Imagine you are standing in a small chapel before dawn. The candles are lit. The font stands at the center of the room, filled with water that has not yet been blessed. You are about to witness something the Orthodox Church has performed, with only minor variations, for nearly two thousand years — and something that, if you are the one being baptized, will be the most significant event of your existence.
The priest enters. He does not begin gently.
Before the Waters
The service opens with exorcism.
Three times the priest prays over the person to be baptized, addressing the Evil One directly. The words are not metaphorical. The prayers rehearse the whole history of cosmic conflict — the fall of Satan, Christ’s descent into death and emergence victorious, the final judgment still to come — and they apply that history to this single human soul, standing here, now, on the threshold of a new life.
“The Lord rebuke thee, O Devil,” the priest reads. “He who overthrew thee by death, and with His Resurrection destroyed all thy dominion.”
This is where the initiation begins — not with warm words of welcome, but with a declaration of war. The Church understands that every person approaching Baptism is approaching it from enemy-held territory. The stakes, as the rite makes clear, could not be higher. The battle is over a soul, and it will last that soul’s entire life. The exorcisms do not end the warfare; they inaugurate it, openly, under the banner of Christ.
After the exorcisms, the candidate is turned to face west — the direction of darkness, of error, of the setting sun. Three times they renounce Satan, his works, and his worship. Three times they breathe on their hand and spit, a gesture of ancient and visceral rejection. Then they are turned to face east.
East is the direction of Christ. “For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:27). The Church has always prayed facing east for this reason — it is the direction of the dawn, of the Resurrection, of the return of the Lord. Turned toward the light, the candidate is asked three times: “Do you join yourself to Christ?”
Three times: “I do join Him.”
Then comes the Creed — the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith, composed by bishops who suffered imprisonment, exile, and torture for the doctrines it contains. Reciting it is not a theological exercise. It is a battle cry. It declares to the devil, the world, and one’s own fallen nature that Christ matters more than anything this world can offer. The newly initiated inherits the faith of the martyrs in the act of confessing it.
The Shape of the Water
Before the candidate enters the font, the priest blesses the water. This too is ancient, and the prayers make its meaning explicit.
The water is not merely a medium of washing. It is connected, through the Church’s theology of types and foreshadowings, to every water-salvation event in the whole of Scripture. It is the water over which the Spirit of God hovered at creation. It is the flood that cleansed the earth and saved Noah’s family. It is the Red Sea that Israel walked through dry-shod while Pharaoh’s army was consumed. It is the Jordan, at whose banks the prophet Elijah parted the waters and Joshua crossed into the Promised Land.
Most of all, it is the Jordan into which Christ himself descended at his Baptism — not because he needed cleansing, but because the waters needed him. When the eternal Word of God entered the Jordan, the Church teaches, he sanctified all water. He re-enacted creation: the Holy Trinity present again over the waters, the Spirit descending as a dove, the Father’s voice declaring the beloved Son. The Theophany — as Orthodox Christians call the feast of Christ’s Baptism — was the re-creation of the fallen world.
And so each baptismal font holds, in some real sense, the Jordan itself.
The priest anoints the candidate with the Oil of Gladness. This is the anointing of a warrior preparing for holy contest — the imagery is deliberate. “Christ as Umpire of the contest… as wise, He placed its laws, and as generous, the prizes suitable to the victors.” The oil seals and readies the body for what is about to happen.
The Crossing
The candidate steps into the font.
What happens next is not a symbol. The triple immersion of Orthodox Baptism is the thing itself: a death, a burial, a resurrection — performed on the body of the person being baptized, united to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. St. Paul’s words in Romans 6 are not being illustrated; they are being enacted.
“Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”
Down into the water — death. Under the water — burial. Up from the water — resurrection. Three times, once for each person of the Holy Trinity, in whose name the baptism is performed. The word Baptizō in Greek means simply “to immerse or plunge,” and the Orthodox Church has always understood that the full physical act of immersion carries the full theological weight of the Paschal mystery. What is submerged is the old human being — “that which was dead and corrupt.” What emerges is a new creation, a child newly born from on high, adopted into the household of God the Father.
