Happy Feast of Baptism of our Lord Jesus ✝️🙏

"As therefore any one who takes and recasts a golden statue which has been tarnished by time, smoke, dust, rust, restores it to us thoroughly cleansed and glistening: so too this nature of ours, rusted with the rust of sin, and having gathered much smoke from our faults, and having lost its beauty, which He had from the beginning bestowed upon it from himself, God has taken and cast anew, and throwing it into the waters as into a mould, and instead of fire sending forth the grace of the Spirit, then brings us forth with much brightness, renewed, and made afresh, to rival the beams of the sun, having crushed the old man, and having fashioned a new man, more brilliant than the former.

And speaking darkly of this crushing, and this mystic cleansing, the prophet of old said, "You shall dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."

— From St John Crysostom’s "Instructions to Catechumens".