Holy Water and Magic Dust
Part 1 of 3
Essay Posted February 19, 2008 by James E. Nelson
The twelve days of Christmas have come and gone (Dec 25 to Jan 6) and Orthodox Lent (which doesn’t begin this year until March 10) is still a few weeks away, and for the Orthodox this means it’s the season of house blessings.
Let me explain.
The feast of Theophany and the Baptism of the Lord (Jan 6) is an historically big feast for Christians, second only to Easter. For a variety of cultural reasons the celebration of Jesus’ birth eclipsed the celebration of his baptism in the Christian West. Even though Christmas has become the cultural high point of “the holidays,” Theophany remains the theological mountain peak of the season, especially in the Orthodox East. The birth of Jesus was God taking on human flesh while Theophany is the revealing of the meaning and power of that otherwise secret event.
If you doubt that Epiphany/Theophany is the bigger event, consider this. Only two Gospel writers (Matthew and Luke) record the birth of Jesus, and even in those two Gospels, from a literary perspective, the birth story is a prelude to the Gospel story itself. After that prelude there is a thirty year gap where we know nothing of Jesus (except for his trip to the Temple after his Bar Mitzvah) and we then jump to the Gospel story, which begins in all four Gospels, with Jesus’ baptism (that is, Theophany).
The power of Theophany is demonstrated most fully in Jesus’ baptism. Remember that John didn’t want to baptize Jesus; he thought their roles should be reversed, that Jesus should baptize him. But Jesus insisted. His explanation was that it fulfilled the Law. In more down home conversation we might simply say it was the right thing to do.
The hymns of the church reflect on his baptism and observe that because the Holy One not only took on flesh, but participated in all these earthly things, the earthly things he participated in became holy. This is particularly significant for water. Water is the ultimate symbol for natural evil (or chaos) in scripture. God called creation into being and it was a chaotic watery mess. (“Formless void” is the term used in Gen 1:2.) And then God went about ordering the “formless void,” separating sky from earth, then further separating water and dry land on the earth.
Adam was commanded to bring order to the dry land (to till the Garden), but the water always remained a bit of a wildcard in the biblical view of things. It was the sea that destroyed the world in the days of Noah. The sea was home of Leviathan, the sea monster, which is not evil outright, but certainly disorderly and out of control. Storms arose out of the sea. It’s as if the sea always remained the last great bastion of chaos, or what we might call “natural evil.”
So it is necessary to deal with all this chaos and wildness when God gathers together and puts “all things” into order (Eph. 1:10) at the end of time. And this is precisely what we find at the end of the Bible. John the Revelator (as certain old timey songs call him—I love that term) describes the final victory of God over all that opposes him by saying, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Rev. 21:1). The picture of that final ordering of all things is the complete removal of the sea.
This is why the Baptism was such a significant event. It pointed forward to the way things were going to be eventually and how they were going to become over time. Jesus didn’t remove the wild water, but when the Holy One entered the water and was baptized, the water was made holy. It was the first volley in the battle against the chaos of natural evil. From a conceptual standpoint, this is where the Gospel story starts to get interesting. The Holy One has met the chaotic waters. In the end there would be “no more sea,” but for the time being while the waters remained wild and unpredictable, even the wild waters would become an instrument of holiness.
Because of this big story of the chaotic water that stretches from Gen. 1 to Rev. 21, and because at Theophany Jesus Christ enters into this particular big story when he enters into the Jordan, the Orthodox Church takes this opportunity to bless the waters. A big urn of water is placed prominently in the chancel. (And ours at St Thomas is big! One of the altar boys was overheard asking, “Is this the week we bring out the Stanley Cup?”) After the water is blessed the faithful are invited to take some of it home with them. One can drink it, sprinkle it, keep it on the icon shelf. It’s good for what ails you.
And then, in the weeks following Theophany and the blessing of the water, the priest comes around to the community to do house blessings. The same water that was blessed on Theophany is used to bless houses. It is sprinkled around the house to set aside the house as a home that belongs to God.
And this brings me to Bones and Booth.
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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