Baptism of The Christ

Baptism of Christ. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John. Davezelenka

Matthew 3:13-17

 

Today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus, the iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, often reduced to the role of a theological statement about the identity of Jesus. We pay little to the relationships between Jesus and John, Jesus and the created world, and Jesus and spiritual experience by using it to prove Jesus is divine and already righteous without the need of John’s baptism.

 

Yet this is an incredible story, told in all 3 synoptic gospels, each with their own twist but consistent in the central truths portrayed. John is baptising on the banks of the Jordan. It is a baptism for transformation and change, a baptism not of ritual but of experience. He is challenging those who come to be transformed by the experience and to go away and transform the world in which they live. Yes the word sin appears, but it is not the trivial definition we use of personal sin today, but an understanding of the disconnection from our one-ness in creation and our need to rediscover our co-independence in our movement in relational wholeness empowered by love. His is a baptism of community for an evolving creation destined to find its beginning and completion in Christ.

 

John is correct, Jesus has no personal need for such baptism, but he does have a representational need to do so. He comes to John, his cousin and mentor, as a student comes to a teacher. This is about participating in the experience and become a participant in the journey to wholeness which is a journey to himself. The great Christian mystics such as Merton, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin and others, along with the seminal mystics from other faiths and spiritual practices, all speak of the journey to wholeness as the journey to self. They all, in their various understandings, equate the inner journey of discovering your true self as the experiencing of the Christ at the most intimate and personal level. Merton write that the only journey a human takes is the inner journey.

 

Karl Rahner, a modern Catholic mystic, writes: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.”  Jesus and John both agree with Rahner, without a deep and undeniable experience of God there is no way of being for Christ in the world.  This is not necessarily an emotionally charged moment of bells and whistles, it is often the breaking open of ones self perception in such a way one becomes a completely new being, unrecognisable from the one who existed before, especially and most importantly, by ones self.

 

In the baptism of Jesus this is exactly what happens. Here we have a young man recognising his need of John’s tutelage and baptism and coming in obedience to John’s call. For many this may fly in the face of what we think about this story. Jesus is not just following a divine script. He is a created being, a thinking man, making a considered decision to be baptised by John.

 

It is an act rooted in a personal relationship with John and completed in the created world. Both points are very important. Jesus is an ordinary person, engaging with others and the created environment who experiences a mystical awareness of his true self in the midst of both. Jesus does not have his mystical experience, his awakening to his true self, in isolation from others or the world. It occurs in the midst of an act of obedience, surrounded by others engaged in the same, on the banks of a shallow and narrow river on the edge of the desert.

 

What happens next is, apparently, witnessed by others, but most specifically experienced and reflected on by Jesus, not just in the desert where he went after this occurs, but in his discussions and teachings with those who followed him. This event dislodged Jesus from his ego self and set him on a deep spiritual path he invites all of us to participate in – through journey through him to him.

 

Jesus is the fulfilment of creation and brings with him into our world both the way and the end. In his baptism he understands this truth. He participates in an act representative of the evolving understanding of the spirituality John brings and is connected to the source of all creation (God) by the power to bring us to evolved fulfilment (the Spirit). God speaks, the Spirit hovers of the waters, just as in the first creation myth. God speaks similar words to those attributed to him then, ‘and God saw it was good’. Here he says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

An interesting comment in itself as Jesus has yet to do anything, his ministry has not begun, there have been no acts of power, words of wonder or miracles of healing. It seems the ordinary human being Jesus is deemed to be sufficient by God and the simple act of responding to John’s call has opened the gates of heaven and placed Jesus in a new relationship with God.

 

Is this just an experience only Jesus can have? Do we read this story and listen to this sermon and go, ‘Nah, couldn’t happen to me. I’m not good enough. Only Jesus who was God’s son could have this experience.” We have been fooled by the idea that because we understand Jesus was both divine and human and somehow that excludes us from emulating such experiences. The truth is that this should be the normative experience for those on the spiritual journey. It is not the experience only of Buddha, Dalai Lama or Jesus or Mother Teresa or Rumi or any of the other spiritual pilgrims, it is the experience we all are destined for if we participate in the acts of being human and open to the possibility of such experiences.

