Homily for the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord
13 January 2008
The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17We celebrate this Sunday as the Baptism of Jesus. Coming so soon after Christmas, we should not allow ourselves to be confused. The Baptism of Jesus was not an infant rite of passage, as baptism has often become in our popular religion. Jesus was a Jewish child and the infant rite of passage was circumcision. The Christian liturgical year condenses the story of the historical Jesus into the three months between Christmas and Easter. The Baptism of Jesus in all four Gospels is associated not with Jesus’ birth but with the beginning of his public ministry. This, h the gospel tradition leads us to believe, began at about the age of thirty.
Each of the canonical Gospels gives a slightly different spin to the Baptism story. For Mark it is the opening gambit of the Gospel, and it is at the Baptism that Jesus is declared Son of God. When Matthew and Luke develop Mark’s account, they preface it, each with their own story of the birth of Jesus. In those stories Jesus is at his birth both Messiah and Son of God. John the Evangelist’s preface to the story relates not to the birth of Jesus but to the creative action of God. In the beginning, John tells us, the Word was present in that creative action, and now in the life and ministry of Jesus, we see the Word made Flesh. We see a similar development of doctrine between the Apostles’ Creed of the second century and the traditionally called Nicene Creed of the fourth. If there are those who insist that the texts of our scriptures and the dogma of the church, descended, as it were from heaven, cast in concrete, they have just not read the texts.
All four gospels suggest, if we read a little between the lines, that there was later either rivalry or disagreement between the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus. Matthew’s story, which forms our liturgical Gospel today, contains a discussion about who was most important, and who should be baptized by whom.
From Josephus and other texts, we learn that John the Baptist’s was not the only movement of religious revival in the years preceding the Birth of Jesus. Nor in the context of the time can we separate religious revival from political aspiration or outright revolution. Luke’s much longer account of John’s message, while being theological comment rather than record of history, nevertheless suggests that John as prophet continued the prophetic tradition of announcing that the holiness of God required a response of social justice being practiced in the community. The synoptic Gospels associate John’s baptism with a confession of sin. John the Evangelist seems to correct that impression. For the fourth Gospel it is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Baptism of Jesus above all reveals him as the Lamb of God. For that reason you will find in Christian art, as in the reredos of our High Altar, that John is often depicted carrying a lamb.
So what is the significance of Jesus’ Baptism? Remember first that what happened was not the sprinkling of carefully warmed water over the head of a baby, but the pushing of the baptizand under the cold water of the river. In the remains of sixth century churches I have visited in the Mediterranean basin, the font is clearly a place where the candidate was immersed in the water. In several instances it is in the shape of a cross, and in one North African church, I saw that the font was a recycled Roman sarcophagus. Baptism, for Jesus, his followers and for the early church was about symbolic death and rebirth into new life. But this new birth, this new life, eternal life in the words of John the evangelist, the reign of God in the Synoptics is not about new life after death, nor about the continuation of life in some place above the sky. That was a later development in the Christian tradition. Baptism was about moving to a new way of living, a new way of relating to others and to God in the midst of this life. The association with the experience of death is not to be underrepresented. To leave behind the old way and to truly to follow Christ is a deeply painful experience in itself, and in the early days often led to suffering and persecution.
In his book “The Cost of Discipleship”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by Hitler’s officials just before the end of the Second World War, complained that the church offered cheap grace. We had lost sight of the Gospel truth that baptism was new birth into a life of struggle. When we look at our situation today, we may need to take Bonhoeffer again to heart. In Canada, as in Europe, church membership is declining rapidly. I believe that part of the reason for this is that the church is not saying anything challenging, anything worth taking seriously. There are two ways, I believe in which this needs to change. One I shall deal with fairly briefly, as we talk about it much in this place.
The Gospel should, I believe, present a challenge to the way we live our life socially, politically and ecologically. Social and political challenge is deeply embedded in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the message of the Christian scriptures. If there are those who believe that Christianity should be a private inner experience only, with no implication for society, they are being misled by a tradition of interpretation of scripture which does no justice to the prophetic message. The problems of our biosphere and the damage our western way of life has inflicted on it have emerged only recently. We should not expect to find direct reference to them in either scripture or the tradition. But the theological resources are there in the understanding of creation and re-creation in scripture, and the importance of peace and justice which goes beyond human relationships, involving both the plant, animal and physical world.
I want to think more about the second challenge of which the church needs to speak. This is the tradition of independent thought which began with the Enlightenment of the sixteenth century. It has brought to us the processes of scientific thought in the physical, biological and human sciences. It brings to us ideas of secular society and of ethical discourse based in reason rather than religion. A specialized branch of it brings critical interpretation of scripture. All of this brings humungous challenges to the way we think about and express our Christian faith. I liked the way Dr Roger Balk spoke of this last Sunday when he said:
“The three great festivals which we celebrate in January, Epiphany, Jesus Baptism and Transfiguration each contain a reminder that the central events of our religion were originally believed to be the result of a great cosmic plan. In this way, the religion of the Bible is understood as part of a history already defined within the heavens, one which could later be rendered in its entirety in the stained glass of a large medieval cathedral. Although we continue to celebrate these events within the liturgical year, the location of our faith has disappeared into a galaxy which is but one of an uncounted number of galaxies.”
Evolutionary biology, astro-physics, quantum mechanics, psychology, anthropology sociology and political science all call into question not just the details of the way we express our faith, but the whole framework within which we express it. Critical study of our scriptures has challenged any possibility of seeing the Bible as the simple words of a God who is somewhere up there, showering gifts on those who claim to believe in him and casting thunderbolts on those who don’t.
There have been a number of different types of response to these challenges, none of them for me particularly satisfactory. One response is the not very new, but recently re-polished position of atheism. But as I read Richard Dawkins, he seems to be taking aim at a God no thinking Christian could believe in anyway. Another response, in which I have to confess, I have often taken shelter, is a too easy accommodation with modern science. It comes in two forms. One simply appears to accept the findings of science, but places God, as it were, above and beyond them. Science tells us about how God works in the world, and so we can still believe in him and accept the findings on new knowledge. The other form is a division of realms of thought. Science talks about explorable facts. Religion speaks of more ultimate values such as truth, beauty and love. But we have to ask whether value and meaning are not the product of human experience, not requiring any religious explanation In any case all such responses have abandoned the God, and the way of thinking about God of the whole Jewish Christian Tradition. A third response is simply to deny any value to the findings of modern thought wherever they conflict with scripture. The world was created six thousand years ago. Human beings and dinosaurs coexisted, and the fossil record was implanted by God specifically to mislead unbelievers. One of the problems we face in our internet connected wired world is that there is an almost infinite amount of information, without any criteria of evaluation or validation. The charlatan can speak with persuasive force equal to that of the scholar. At least that is the only explanation I can give for the sudden resurgence of Christian fundamentalism.
So, I do not believe any of these responses is satisfactory for a thinking person, who nevertheless feels drawn or driven to explore the tradition of human knowledge which speaks about God. I do believe that to take modern knowledge seriously will involve the church, and us the faithful, in a Baptism of fire. The struggle which will ensue will be fraught with difficulty and pain as we let go of old ways of believing and speaking about God, and seek ways which we can pursue, with intellectual honesty for ourselves, and meaning for that 85% of society which is just not interested in what the church of today has to say about God or anything else.. Such, I believe is the Baptism through which the church must go if we are to find new Christian life in the coming generations of our children and grandchildren.