by Fr Georgios Lekkas
To Fr Georgios Dorbarakis for his prayers
When St John the Baptist was asked by the Lord Jesus Christ to baptise Him in the River Jordan, the saint’s reluctance recalls the reluctance of the Apostle Peter to allow the Lord to wash his feet, shortly before the Mystical Supper.
The humility shown by the last of the Prophets and by the first of the Apostles was condemned by the Lord Jesus, for through their humility they both were obstructing the world-redeeming work of Divine Humility, which is incomparably superior to any human humility.
The revelation of the Three-sun Divinity to the world at the baptism of Jesus Christ was prompted by the humility, which is beyond reason, of the sinless Lord Jesus, the incarnate Son and Word of God, who consented to be baptised as if he were any other sinful man, in order to save even the most sinful of men. The self-revelation of the Triune God in the Jordan, following the Lord Jesus’s self-abasement, demonstrates to us that what most moves God to reveal Himself to a human being is above all the degree of the latter’s self-abasement.
An abyss of humility separates us from Christ. Christ is the ‘true desire’, not because of His complete power but because of His complete humility. To sincerely worship Christ, one must begin to grasp the extent of His humility. Love for Christ is absolute, because the humility through which He gives rise to it within us is without limits.
Undoubtedly there is a secret relationship between the complete power and the complete humility of God. What is certain, however, is that the complete humility of God makes our arrogant mind dizzy, with the result that the mind, filled with dizziness, leaves space for the heart to worship its Creator.
John’s baptism was a moral baptism, as it required the rejection of moral evil on the part of the one baptised. However, the baptism which is offered by the Lord Jesus in the Holy Spirit is an ontological baptism, requiring the rejection of the denial of God which was made by Adam and Eve in Paradise, when they adopted the false belief that they could live without God.
Only the complete humility of the Lord Jesus allows fallen man to understand that the complete power of God and the complete powerlessness of man are ontologically complementary quantities according to ineffable divine loving-kindness, so that even though man is a creature, he can enjoy the Divine Life of his Creator eternally.
The soul is filled with dizziness when she intuits the mystery of the ontological complementarity of divine omnipotence and human powerlessness, as a result of which her love for God is unreserved. For a brief moment the soul believes that her love for God is only one-way, but immediately afterwards she becomes aware that her love for God is only a distant echo of His own love for her, with the result that she goes from dizziness to dizziness and from love to love.
We seek Christ where he is not to be found. He is not among the first but among the last. We are still fighting with each other over who will be first instead of competing with each other over who will be last. It is only the one who is last who worships Christ at the feet of all. The one who is last sees Christ in every person and becomes entirely Christ by worshipping Christ in everyone. At the top there is only one, but at the bottom are all the others. Christ descended from the top to the bottom, where everyone is, so that if possible he can win them all.
We are inclined to look upwards, and thus we do not see Christ kneeling before us and washing our feet. We seek Christ in heaven, but our encounter with Him takes place, as so beautifully expressed by Saint Silouan, where He waits for us, that is, in our own Hell, so that He may take us with him to Paradise.
The baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ is a prefiguring of His death and, more particularly, of the fact that through the death of Jesus Christ death itself would be defeated. Henceforward it is irrational that the death of any human being – let alone a baptised Christian – should provoke fear, for it simply washes away his sins and accomplishes his rebirth, the same person but ‘in a different form’, in the Kingdom of God.
Translation from Greek: Andrew Watson
Protopresbyter Dr. Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Belgium. He studied Law, Philosophy and Theology at the University of Athens. He has a PhD in Greek Studies from the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Research Agency. He taught Greek philosophy in Greek Higher Education between 2005-2017. His latest poetry collection, PROSECHOS ANAGENNISI (IMMINENT REBIRTH) was recently published by To Koinon ton Oraion Technon (Athens, 2021, p.79.