 

I suspect Jesus was unaware of what was about to happen to him when he came to John, despite the prophetic words of John and Jesus's response. I suspect Jesus was still coming to grips with the guidance John had been giving him and simply wanted to do what was necessary. His baptism dislocated him from his self-understanding in such a way that he heads into the desert to make sense of it all. What happens there is the continuation of his evolution into the Christ and the path that would take him to complete self-denial and love on the Cross.

 

Yes, this an iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, but not one reserved for Jesus and out of reach for you and I. It is available for us if we participate in the journey to relational wholeness in the created world out of love for God and others. This experience will set us on the Way to the Way, it will bring us, through the experience of Jesus to ultimate fulfilment in Christ. It will occur when we become open to the possibility, diligent in our worship and practice, inside and outside liturgy, and when we come just as we are, just as Jesus did. Amen 

Seeing Differently

Mathew 3

Grand Canyon by David Hockney

Today we meet the hermit from the bush. The bloke who ignores the social requirements for appropriate dress and, by the smell of him, for the use of water for something other than drinking, a man who is on the outside looking in, John The Baptist, so named after the rite he made his own.  It is interesting he wasn’t called John Camel Hair or John Who Needs A Bath or John the Vegan, but he wasn’t. He is John the Baptist.

 

John is also remembered for his aversion to sin. His baptism was predicated on repentance, the recognition of sin by an individual who then takes steps to repent of that sin through the cleansing and renewing act of baptism. Now sin got a bad name when I was growing up. It seemed to include everything that was enjoyable – eating too many lollies, drinking too much soft drink, getting your sibling into trouble, dipping the pigtails of the girl who sat in front of you in the inkwell and many more mortal acts. The last may very well have been mortal if she could run faster than you at recess!

 

Sin has been trivialised to many normal and ordinary acts of being human and it seems it is still in that place. Yet John the Baptist’s idea of sin was much expanded on that of our parents, nuns and the morality police of our youth. John refers to the systemic sins maintaining the status quo, the sins of entitlement due to right acting, of doing what was expected of you and reaping the rewards. It was the sin of identifying clearly the status of each individual, their rights and their responsibilities. It was ensuring those born into privilege maintained that privilege. It is about exclusion of others from the benefits you have based on class, skin colour, health or otherwise, gender and age.

 

²“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In other words, the possibility of instituting the promised kingdom does not belong out there, to others or to the future. It belongs here, in you and now. It is calling you and I to make it real – to put love into action and respond to the covenant requirements of kindness – respect, justice and compassion. It is not a task of people like John or even those whom he spoke harshly about; the first is just one man and the latter group won’t change until they have no choice. It is up to you to ensure they have no choice by you own love in action for yourself, others and the world.

 

John wasn’t interested in who stole the cookie from the cookie jar, but who stole the cookie jar and who allowed the cookie jar to remain stolen. He was particularly tough on those in privileged positions and saved his strongest words for them, but he didn’t let the ordinary folk off the hook either. John’s expectation was that is if you recognised your complicity in this corporate sin, then you needed to show evidence of a change of heart, mind and action. He says: “⁸Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

 

Bearing fruit can be as little as sharing the troubles of those who live next door, advocating for a fairer share of society’s wealth for all, ensuring those who on the outside get to come in side. There is no prescription for bearing fruit and there is no particular type of fruit – love, justice, compassion, kindness, advocacy, giving and more – all work if that is what the situation needs.

 

Ben Witherington suggests: "Repentance, or metanoia, to use the Greek word, refers to far more than a simply being or saying one is sorry for past sins, far more than mere regret or remorse for such sins. It refers to a turning away from the past way of life and the inauguration of a new one, in this case initialised by an act of baptism."

