The Baptism of the Lord
Today ends the liturgical season that began in December with the weeks of Advent. Over the past couple of months, we’ve been introduced to a number of themes that are very important for our spiritual lives. First, there’s the themes of advent itself: the coming of the Savior and our preparation for it. Remember that God always makes the first move. God’s coming into the world–into God’s creation and even that creation itself happens first. Our preparing ourselves to receive it is our response. But, without that preparation, we remain blind and deaf to God’s self-revelation.
The second set of themes we looked at center on our celebration of the Nativity. These themes are the incarnation–that is, God pouring himself into our humanity and taking on our full human condition–and also the re-definition of ‘power’ and ‘glory’ in terms of the helplessness of and infant and the humility of a stable.
In the feast of the Circumcision, we are presented with the theme of God’s promise and its fulfillment. The promise is one of victory not only over sin, but victory over death itself. The fulfillment of the promise to Abraham is transformed when the Son of God takes on himself the covenant and its stipulations in the Law of Moses (the Torah) and frees us from the illusion that our salvation depends on our obedience to rules.
The Epiphany teaches us that God is found where we are least likely to expect him. We can find God in the most God-forsaken places and hopeless times of our lives, but God can only be found there if we’re willing to look for him. When God is absent, it’s we who have moved.
And so, here we are at the Baptism of the Lord. Centuries ago, the Epiphany was celebrated for eight days (like Christmas and Easter), and today would have been the octave of the Epiphany. We saw last Sunday that Jesus’s baptism by John in the Jordan River was originally celebrated as the Epiphany, so it makes good sense historically to end the season of Epiphany with the commemoration of Jesus’s baptism as part of his revelation to the world as the Son of God.
Each of the gospel authors approached this event differently, with different details to bring out different meanings. Please keep in mind that the gospel stories are not histories in the modern sense. They are meant to convey part of the spiritual experience of the authors. Mark emphasizes that Jesus’s true identity was hidden from the crowds–and even from his disciples–until the Resurrection. So, the experience Mark describes is personal and private to Jesus alone.
What is the meaning of Jesus’s baptism? John’s baptism was one of repentance. Did Jesus need to repent? None of the gospels suggests that. Like most of Jesus’s ministry, his participation in this ritual bath did not transform Jesus, but, rather, it transformed the meaning of the ritual itself. Many of the words Mark uses to describe this event are references to passages from the prophet Isaiah that would have been familiar to most of his Jewish readers. Jesus is seen not only as the new Adam, the firstborn of a renewed humanity, he’s also seen as the embodiment of the people of Israel themselves.
Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s covenant–his promises–with Abraham and with Moses as well. This fulfillment is not for himself alone, but as the embodiment of God’s faithful people–that which we now call Christ’s Church. So, what Mark is presenting to us in this passage is a new Exodus. Once again, God’s people pass through the waters and emerge to a new life and the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise.
The words that Jesus hears when he emerges from the waters are taken again from the prophet Isaiah which we heard in our first reading this morning. With his baptism, Jesus’s private life ends and his public life begins. He is setting out on his mission to preach the good news, to heal, and to suffer. The passage from Isaiah is known as the first of the Songs of the Suffering Servant. These four “songs” are read in the liturgies of the four days in Holy Week before Maundy Thursday. In other words, the path that Jesus sets foot on as he rises from the waters of the Jordan river leads directly to Calvary. In accepting baptism, Jesus accepts his role as Messiah and Savior.
Can we knit all these very different themes into a meaningful whole that we can take away from this season? I believe we can. Here’s one sentence that I think sums up all that we’ve experienced over the past six weeks: God confounds our expectations.
God reveals himself in silence and darkness. God’s power manifests itself in weakness. God’s glory shines through adversity. God is found where we think him most absent. God’s victory appears to us as defeat and God’s life is fully realized on the other side of death.
One thing we must never forget when we think about the Incarnation–God becoming human: we must never forget that God hurts. Since we are all baptized into Christ Jesus and we all can say with Saint Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” then, when we hurt, God hurts. In that is God’s power. In that is God’s glory. In that is God’s love.