial comprehension: For what reason is the cleansing by water? And for what need are the three immersions employed? What the Fathers taught, and what our mind has assented to and accepted, is this. We know four elements from which the world has its constitution, known to all even if their names are left unsaid; but if, for the simpler, the names too should be given: fire and air, earth and water. Our God and Saviour, then, fulfilling the economy for our sake, went beneath the fourth of these, the earth, so that from there he might make life rise. And we, receiving baptism in imitation of our Lord, teacher, and guide, are not buried in earth (for that is the covering of a body entirely dead, wrapping up the weakness and corruption of our nature), but coming to the element akin to earth, water, we hide ourselves in it, as the Saviour did in the earth; and doing this three times, we portray in ourselves the grace of the resurrection on the third day. And we do this not receiving the mystery in silence, but with the names of the three holy hypostases spoken over us, in whom we have believed, in whom we also hope, from whom we have both our present being and our being hereafter. Perhaps you are vexed, you who fight boldly against the glory of the Spirit, and grudge the Paraclete the veneration with which he is venerated by the godly. But leave off wrestling with me, and resist, if you can, the words of the Lord, which ordained for men the invocation in baptism. What does the Master’s command say? “Baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” How into the name of the Father? Because he is the source of all things. How into the Son? Because he is the maker of creation. How into the Holy Spirit? Because he is the one who perfects all things. We bow, then, before the Father, that we may be sanctified; we bow also before the Son, that the same may come about; we bow also before the Holy Spirit, that we may become what he is and is called. There is no difference in the sanctification, as if the Father sanctified more, the Son less, and the Holy Spirit less than the two. Why then do you cut the three hypostases up into different natures and make three gods unlike one another, when you receive one and the same grace from all? But since examples always make a discourse more lively for the hearers, I want to instruct the mind of the blasphemers by an image, making great things, not seen by sense, clear from earthly and lowly ones. Suppose you had met with the misfortune

of captivity, and were among the enemy, a slave and in misery, groaning for the freedom you once had; and suddenly three acquaintances and fellow citizens, coming into the country of your masters and tyrants, freed you from the constraint upon you, paying the ransom equally and dividing the expense among themselves in equal shares: would you not, on receiving that favour, regard the three alike as benefactors and make return for the ransom to them in equal shares, since both the effort and the expense on your behalf were common to them, if you are a just judge of the kindness? So much by way of example; for our aim now is not to set out the doctrine of the faith. Let us return to the present occasion and the subject before us. For I find that the grace of baptism was proclaimed not only by the Gospels after the cross; but even before the Lord’s incarnation the Old Scripture everywhere prefigured the image of our regeneration, not displaying its form openly, but foreshowing God’s love for mankind in riddles. And as the Lamb was proclaimed beforehand and the cross was prophesied, so baptism too was announced in deed and in word. Let us remind the lovers of the beautiful of the types; for the season of the feast demands the remembrance as a necessity. Hagar, Abraham’s maidservant, whom Paul too allegorizes in addressing the Galatians, was sent out of her master’s house because of Sarah’s anger (for a slave woman under suspicion with the master is a grievous thing to lawful wives), and was carried, desolate, into a desolate land, with the infant Ishmael at her breast. When she was in want of necessities, and she herself came near death, and the child even before her (for the water in the skin was spent, since the Synagogue, which lived for a time among the types, could not have sufficiency of life from the ever-flowing spring), an angel appears unexpectedly and shows her a well of living water; and drawing from it she saves Ishmael. See, then, a mystic type: how from the very beginning salvation came to the perishing by living water, which was not there before but was given by grace through an angel. Again, later, Isaac had to be yoked in marriage, he for whose sake Ishmael with his mother was driven from his father’s hearth. And Abraham’s servant, sent as matchmaker to win a bride for his master, finds Rebekah at the well; and the marriage that was to produce the lineage of Christ took its beginning and first compact at water. Not only so, but Isaac himself, when he tended his flocks, dug wells everywhere in the wilderness, which the foreigners stopped up and filled in, as a type of the ungodly in later times, all who hindered the grace of baptism and railed against it, fighting against the truth. But the martyrs and the priests, digging wells, prevailed, and the gift of baptism flooded the whole

