The Cosmic Jordan

Early Christian ideas of the Cosmic Jordan have something to teach us in the context of climate change...

By Dr Edward Echlin, 8th January 2010

Today, the Jordan, so closely associated with Jesus and all of us, suffers climate change, pollution, over extraction, diminishment, and near death. Over extraction has so diminished the river that it now barely reaches the Dead Sea. Agriculture and other human effluents pollute the once clear river. All present dwellers in the Holy Land, indigenous Palestinians, Jews, Moslems, Christians, and all faiths should share a healthy river. The Sea of Galilee is less deep and pure than it was, fish species known to Jesus and the apostles are dwindling, salt springs on the lake floor are effecting the water

Through the Incarnation our whole interconnected soil community is united in the human Jesus to God. Jesus had a special relationship to the Jordan. We may say it was -- and still should be -- a privileged river. Jesus’ Jewish ancestors, crossed the Jordan to enter the promised land where ‘dew from Hermon waters the mountains of Zion.’ As a young Jewish Galilean, familiar with readings from the Jewish Scriptures, Jesus would have appreciated the Jordan, its sources at Mount Hermon, and the living waters which nourished the Jordan valley and flowed into the biodiverse lake, which Christians call the Sea of Galilee.

For most of his life Jesus lived amid extended family fields on the Nazareth ridge. Unlike Egypt with its irrigated vegetable fields, Nazareth’s thin but fertile soil was dependant on gentle rains. As the second century African Tertullian said, ‘Christ is never without water’ (numquam sine aqua Christus). There was and is unavoidable wisdom in the Jewish scriptures: When people serve God, He sends rain and fertility: when they serve other ‘gods’ there is drought and climate change (Dt. 11.13f; Lv. 26.36) As he matured Jesus realized He had a special mission in God’s kingdom. He therefore left Nazareth, its fields and winter rains and journeyed to the Jordan, where he was baptized in the river by John the wilderness baptizer. Through Jesus’ baptism all the waters of the earth are effected and become what early Christian writers call the extended or cosmic Jordan. The Syrian writer, Jacob of Sarugh, says beautifully, ‘The entire nature of the waters perceived that you had visited them – seas, deeps, rivers, springs, and pools thronged together to receive a blessing from your footsteps’. We now know that, through evaporation and precipitation, all waters are related. All waters, including our own rain and aquifers, are blessed because Jesus was baptized in the Jordan. After John’s arrest Jesus moved to Capernaum, near where the Jordan replenishes the lake ‘by way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations’ (Isa. 9.1; Mt. 4.12). His ministry was itinerant, preaching the kingdom, and retiring often to wilderness or quiet places.

As his ministry drew to a close, Jesus visited the sources of the Jordan near Caesarea Philippi. There was an ancient shrine to the fertility god Pan there which even today is a ‘new age’ pilgrimage site. At that biodiverse source of the river, Matthew says Jesus commended Peter the rock (Mt. 16.16). The contemporary successors of Peter and the apostles, with all church leaders and all baptized Christians, could contemplate the fertility associations of that region where Jesus praised Peter. There is something in that event in that place with its ecological associations that should touch all of us. As Pope John Paul II said, we need ‘an ecological conversion’. Jesus’ visit to Caesarea Philippi, near the source of the Jordan, with his first followers can inspire us to treasure all the waters of the earth.

Shortly after that visit to northern Galilee and Mount Hermon, Jesus made his final trip to Jerusalem. Jesus did not go there explicitly to die, but he did know he could be executed and thereby contribute to the kingdom. Immediately after Jesus’ death, water flowed from his open side onto the soil. The open side and the presence of Mary, whom Jesus called ‘woman’, symbolize Eden. Jesus is the New Adam. His life and death here on our earth reverse the disruption caused by Adam and Eve’s disobedience. His reconciliation of all creation is a new creation. Significantly, water is again included in Jesus’ death on the cross. Christ, as Tertullian said, is to the very end, ‘never without water’.

An Israel based apolitical NGO, ‘Zalul Environmental Association’, now struggles to protect, replenish, and restore the suffering and dwindling river. Because all environmental healing everywhere is connected, when we live sustainably and heal the earth’s waters we are healing the ‘cosmic’ Jordan. We can support Zalul Environmental Association in its efforts to restore the river. And we can insist nations bordering replenish the Jordan, and permit access to water by indigenous Palestinian people of all faiths. By our efforts, wherever we live, to restabilise climate, and to demand our leaders implement agreements reached at Copenhagen, and by preventing more water and climate damaging coal power stations, roads, and runways, and by conserving water where we live, we are, as the Jesus community today, protecting the ‘cosmic’ Jordan.

Dr Edward P. Echlin is Honorary Research Fellow at University College of Trinity and All Saints, Leeds; Fellow at Sarum College, Salisbury; Chairman Emeritus of Catholic Concern for Animals, and author of The Cosmic Circle, Jesus and Ecology (Columba, 2004).