 

And this isn’t easy. Those who describe the Christian life as easy and a cop out haven’t tried to live it! It is incredibly difficult to live in such away that each day is a further step toward wholeness and another from stuff we have held onto and has held onto us. It is being prepared to shed our previous static identity and accept the uncertainty of unfinished business.

 

Crabs and other crustaceans do not grow in a linear fashion because of their hard outer shell. Up to 20 times in its lifetime a crab moults, in effect moves out of the old shell and grows a new one. This happens 6 times in the first year. It is a difficult and excruciating time, not to say a vulnerable onee. If your shell is your protection, wandering naked around the sea floor is not a comfortable place to be. Yet it must happen if it is to grow into maturity.

 

Repentance requires we shed our tough and hard formed identities both as a society and as individuals. What served us well in another time and place no longer does. What we have come to accept as the way things are, no longer is appropriate and we have to change structures, ideas, ideologies and religions.

 

John the Baptist calls that the coming near of the kingdom of God – the ever evolving recognition of a new way of seeing. David Hockney, the wonderful English artist, paints what he sees but what he sees in isn’t always what is physically there. He suggests we see two ways – physically and psychologically; physically by recognising objects, like a camera. Seeing psychologically is different. If we look at a scene we will focus on one particular element that takes our eye in that scene. Because we do, that tree, face, animal, colour becomes clearer and larger in our view and seems to be larger and more significant than the rest of the scene. There are a whole lot of reasons why this happens but we rarely if ever see what is there. We see what we see.

 

In art this works well, in community and individual life here is a glitch to be aware of. What we think is the case may not be so because we are seeing, hearing, engaging with it as we see the world – focusing on what is important to or has a specific meaning or interest to us. We may miss what is really happening. We are not called to see physically or one dimensionally as a camera but we are to be aware of the psychological pre-determinants affecting our response to the world.

 

John the Baptist calls us to confront society and ourselves to engage in the very difficult process of moulting, like the crab, and to recalibrate our seeing. In this way we begin to recalibrate the world by helping to break it out of its restrictive shell and welcome in relational wholeness empowered by love - the kingdom of God.

 

Oh and this won’t get easier when Jesus enters the picture. It gets harder, because he increases the requirements and calls more from us. “¹¹He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Seeing through the eyes of Jesus changes everything.

 

John’s repentance is the ongoing reassessment of self and society required of all who profess faith. It requires action and outcomes and can’t be avoided. It is our vocation. How will you see differently when you leave here this morning?

The Father and I Are One

 

John 10:30

Jesus, in John’s gospel, is Jewish, very, very Jewish. Not only is he Jewish he is very devout. John reports him attending synagogues, upholding various laws and attending a range of festivals just as a devout Jewish boy would. Jesus grew up in this environment. His parents were very Jewish and abided by all the appropriate practices and rituals. We can follow them through key incidents in the various Gospel retellings of his story.

 

There is no doubt about his heritage. Both John and Jesus rely heavily on the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, for images, ideas and connections to the story of the Israelites from Exodus to the promised land and more. Jesus lived the Psalms and understood his life and mission in terms of the stories of his peoples past.

 

In modern Christianity there is a move away from the Old Testament (the Christian form of the Jewish scriptures) to sole reliance on the New Testament scriptures. This has happened for a number of reasons:

• The proliferation of violence, often attributed to God or, at least, carried out in God’s name.
• The apparent irrelevance of the laws and moral positions found therein for modern life.
• The expectation that the Old Testament must be historically factual and true, and it fails to meet the modern scientific standard for such.
• The idea that the Old Testament is fulfilled and superseded by the New Testament and is no longer required reading for Christians.
• The idea that the Old Testament was about law exclusively and the New Testament is about love exclusively.

Each of these ideas have developed lives of their own (and I will deal with some of them in posts on my blog over the next few weeks) and a sense of the bleeding obvious for most Christians. Yet it seems to me that that was not the case for Jesus and those who wrote about him. Yes, Paul and others reimagined the story as contained in the Jewish Bible so that it could be understood and embraced by non-Jews, but the truth remains, key ideas and images of the Christian faith continue ideas and rituals at the centre of the Tanakh.