inhabited world. By the same force of meaning, Jacob too, hastening to his betrothal, unexpectedly met Rachel at the well. A great stone lay on the well, which a crowd of shepherds coming together used to roll away, and then they drew water for themselves and their sheep. But Jacob alone rolls away the stone and waters his betrothed’s sheep. The event is, I think, a riddle and a shadow of what was to come. For what is the stone lying on it, but Christ himself? Of whom Isaiah says: “And I will lay in the foundations of Zion a costly stone, precious, chosen”; and Daniel likewise: “A stone was cut without hand”, that is, Christ was born without a man. For as it is new and strange for a stone to be cut from rock without a stonecutter and the tools of stonework, so it is beyond every wonder for offspring to appear from an unwedded virgin. The spiritual stone, Christ, then, lay upon the well, hiding in depth and mystery the bath of regeneration, which needed a long time, like a long rope, before it was revealed. And no one rolled away the stone except Israel, which is the mind that sees God. He also draws up the water and waters Rachel’s sheep; that is, revealing the hidden mystery, he gives life-giving water to the flock of the Church. Add also the matter of Jacob’s three rods. For from the time the three rods were set by the watering place, Laban, the worshipper of many gods, became poor, while Jacob became rich and abounded in lambs. Let Laban be taken allegorically as the devil and Jacob as Christ. For after baptism Christ took away all Satan’s flock and became rich himself. Great Moses, when he was a fair infant at the breast and fell under the common and grim sentence which hard-hearted Pharaoh issued against the male infants, was exposed on the banks of the river, not naked, but placed in a chest. For the law had, as a type, to be in an ark. He was set down near the water. For the law is neighbour to grace, as were the daily sprinklings of the Hebrews, which a little later were to be covered over by the perfect and wonderful baptism. And as the divine Paul judges, the people themselves, crossing the Red Sea, announced the good news of salvation through water. The people passed over, and the Egyptian king with his army was sunk; and by these deeds this mystery was prophesied. For now too, whenever the people come into the water of regeneration, fleeing Egypt, that is, wicked sin, they themselves are set free and saved, while the devil with his own servants (I mean the spirits of wickedness) is choked with grief and destroyed, counting the salvation of men his own disaster.

These things would be enough to confirm the subject before us. Yet the lover of the beautiful must not neglect what follows either. For the Hebrew people, after suffering much, as we have been taught, and completing the wretched circuit of the wilderness, did not receive the land of promise until they had crossed the Jordan with Joshua leading them and steering their life. And Joshua, setting the twelve stones in the stream, was plainly preparing in advance the twelve disciples, the ministers of baptism. And the wonderful sacrifice of the aged Tishbite, which surpasses every human mind, what else does it foretell in deed than faith in the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and redemption? For when the whole Hebrew people had trampled on the religion of their fathers and fallen into the error of many gods, and King Ahab was made the sport of idolatry, having as companion of his life and most defiled teacher of ungodliness the ill-named Jezebel, the prophet, filled with spiritual grace, came to meet Ahab, and, with the king and all the people as witnesses, stood up against the priests of Baal for a wonderful and extraordinary contest. And proposing to them to sacrifice the bull without fire, he showed them ridiculous and wretched, praying and crying in vain to gods that do not exist. Finally, calling on his own true God himself, he accomplished the proposed contest wonderfully, with many surpassing additions. For he did not simply pray and bring fire from heaven on the wood while it was dry, but bade and commanded his attendants to bring much water. And when he had poured out the jars on the split logs three times, he kindled the fire from water by prayer, so that from the natural opposition of the elements, which strangely ran together into friendship and cooperation, he might show the power of his own God with great surpassing. By this, then, Elijah clearly foretold to us through that wonderful sacrifice the rite of baptism that was later to be performed. For the fire was kindled by water poured on three times, to show that where the mystic water is, there also is the Spirit, quickening, warm, fiery, burning the ungodly and enlightening the faithful. And his disciple Elisha too, when Naaman the Syrian, who was sick with leprosy, came to him as a suppliant, cleanses the sick man by washing him in the Jordan, clearly foreshowing what was to come both by the general use of water and by the particular dipping in the river. For the Jordan alone of rivers, receiving in itself the first fruits of sanctification and blessing, channelled the grace of baptism to the whole world, as from a spring, from its own type.

