Epiphany 1, Year B, Baptism of Christ - Sunday, January 8, 2012
Genesis 1:1-5
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11
St John the Baptist Baptizes the People, by Nicolas Poussin, French, 1635
The Baptism of Christ - Seven Mysteries
Our texts this morning are short. The first is the beginning of the creation story in Genesis. The second is the odd and interesting story of the baptisms in Ephesus, where Paul found disciples of Jesus who were still practicing the baptism of John the Baptist. And the Gospel is the story of the baptism of Jesus by John. Their brevity makes them accessible, easily grasped as stories, to all who hear or read them. They are straightforward narratives. At least they seem straightforward. But as we ponder them they come to be steeped in associations which lead us deeper into the Scriptures, and the deeper we go, the more mysteries we find. These are not mysteries to be solved, like detective novels or mathematical problems, but experiences we are invited to enter, through which we are led to places we might not have expected to go.
This morning I want to share some of my mysteries of this story in Mark with you, and see where they might lead. And I gratefully confess that my guide for this journey has been the excellent commentary on Mark by Francis Moloney.
In order to do so, I am afraid we will need the first three verses of Mark, which I took the liberty of adding to today’s Gospel. I am sure the composers of the Lectionary won’t mind a little bit more of St. Mark this morning.
A first mystery: Mark’s Gospel begins “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”. St John’s Gospel famously begins with en arche en ho logos, and we immediately associate that, as we should, with the beginning of Genesis: “In the beginning (en arche) God created the heavens and the earth.” It is less noticed and it is worth considering that Mark’s first word is also arche. The beginning. A coincidence of grammar? Perhaps. But one of Mark’s characteristics as an author is that as often as not he uses allusions to scripture, a phrase or even just a single word, to set off a chain of associations. This is made easier because the Scriptures for him and for the Early Church were the Greek translation of what the Church came to call the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which Jews and Christians alike believed to be as inspired as the Hebrew. The story Mark tells will stand on its own, but when we “get” his scriptural references, our participation in the story is enriched. So Mark’s use of arche as his first word should at least alert us that something about creation might be happening.
A second mystery: In the short space of the first three verses of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is given three titles: Christ, or the anointed one; the Son of God; and the Lord. Embedded in the first eleven verses of Mark are also three other oblique but important references to Jesus’ power and divinity. First, in the ancient world, an euangelion, a gospel, or good news, as we translate it, was a proclamation of a military victory, a political triumph or the birth of a royal heir, and that is the word used for the proclamation of Jesus. Second, John says that he is waiting for someone “more powerful than I”. The Greek word for “more powerful” is ischuroteros, a word regularly used as an attribute of God. And third, John is introduced with a simple “it happened that”, usually translated as “appeared”: egeneto. The same word is also used of Jesus, but look at the difference: “egeneto en ekeinais tais hemerais elthen Iesous”: “it came to pass that in those days Jesus came”. So many more words: our “in those days” doesn’t quite capture the majesty of the Greek, with its redundant “the” and “those”. Jeremiah (31:33) uses this form, “in those days”, to introduce the Day of the Lord. Joel uses it of the pouring out of the Spirit on all mankind “on that day” (3:1). And Zechariah says, “In those days ten men of every language will take a Jew by the sleeve and say, “We want to go with you, since we have learnt that God is with you” (8:23). Jesus is not only Messiah, Son of God, Lord, but he himself is the euangelion, the proclamation of divine power as the world understands it; he is ischuroteros, the one who bears the attribute of power of the God of Israel; and he is himself the Day of the Lord the prophets have waited so long for.
A third mystery: The place of John the Baptist. A place in time. Old Testament prophets usually pointed back to the covenant of the LORD with Israel. But John points forward to the Lord. John is the hinge between the past and the future: “I baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” There was the past and there will be the future. But what of that pregnant moment in between, where John actually lives? And another place, this one his social location: “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals”. According to the rabbinic commentaries, “untying the master’s sandals was the one demeaning task never required of a Hebrew servant” (Moloney p. 35). Mark expresses indirectly the unique nature of John: the one who looks both backward and forward, the one who is both greatest and least. As our Lord says in Matthew (11:11), “Of all children born of women, a greater than John the Baptist has never been seen; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is.” This mysterious figure dislocated in time and human relations is the one who brings Jesus to the Jordan.