 

Today we come to one of those stories, the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple. An appropriate story for the baptism/dedication of Oscar. The Festival of the Dedication of the Temple or Hanukkah, commemorates the Jewish people’s successful rebellion against the Syrians in the Maccabean War in 162 BCE. A ritual cleansing and re-dedication of the Temple occurred after the Jewish people’s victory. It is believed that there was only enough consecrated oil to keep the lamp burning for one day but the small bottle of oil miraculously lasted for eight days. Hanukkah, also known as Chanukah, is referred as the Feast of Lights or Festival of Lights for this reason.

 

Why would John have Jesus walking in the colonnades of Solomon (the wisest of the Jewish fathers and the builder of the great temple) in the temple rebuilt by Herod, the despot? What is the significance of the confrontation with the synagogue scribes about his identity? Why doesn’t he answer them plainly?

 

Jesus is abrupt and brutal. It is very obvious who I am if you just see the connections, follow the bread-crumbs, join the dots. Those who are able to listen, those you are called to shepherd they understand my identity. Oh by the way, since you have separated your self from the sheep, you fail to hear because you think you know. Jesus continues, but here goes, here’s another clue.

 

Earlier in John 8 Jesus, in one of the ‘I am’ sayings says: “I am the light of the world”. Here Jesus turns up at the Festival of Lights, the Dedication of the Temple.  Paul S. Berge writes, "In the setting of the festival of lights, Jesus is the true light of the world; in this festival of the temple, Jesus is the true temple in whom the presence of the Father dwells."

 

The imagery is powerful and very deeply connected to the ritual and imagery of the Old Testament. This story would not work without a deep understanding of the Jewish scriptures. The synagogue people get it and don’t like it. Jesus has appropriated for himself equality with God. In verse 31 ‘The Jews took up stones again to stone him.” Here we find a sense of exasperation the Jews have with Jesus - the word ‘again’ – he constantly provokes them by couching the things he says and does in terms of their scriptures.

 

His finishing statement – “The Father and I are one” is more than they can take. Yet it is the bringing together of the covenantal relationship begun by God and related in their scriptures. It is what they believed in as a people, a oneness with their God, but were unable to see fulfilled in Jesus or anyone else for that matter.

 

And perhaps that is one of the major issues we have with the Old Testament.

• We don’t want to recognise ourselves in its stories, violence, legends and failures because we know we are not like that because we are constantly affirmed by family, friends and consumer society.
• We don’t want to recognise the possibility of a God who does in fact get angry, make judgements about us and leave us to stew in our own juices because it is always somebody else’s fault anyway.
• We don’t want to admit that there are time when we want God to be more like a marauding Messiah than Jesus turns out to be, because we do have a hit list of those we would like God to smite.  

It’s just a little too real and too close to home.

 

In the baptism service we recognise our place in God’s economy and commit ourselves, individually and communally to live in relationship with Jesus who is both the light of the world and the true temple. We dedicate, give back, welcome into the church a young person who will live in relationship with Jesus as a light in this world and a temple indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Baptism symbolises our desire to be one with God in this world and the next.

 

It is the moment we pick up two key ideas of an Old Testament Festival and celebrate them in the life of one individual, in our desire for life to epitomise oneness with God. This connection to traditions of great depth, meaning and longevity give us hope for ourselves, for the one baptised and for the future of our faith. The Old melds into the New as life goes on in the shadow of the past and the light of the present and the future, the light who is Christ, the temple and dwelling place of the everlasting Godhead.

 

Let us join with Oscar and cast ourselves into the baptismal waters to rise shining and in dwelt by the spirit of Christ. Amen. 