These, then, are signs in act and deed of regeneration through the bath. Let us now consider the prophecies in words and utterances. Isaiah cries out, saying: “Wash, become clean; take away the wickedness from your souls.” And David: “Come to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not be ashamed.” And Ezekiel, writing more clearly and plainly than the two, promises the fair promise: “And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be cleansed from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you; and I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will give you; and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh; and I will put my Spirit in you.” Most plainly too Zechariah prophesies Jesus clothed in the filthy garment, our slavish flesh, and, stripping him of the gloomy clothing, adorns him with the clean and shining robe, teaching us by this figurative example that in the baptism of Jesus all of us, putting off our sins like a poor and much-patched tunic, put on the holy and most beautiful garment of regeneration. Where shall we place that oracle of Isaiah, too, crying to the wilderness: “Be glad, thirsty wilderness; let the wilderness rejoice and blossom like a lily; and the desert places of the Jordan shall blossom and rejoice”? For it is clear that he does not announce gladness to lifeless and senseless places, but by the wilderness speaks figuratively of the parched and unadorned soul; just as David too, when he says: “My soul is like waterless land to you”; and again: “My soul has thirsted for God, the mighty, the living.” And again in the Gospels the Lord: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.” And to the Samaritan woman: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.” And the honour of Carmel is given to the soul that is like the wilderness, that is, the grace that comes through the Spirit. For since Elijah dwelt on Carmel (and the mountain became famous and celebrated because of the virtue of its inhabitant), and John the Baptist, shining in the spirit of Elijah, sanctified the Jordan, for this reason the prophet foretold that the honour of Carmel would be given to the river. And the glory of Lebanon, from the comparison with its lofty trees, he transferred to the river. For as Lebanon has ample occasion for wonder in the very trees it grows and nourishes, so the Jordan is glorified by regenerating men and planting them in the paradise of God; and of them, ever blooming, as the psalmist’s word says, and leafy with virtues, the leaf shall not fall, and their fruit

God will receive in due season and rejoice in, like a good gardener exulting in his own works. And the divine David, prophesying also the voice which the Father sent from heaven to the Son when he was baptized, to lead the hearers, who were still looking at the perceptible lowliness of the man, to the natural dignity of the Godhead, wrote this in the book: “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the voice of the Lord in majesty.” But the testimonies from the divine Scriptures must stop here; for the discourse would run on to an endless length if one wished to collect them one by one and set them down in a single book. But all of you who pride yourselves on the gift of regeneration and make your boast of the saving renewal, show me after the mystic grace the change in your ways, and make known by the purity of your conduct the difference of your transformation for the better. For of the things that fall under the eyes nothing is altered: the features of the body remain unchanged, and the shape of the visible nature is not exchanged. But there is surely need of some plain proof by which we may recognize the newborn man, distinguishing the new from the old by clear marks. These, I think, are the deliberate movements of the soul, by which, separating itself from its old habits and cutting a newer road of life, it will clearly teach its acquaintances that it has become another from what it was, drawing along no mark of the old. And this is the manner of the transformation, if you will be persuaded by me and keep my word as a law: the man before baptism was licentious, grasping, a seizer of others’ goods, abusive, a liar, a slanderer, and whatever is like these and goes with them; let him now become orderly, self-controlled, content with his own and sharing from it with those in poverty, truthful, courteous, affable, in a word practising every praiseworthy action. For as darkness is dissolved by light, and black vanishes when whiteness is coloured over it, so the old man too vanishes when adorned with the works of righteousness. You see how Zacchaeus too, by the change of his life, killed the tax collector, paying back fourfold to those he had wronged, and distributing to the poor the rest, which he had wickedly hoarded before from the poor whom he oppressed. Matthew the evangelist, another tax collector, of the same trade as Zacchaeus, immediately after his call changed his life like a mask. Paul was a persecutor, but after grace an apostle, carrying heavy chains for Christ in amends and repentance for the unjust bonds which he once received from the law and carried against the Gospels. Such should regeneration be; so it should wipe out the habit of sin; so should the sons of God live; for after grace we hear ourselves called his children. And for this reason we must examine carefully the characteristics of our begetter,