And so, the mystery of the baptism, the movement, and the vision, and the voice, three mysteries which are really one great mystery.
As Jesus ascends from the water, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove. The words echo each other in English as they do in Greek: anabainon and katabainon. Ascend and descend. The upward and the downward movements are simultaneous, a cosmic dance. Jesus emerges out of the water and the Spirit like a dove descends upon him. Water? A dove? The first dove we meet in Scripture is the dove Noah releases from the ark, which brings back the olive branch to show that the earth has begun to emerge from the chaos of the waters. Mark is the first to associate the dove with the Holy Spirit. And Mark’s implied comparison, the Flood and the Baptism, is also striking. But who is Jesus in this comparison? Jesus is not Noah. He is not the one who sent the Spirit-dove. Jesus is the one who is emerging from the water, cleansed, purified, ready for new life. The one with power, the incarnation of the Day of the Lord, is himself the one in whom life will return and in whom the new covenant will be written. And again, ascending and descending: Jacob’s ladder, which itself opens heaven to allow the angels of God to ascend and descend, a figure which John’s gospel ( 1:51) reports of Jesus: “ you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
As Jesus comes up from the water, he sees the heavens torn apart. In Genesis (7:11), the heavens are opened to begin the great flood, and Isaiah (24:18) envisions the opening of the heavens as part of the apocalypse at the end of time. But Ezekiel, the prophet to whom God gives the vision of heaven and the throne of God, (1:1) says that his ministry began with a rending of the heavens: “In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, as I was among the exiles on the bank of the river Chebar, heaven opened and I saw visions of God.” Three fruitful associations: The beginning of the act of cleansing of the world; the beginning of the end of days; and a prophet standing with those exiled from Israel, on the banks of a river, seeing visions of God. Standing behind all these, though, is a greater rending. God begins the first creation by separating the light from the darkness, and then by creating a vault to separate the waters, the waters above the vault and the waters below the vault, and the vault is called heaven (Gen. 1:6-8). Before the waters were separated the Spirit hovered over the deep. Has the Spirit been absent, or been disregarded, or even banished, from the first creation? Is the Spirit now returning as the heavens are torn apart, in the Baptism of Christ, to the waters below the vault of heaven? Is the creation being remade, refashioned, made new?
And the voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." A sign of God’s favor, surely. A cause for rejoicing. But what pleases God so much? Perhaps the clue is in the description “the Beloved” - ho agapetos. This is the adjective God himself uses to describe Abraham’s son Isaac, and which God’s angel uses twice again as they approach the top of Mount Moriah for the sacrifice (Gen 22:2; 12). What wondrous love is this? we might ask.
Mark’s first eleven verses open to us a world of astonishing scriptural sophistication, quite different perhaps than we may have thought at first about this seemingly simple narrative. These mysteries open to us the Baptism of Jesus as the culmination of the yearning of creation, the patriarchs, the prophets, Israel, indeed the whole world, since the beginning of time. We see John the Baptist as the representative of all that has gone before, standing in the timeless moment before the One-who- will-be-called rises up out of the water. Once he does, once he rises, everything has changed. The world is no longer separated into a Spirit-filled heaven and a bereft earth, because the heavens are torn apart and the Spirit pours down, lighting on the head of Jesus, ready to fill the earth, beginning at Jordan. The creation is about to be transformed by him whose gospel of power is announced and whose redemptive, beloved Sonship awaits.
And so, the seventh mystery: We are invited into the mystery of Jesus’ Baptism, the same mystery he enters into. We are not invited to be John the Baptist, standing, watching, witnessing, but not joining. We are called to follow Christ down into the water, and then up, to meet the Spirit descending upon us, even us. May we go down into the water. May we rise in Baptism. And as beloved sons and daughters, may we follow wherever it leads.
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