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First Sunday in Epiphany: Baptism-Schmaptism: Jesus is Lord
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17
The Elves who concocted the Revised Common Lectionary provide a progression of the Jesus story from birth, to the revelation of the meaning of the birth, and now the baptism. It is a somewhat dizzying bounce from newborn infant to a 2-year old, then to the adult Jesus coming to do what is proper and to fulfill the law (see Matthew 5:17-20). But Matthew isn’t interested in Jesus’s early life. Matthew is most interested in confirming the legitimacy of Jesus as God’s chosen Messiah.
The lectionary readings begin with one of the four “Servant Songs” from Isaiah. The writer is referring to the land and people of Israel as the servant of God who establishes justice in the earth. The coastlands – the boundaries of the known world – wait for that teaching. God says to the servant Israel, “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon. . .” The covenant people – those who contract with God to establish justice on the earth – are the people of Israel. From that covenant, all the nations of the earth will benefit from God’s justice-compassion.
To use this reading as a description of Jesus is to continue Matthew’s midrash (see last week’s blog). With his extraordinary addition to Mark’s story about Jesus seeking out baptism by the itinerant, crazed, John – who is out on the fringes of propriety (Mark 1:6-11) – Matthew transforms Isaiah’s servant Israel into the servant Jesus. John wants to know how it is that one so much greater than he should come to him for baptism. “Don’t worry about it,” Matthew’s Jesus says, “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill God’s will, as revealed in scripture.” Then the heavens open, and God’s Dove descends – just as it had after the great flood – and God’s voice says, “This is my favored son – I fully approve of him!” What more proof is needed that the known world has been rearranged, just as it had been in the time of Noah. But this time, instead of destroying the world in storm and flood, God covenants to save the world through the servant Jesus.
Matthew is the only writer that finds the conundrum of the baptism of Jesus by the spiritually inferior John to be significant enough to add it to Mark’s original story. Some of the early Christian communities had major problems with the idea that one who was supposed to be perfect and free of sin would need to be cleansed of sin. “The fact that Jesus had been baptized at all by John and that John was his mentor for a time was an embarrassment for the Christian community that wanted to distance itself from both the baptist movement and rabbinic Judaism, so it developed various apologetic ploys to explain those earlier connections to John and to Judean religion.” The Five Gospels (p. 133).
So it was and is that Jesus’s overturning of the conventional understanding of power is watered down, denied, and forgotten.
Scholars researching the origins of the book of Acts are seriously considering the possibility that Acts was written “early in the second century to respond to issues in its own day . . . The discussion . . . provided an occasion to grapple with the implications of dating for the interpretation of Acts.” Dennis R. Smith, “Report on the Acts Seminar,” The 4th R, January-February 2008, p. 19. Acts is not the record of historical events, but is most likely one of the pieces of thought that went into the formation of early Christian theology/Christology. Peter’s sermon at Caesarea affirms the inclusiveness of the Christian Way: “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” This is hardly news (see Deuteronomy 10:17-18; 2 Kings 5; Romans 2:11), but in the context of the entire story (which is of course left out by the Elves – see Acts 10 in total) gentiles are not only carrying the message without regard to social barriers, they receive the Holy Spirit in the same way as the apostles did at Pentecost (Acts 2:17-18).
But whether or not the stories told in Acts were written late in the First Century or early in the Second Century, and whether or not they were written by whoever wrote the Gospel of Luke, the language tells us that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the whole point of the story of Jesus, and that belief is what saves people from sin. “[Jesus] commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” Acts 10:42-43.
The extraordinary overturning of conventional understanding of true power is not even on the radar. Isaiah’s servant, whom Matthew does his level best to illustrate has to be Jesus, who will “bring forth justice to the nations [and who] will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench,” and who subordinates himself for purification to the rabble-rousing crazy at the edge of town, is buried under the concern for individual salvation from hell.
Personal piety has supplanted Jesus’s kenotic disregard for self-interest, and it’s only been a couple of generations.
Humanity has always been confronted with the four questions of the apocalypse:
1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of the prophet’s message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief (suspension of disbelief) or trust in God?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?
For some reason known only to the forces of the evolution of consciousness, human history seems to be defined by answering: violence, exclusiveness, belief (piety), and salvation from hell. The struggle continues as we attempt to throw off injustice while maintaining our own survival through violence, exclusivity, and belief.
For those who nit-pick and want to know “what about the problem of evil?” my answer is that evil is the perpetuation of injustice because of a concentration on salvation from hell based on violence, exclusiveness, and belief (piety), or in post-modern times, suspension of disbelief in a triple decker, earth-centered cosmology, controlled by an interventionst, personalized god.
Who knows why Jesus went for baptism by John – if he did. But in his careful midrash, changing the metaphor of the servant people Israel to the servant Messiah Jesus, Matthew answers the question, and points toward a god of non-violence, a message that is inclusive, and trust in a kenotic, non-theistic, creator-god/dess, all of which results in deliverance: liberation through the great work of justice-compassion.
The readings reinforce the view that Jesus is the manifestation of God’s direct action to save the entire world from sin. Psalm 29 tells us clearly that God’s voice is like the incredible power of a tornado or hurricane – a storm that arises and rearranges the known world in a heartbeat. But that rearrangement is not about instantaneous salvation from sin and escape from hell for Jew and gentile alike. Jesus rearranges the order of the universe by reversing the normal polarities of power from strength to weakness, from hysterical rant to quiet consciousness; from violence to non-violence.