This Week: Epiphany 1C
Gospel: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
This week’s gospel is as straightforward as it gets. John the Baptist is baptizing people in the wilderness and Jesus comes to him to be baptized. Of course. And the Holy Spirit comes down like a dove. The voice of God booms, calling him beloved.
Along with the straightforwardness comes the theological implications and questions about Jesus being baptized like a normal person, of why this story now, and what it really means. And for those with an eye toward history, the memory that Christians have taken this moment in different directions based on their own theological proclivities.
The most famous distinction is how the baptism relates to Jesus’s dual nature of human and divine. For many in the East, the baptism was a great opportunity to explain away a divine toddler and preteen who no doubt would have to learn things the hard way—offering this moment as a solution to that complex problem—Jesus gets empowered in the baptism!
For many in the West, this just won’t do. All is a mystery and a matter of faith. Did Jesus bring a bird back from the dead or strike down a neighbor kid because he was angry? Maybe? But probably not—he was always this side of perfect. Blegh. Then clearly not truly human, friends.
Neither of these deals with a programmatic need to have Jesus abide the rules, fulfill the rules, and ultimately transform the rules. Jesus needs to be baptized so that we all get baptized.
I wonder if, at this point, you’re like me and find all of this stuff sounds…kind of stupid? Off base, maybe? Or a little too explainy?
I love the historical debates and explanations because they aren’t terribly satisfying on this one—but they highlight yet another paradox about the nature of creation. Neither answer alone can satisfy, but the debate offers a kind of life to the subject that makes the whole thing more exciting. Just like the kinetic nature of the Trinity—never one or not one. A paradox that says more by not being singled-out and being unfinished and open.
The real reason I geek out about the Baptism of Jesus is not anything it explains or what Ts it tries to cross. It is something much more profound and resonant with the entire Christ Project. It is the start of the ministry. Jesus succumbed to the sacramental life into which we all choose whether or not to participate. He went along the same journey, to show us the way.
But the point is that it is a journey. And it begins here. Not at birth. Not with a decision. Jesus didn’t choose to take himself into his own heart. This not a believer’s baptism or an infant baptism or any distinction humans make to “get it right”. It is Jesus accepting the baptism as the natural start to something much bigger than himself, greater than his worldview and experience: the start of something connected to the world around him.
This, my friends, is what is beautiful about Jesus’s baptism and ours. That it isn’t merely an entrance rite or the hoop we jump through to be able to take communion. It is not a symbol of participation or the badge of honor to display to others to prove our value and secret knowledge—no secret handshakes or words to prove our own greatness. It is the beginning of shared commitment to the Kin-dom, to the restoration of the world, an era of Jubilee.
Take all of these other trappings of membership and shove ‘em. What we have is something that transcends that. Love and mutual affection in a common project of transforming the world. It isn’t about the group or its exclusivity—it’s about the project that is way bigger than the group. It’s about God making things here as they are in heaven. That stuff is about the old world, not the new.