Baptism of the Lord, cycle C

Luke 3:15 - 16, 21 - 22

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a live concert by a rock or country band.  It’s the same music you could hear on a recording, but people keep demanding live music, in venues where everyone stands shoulder to shoulder and moves with the music.  I think the main reason is that in those kinds of events, there are moments when you feel at one with everyone else, moments when the barriers fall, and you have a glimpse of a different way of being.  There's Something in us that longs to be one with the rest of humanity, just as there is something that wants to throw up barriers between my group and your group. Humans are weird.  

The Gospels were written in the forms we have today about 60 to 100 years after the Birth of Christ.  Some estimates are even later.  Mathew and Luke tell the same baptism story as Mark, with their own embellishments.  John refers to observing the voice from heaven but the actual baptism isn’t recorded.  In any event, Matthew gives a hint as t6o what will trouble the Church down through the ages.  He has John saying, “It is you who should baptize me” and Jesus replying “Let it be so for now.  It is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.”  Sister Dorothy back in grade school used this passage to tell us that Jesus didn’t really need to be baptized but was just giving all of us sinners a good example.  As you can tell, that was burned into my brain, leaving me puzzled for the next 70 years.

I’m not the only one.  Many great theologians puzzled over this. It’s hard to view Jesus acting deceptively.  Some decided that John’s baptism had nothing to do with sin or repentance, but instead was an act of solidarity with the ancestors who had crossed the Jordan river into the promised land.  And Catholic theologians, at least, do insist that the baptism of John was not a sacrament, like the baptism instituted by Jesus through his Church.  

But maybe we could look at the baptism of Jesus in a different way.  Picture the scene -- John has just called the crowd a brood of vipers, and we know there were tax collectors and various other sinners in that vast gathering, not to mention pagan soldiers.  Remember when John was asked “What are we to do?” and he gave answers to tax collectors and soldiers specifically. And there were Pharisees.  So there was Jesus, in the middle of a crowd -- a crowd of sinners.  

And the people were entering into the Jordan river -- the same river  where Elijah the prophet ended his ministry and Elisha, his successor, assumed his.  The same river where Naaman the Syrian had been washed clean of his leprosy.  The same river where the people of God crossed into the land given  to them by God, where they became a nation.  

The first public act of Jesus was to indicate his solidarity with humanity -- all of humanity, past, present and future; Jews, gentiles; sinners and those who thought themselves sinless.  

This is the moment when Jesus steps into God’s work on earth.  It’s when he takes on the common human experience of living in a broken world, a world which is bound to disappoint.  He’ll join us in longing for justice and righteousness and the world that could be.  

And this is the moment when You and I are invited to see that in these muddy waters, carried forward down through time in our baptismal fonts, something happens that transforms us, that unites us with the God become man who allows John to wash him as well.  

Saint Paul tells us that there is one baptism -- and when we participate in it, we are there with all those others who have been baptized --many of whom in ordinary life we probably would have nothing to do with.  But we are invited to see that we are not alone, that God is with us, that what appears ordinary, random, unexciting, is actually touched with divinity.  And that is not because of anything we have done, but because God loves us and in Jesus, calls us his beloved son or daughter.  And it goes without saying, that if I’m a beloved son or daughter, then so are you, and I had better take a closer look -- because there is something of the divine in you as there is in me.  Sometimes it seems like the whole message of Christianity is that because Jesus takes on our nature, all the barriers, the tribalism, the rivalry, the class wars, the race thing -- all that divides us is meant to be broken down.  And of course Jesus prayed, “That all may be one, Father, as I am in you and you are in me, that all may be one in us.”  To the extent that we open ourselves to this mystery, baptism, which unites us with Jesus and the rest of the baptized,  is where salvation starts.