The baptismal font is a tomb and a womb at once.
The Church does not understand this as a merely interior or spiritual event. Something genuinely happens to the person who passes through those waters. They are joined, ontologically, to the dying and rising of Christ. They inherit the covenant identity of Noah, of Israel at the Red Sea, of Joshua’s generation entering the Promised Land — all at once, in a single moment.
A white robe is placed on them: the vesture of the royal priesthood. “A robe of light Thou hast bestowed on me.” A cross is placed in their hands, with Christ’s own words: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” They are clothed in their new identity before they have taken a step in it.
Sealed
Immediately following Baptism, without pause, comes Chrismation.
The priest takes Holy Chrism — oil consecrated by a bishop, prepared from olive oil and grape wine and a great variety of aromatic substances, each variety of incense signifying a different gift of the Spirit — and anoints the newly baptized on nine parts of the body: forehead, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet.
Each anointing is accompanied by the same words: “The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit.”
This is what happened to Christ at the Jordan. The Spirit descended upon him — and the name “Christ” means “the Anointed One.” When Christians are chrismated, the Church teaches, they become little christs, anointed with the same Spirit, sharing in Christ’s prophetic, priestly, and royal calling. The name “Christian” is not a descriptive label for someone who follows a religion. It is a baptismal-chrismational identity: one who has been anointed.
The earliest reference to this practice comes from Theophilus of Antioch, writing around 181 AD: “It is on this account that we are called Christians: because we are anointed with the oil of God.”
The seal received at Chrismation is permanent. It marks the person as belonging to God — not a membership in an organization, but an eschatological mark, the sign of the living God spoken of in the Book of Revelation: “And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the sign of the living God” (Revelation 7:2). The newly chrismated person carries this mark into every moment of their life, into every struggle and failure and return to God that will follow.
After the Chrismation, the tonsure: the priest cuts four small locks of hair in a cruciform pattern. Hair, in the ancient world, was a symbol of beauty and strength — think of Samson. This small offering of strength is a first-fruits offering, the candidate giving the whole of themselves to God by offering a token of what is most vital. The cruciform cut shapes the offering into the sign of Christ’s own death and resurrection.
The First Table
The newly illumined — this is what the Orthodox Church calls the newly baptized: the illumined — are now led to the chalice.
They have died and risen. They have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. They wear a white robe and carry a cross. And now, immediately, they receive the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion.
This is not optional, and it is not deferred. The Orthodox Church has always understood, following Christ’s own words in John 6 — “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” — that Holy Communion is essential, not supplemental. Pope St. Leo the Great, writing in the fifth century to Eastern bishops, confirmed that infant communion was the universal practice of the whole Church in the first millennium.
The Eucharist is the immediate nourishment of the new life just granted. One is not initiated and then later, when sufficiently mature, admitted to the table. One is born and immediately fed — as every mother knows is right and natural. The Eucharist is the continuation of baptismal grace, the food of the reborn.
The priest’s words at that first communion are simple and complete: “The servant of God [Name] partaketh of the Precious Body and Blood of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
If the newly illumined is an infant — and in the Orthodox Church, infants are baptized, for the Church has understood from the beginning that what God offers is offered to all his children — the priest takes the child in his arms and gives him to the mother, saying: “Receive, O mother, thy child, who hath been baptized, chrismated and sanctified.”
The candle given at the close of the service carries the words of Christ: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father, which is in heaven.”
The newly illumined goes out from the chapel carrying this light. They are, as the Church declares over them: “Justified. Enlightened. Baptized. Chrismated. Sanctified. Washed clean.”
The exorcisms declared the war. The renunciation broke the old allegiance. The waters buried the old self and raised the new. The oil sealed the new soldier. The Eucharist fed them for the road.
The road is the Christian life — a lifetime of learning, in the arena of the human heart, what it means to live as someone who has already passed through death.
Source: The Divine Services of the Orthodox Church, Chapter IV — The Holy Mysteries of Initiation.