January 9, 2011

The Baptism of our Lord

Matthew 3:13-17

The baptism of Jesus is one of those stories in the Gospels that can so easily evoke a "Well, what was all that about?" response. It hasn't always been this way. For many of the early Church Fathers the baptism of Jesus was a defining theological reality, a Trinitarian convergence that brought about the first day of the new creation. The descent into the waters of the Jordan marked the moment in which Jesus embodied in his public ministry the divine participation in humanity's weakness.

Remnants of this richer meaning linger liturgically in the eight sided baptismal font which some churches retain: the eighth side represents the first day after the seven days of creation, weaving baptism into creation and the new creation. But all too often such symbolic associations of fonts and the like, in those rare moments when they are explained, are seen merely as "quaint", perhaps adding a sentimental flourish to an otherwise mysterious (and we have been told, necessary) tradition.

And yet the Christian narrative remains baptismal to the core but unfortunately people given the minimum of baptismal instruction can barely fumble towards a thought such as "baptism is belonging to God's family". And some clergy would be positively enraptured if the thought "baptism is having our sins washed away" was clearly articulated. That this is an improvement over "his grandmother wants it" shows the depths (or should we say shallows) to which baptismal ignorance has fallen.

The tragedy of the bleaching of the street knowledge of baptismal theology is not simply a diminishing of this constitutive rite of the Christian Faith and its transforming capacity; it is the deleterious implications that follow when the Christian story loses its grounding in creation and its "already-been-lived-out- for­us-by Christ-ness", two of the central implications of Jesus' baptism.

The baptism of Jesus is thus one of those stories the contemporary Church urgently needs to relearn, providing as it does one of the scriptural prisms through which the Trinitarian colors of creation, incarnation and consummation are most vividly seen. It is a story in miniature of "the whole God thing". So let me sketch how the baptism of Jesus as recounted in the Gospel According to Matthew covers all this ground.

The hermeneutical principle of "the more difficult text the larger the context" certainly applies to this story and Jonathon Pennington's book Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew helps us enormously with this task. Pennington argues persuasively that Matthew's theme of "heaven and earth" provides us with an overarching theological context for the Gospel. In short, the heaven and earth language highlights the tension between heaven/God and earth/humanity - a tension awaiting resolution in the Second Coming of Christ.

Pennington demonstrates how Matthew links his Gospel with the Old Testament book of Genesis and the stories of Abraham and creation. Matthew 1: 1 positions the Gospel as a complement to the Genesis story., The heaven and earth language plays a pivotal role in this relationship. "Matthew uses the familiar and foundational language of heaven and earth found in Genesis 1 ... to connect his own Gospel with the larger Genesis narrative, thereby proclaiming that Jesus is the One in whom God's foundational purposes are consummated.

So when heaven and earth language appears in the story of Jesus' baptism we had better pay attention. This tension between heaven and earth is conveyed by John the Baptist in his dualistic language of fruitful and unfruitful, wheat and chaff. Matthew develops this theme further into good fish and bad fish (13:47-50), sheep and goats (23:31-46) and wise men and foolish men (7:24-27.

So now the penny starts to drop: John the Baptist (articulating a Christological conundrum of the early Church no doubt) is puzzled by Jesus' request to be baptized and asks: "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" Jesus replies that his baptism is "to fulfill all righteousness". But "righteousness" in this Gospel precisely identifies the heavenly side of the equation: the sheep, the fruitful, the good fish, the wheat, and so forth. So Jesus in "fulfilling all righteousness" demonstrates obedience to the requirements of God's will- and in seeking to fulfill the kingdom's demand for righteousness, believers have an example in the Lord. Adopting Matthew's language we could say that Jesus the earthly one lives as none of us has - as the heavenly One.

Matthew's language indeed presses even further than this. When Jesus emerges from the water it invokes additional Genesis motifs in which creation is born from the waters of chaos - the waters over which the Holy Spirit moved - in Genesis 1 :2. Similarly, when the escaping Hebrew slaves emerged from the Red Sea, Israel is born. So when Jesus comes up out of the water a new creation and a new Israel are born. And when this story is immediately followed by the desert temptations, paralleling the desert wanderings of Israel, the astute reader registers the full theological a-ha: in Jesus' baptism, a new creation, a new Israel and a new exodus are being inaugurated. As St. Gregory Nazianzus pictured it, Jesus carries the cosmos with him as he ascends out of the waters of the Jordan. The ethical and ecological, let alone theological, implications are profound.

But this is only half the story of Jesus' baptism; the second half shifts into a profoundly Trinitarian gear and here the heaven and earth language comes into play again. When Jesus emerged from the water "heaven was opened" and the Spirit descended upon him. A voice from heaven declared "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased". Jesus, having fulfilled all righteousness and so having lived the human/earth story in the way all others have failed to live it, is unambiguously identified also with the heaven/divine story of Father and Spirit.

So let's pull all these threads together. The baptism of Jesus consists of a fourfold interlocking nexus of the creation and consummation, heaven and earth (God and humanity), the Holy Trinity, and baptism itself. That this is profoundly important to the Gospel narrative is put beyond doubt in the Gospel's climax where the same four elements reappear:

All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember that I am with you always, to the end of the age." (28:18-20)

And from the baptism of Jesus, as so many of the Church Fathers wisely discerned it, springs the baptism of the believer: we too pass through the waters of new creation and are incorporated into the Son through the Holy Spirit moving toward the Father, thereby partaking in the Trinitarian life, becoming disciples who store up treasures in heaven and not on earth, awaiting with hope the creation's consummation.

Who would have thought that so much could spring from a text too often a puzzle to contemporary readers? For despite being a perennial hermeneutical problem for the Church, this story in fact provokes for each generation of attentive readers a dense theological reflection with far-reaching ethical, ecological and ecclesial ramifications

So may the full magnitude of this story astound us each and every time we hear it. May our hearts unfold to be embraced by the vulnerable grace of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and may we in turn embrace one another in this same Trinitarian and baptismal hospitality. Amen.