so that, forming and fashioning ourselves to the likeness of the Father, we may appear genuine children of him who called us to adoption by grace. For the bastard and supposititious child is a sorry thing to be charged with, belying his father’s nobility by his deeds. That is why, it seems to me, the Lord himself, when setting out for us in the Gospels the rules of life, used these words to his disciples: “Do good to those who hate you; pray for those who mistreat and persecute you, so that you may become sons of your Father in heaven, because he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” For he says they become sons when they imprint on their own thoughts the likeness of the Father’s goodness by kindness towards their fellows. For this reason too, after the dignity of adoption, the devil plots against us more violently, wasting away with an envious eye when he sees the beauty of the newborn man hastening to the heavenly commonwealth from which he himself fell; and he raises fiery temptations against us, eager to strip off our second adornment as well, as he did the first. But when we perceive his assaults, we should say over ourselves the apostolic saying: “All of us who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death.” And if we have been conformed to his death, sin in us is from now on altogether dead, run through by the javelin of baptism, as that sexually immoral man was by the zealous Phinehas. Flee from us, then, ill-named one; for you seek to despoil a corpse, one who long ago was joined to you, who long ago lost his senses for pleasures. A corpse does not lust for bodies, a corpse is not caught by wealth, a corpse does not slander, a corpse does not lie, does not seize what does not belong to it, does not abuse those it meets. My life has been ruled towards another life; I have been taught to despise the things of the world, to pass by earthly things, and to hasten towards heavenly ones, as Paul too expressly testifies that the world has been crucified to him, and he to the world. These are the words of a soul truly regenerated; these are the utterances of the newly initiated man who remembers his own profession, which he made to God at the handing down of the mystery, promising to despise every torment and pleasure for love of him. Let this, then, suffice for the sacred subject of the day, which the circling year has brought round to us in its appointed courses. It is good now to let our discourse rest in the bountiful Giver of so great a gift, offering in return a small word for great things. For you, Master, are truly the pure and ever-flowing spring of goodness, who justly turned away from us,

and in your love for mankind had mercy on us. You hated, and were reconciled; you cursed, and blessed; you banished from paradise, and called back again; you stripped off the fig leaves, an unseemly covering, and clothed us in a costly garment; you opened the prison and released the condemned; you sprinkled us with clean water and cleansed us from our filth. No longer will Adam be ashamed when you call him, nor, convicted by his conscience, will he hide himself, concealed in the thicket of paradise. Nor will the flaming sword encircle paradise, making the entrance inaccessible to those who draw near; but everything has been changed into gladness for us, the heirs of sin: paradise is open to man, and heaven itself; the creation, the worldly and the supramundane, long at strife with itself, has been fitted together in friendship; and we men have become of one voice with the angels, devoutly offering their theology. For all these things, then, let us sing to God the hymn of joy which a mouth possessed by the Spirit cried out long ago in prophecy: “Let my soul rejoice in the Lord; for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation and put on me the tunic of gladness; as on a bridegroom he has set a mitre on me, and as a bride he has adorned me with ornament.” And the adorner of the bride is surely Christ, who is, and was before, and is to come, blessed now and for ever. Amen.