The Baptismal Theme of the Bridegroom Services

The first part of Holy Week came to be associated with the coming of the divine Bridegroom (Christ) to wed Himself to His bride (the Church). Matthew 25:1-13 is read during the week to remind us of the Bridegroom’s midnight return for which we all are to be vigilantly ready.

Early on in Church thinking, the baptismal font was referred to as the bridal chamber where we go to meet Christ, our beloved. Baptism was our entry into our nuptial union with our Savior, the Bridegroom. Remember Holy Week was a time to prepare the catechumens for their baptism. Then think about the Matins hymn of Holy Week: “Your bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior, and I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul, and save me.” We go into the baptismal font naked (I have no wedding garment) and emerge clothed in Christ – we have put on the marital garment of light. The Bridegroom hymn is about baptism, our union with Christ and our entering God’s eternal kingdom.

In later centuries, the font as bridal chamber was replaced with the idea that the font is the watery grave where we die with Christ. This was based in St Paul’s words in Romans 6:3 – “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” The font became the place where our sins are buried with Him. But originally in the Church:

‘The baptismal font is not a grave but rather a bridal chamber that survives the water: it is an ‘ark [of] salvation when the watery flood rages.’ (Michael Peppard, THE WORLD’S OLDEST CHURCH, p 132)

As Peppard notes in his book, the early Church didn’t need to emphasize the sacrifice of Christ or our dying with Him, since every Christian was at risk to have to sacrifice their lives in the persecutions: to be baptized was to put yourself under a potential death sentence! The early emphasis was on salvation, redemption, restoration, rebirth, re-clothing, and renewal. Only in the age after the early persecutions ended did the Church place more emphasis on a spiritual dying with Christ in baptism, and then even later the emphasis in baptism was almost exclusively the forgiveness of sins.

Early in Christian history, the Church placed much more emphasis on salvation and redemption in explaining baptism than on sin and death. (See my post The Many Blessings of Baptism to see the multitude of  things we pray for in the baptismal service, the forgiveness of sins is but one blessing in the plethora of blessings.) Peppard writes:

Christian initiation symbolizes a return to paradise – a  microcosmic restoration of paradise – not in the western (and mostly later) sense of drowning of inherited sin, but in the sense of reuniting alienated entities. The theory of atonement at work here may not be sacrifice in place of sin, but reconciliation and restoration in place of alienation and exile. (THE WORLD’S OLDEST CHURCH, p 206)

‘… The aim of the incarnation, according to Ephrem and other Syriac writers, is to re-clothe mankind in their robes of glory.’ The putting on of the primordial, immortal robe occurs through baptismal initiation, ‘a re-entry into Paradise, not just the Paradise of the beginning of time, but also an eschatological Paradise, of which the Church is the terrestrial anticipation.’ Thus Adam and Eve here do not call to mind sin and death so much as incarnation and immortal paradise. (THE WORLD’S OLDEST CHURCH, p 207)

The “re-clothing” of humanity in Baptism is our putting on Christ, putting on our wedding garment in order to enter the bridal chamber, paradise.

During Great Lent, we read Genesis 1-3, the story of Adam, Eve and the Fall to get us to think about the incarnation, deification, salvation and eternal life in paradise which was the emphasis of the early church. The focus on sin and death happened in more recent centuries. We read Genesis to orient ourselves to the Second Coming of Christ and our salvation. Our orientation is not to the past but to God’s glorious coming eschaton.