The Baptism of Jesus

Luke 3:21-22

 

Question: have you ever had the experience of listening to great music or looking at a painting and discovering you are no longer listening or looking at something out there, separate from you, but somehow, in some way you have become one with the sound, the image and the performer? So much so that for a brief moment whom you thought you were has become lost to you and you are completely enfolded within the experience. You are the music, the painting, the performer and they are you. There is no distinction. This is no longer about you are as a solitary human being, you are subsumed into the totality of being.

 

Todays Gospel reading introduces humanity to such an experience, not as the sole possession of Jesus, a special interaction between Jesus and God, but the very reality of our own existence.

 

William Loader suggests that "In a world of above and below, above and below meet in Jesus." I suggest not as the sole possession of Jesus but as the exemplar of an experience that is normative for you and I. Some see Jesus' baptism as the public connecting of God and Jesus, as a way of saying clearly who Jesus is and therefore setting him apart from the rest of humanity.

 

It is interesting that Luke situates the experience with the following words, ‘²¹Now when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised..’ This was not a private experience. It happened as the culmination of the baptism of all present. In some mystical way all present are therefore gathered up in the generosity of God who gives herself fully to Jesus. By association through presence and act all there are included in the proclamation God makes to Jesus.

 

How can this be? Jesus is Gods' son. They are human beings who came for repentance. We are ordinary human beings and therefore can not, by definition, be included in these words.

 

The truth is this: Jesus is God born into human form, material, physical, real and touchable, not in any way unlike us. Gods statement, ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” could be rephrased as ‘You are my person, my fully alive human being, with who I am well pleased’.

 

What Jesus experiences at his baptism, he experiences on behalf and clearly articulates what has happened to all who has been baptised – God has generously flowed out of the Godhead into humanity in such a way that the two have become one – God has become, or is,  the ground of being for every human being. Meister Eckhart, the 14^th century mystic and teacher tells us that, 'You should know that God must act and pour Himself into the moment He finds you ready.' [German sermon 4, trans M.O’C. Walshe]

 

Edward Markquart, suggests that this happens at our baptism. He writes: "In our baptism, similar things happen to us as happened to Jesus when he was baptised: 1) The Spirit of God comes into us and remains in us. 2) We are declared to be a child of God. 3) We hear that God is well pleased with us."

 

Thomas Merton, in his book The New Man, picks up this theme as follows:

For now I had entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God: God's own gravitation towards the depths of his own infinite nature, his goodness without end. And God, that center who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me.

 

The mystical insight found with in the baptism of Jesus is this: we are more than our physicality and what we believe gives us concrete being and identity. We are more than the space and time in which we live. And we are often so preoccupied, attached to what we believe identifies us, our troubles, concerns, possessions, relationships and more, that we live a life time without actualising the gift God pours into every human being.

 

Jesus is the example of what is possible when we do. Jesus detaches himself from the concerns of this world and becomes one with the concerns of God, of love, right up to and including obedience unto death. This is the unity of God and person living life to its fullness, with neither holding anything back.

 

Merton writes, “We exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany.” Essential Writings, Cunningham) Yet we are unaware of this possibility for most of our existence, swallowed up by the sensuality of life and the propaganda of consumerism and worldly concerns, we sideline this experience as only belonging remarkable people, of which Jesus is the most remarkable.

 

The baptism of Jesus is the one-ing of God and man and the recognition that all is well with such an endeavour. For us, the people who share in Jesus baptism, Eckhart writes: 

‘People think God has only become a human being there – in his historical incarnation (at his birth) – but that is not so; for God is here – in this very place – just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago. And this is why God has become a human: that he might give birth to you as his only begotten son/daughter, and as no less.’

 

This is the epiphany in the baptism, the moment when Jesus recognises and is filled with the identity of God and holds this experience out to all who share his baptism. We do not know how many others were there with Jesus, yet , mystically, they were all included in and shared in Jesus awakening to his or humanities oneness with God. This gift is given to us all and as we achieve detachment from space and time we begin to live the eternal life which is ours already.

 

I will allow Merton to close our meditation on Jesus Baptism in the following words:

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”