Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jordan River
Picture it. Hundreds of people gather around the Jordan River. They have come from all over the city of Jerusalem and countryside Judea to hear John the Baptist preach. They have come to be baptized in the river. They have come because they need to be washed clean. They need to wash away their sins, their shortcomings, their failures, like washing the caked-on sand off their bodies from the long walk to the river. They gather at this sacred, historic place – the place where Moses interpreted the law for their forefathers and foremothers, the Israelites, before they crossed from their desert wanderings into the promised land. These people come here hoping and praying that John will open the law to them and renew their faith, and that they can cross the river of repentance from the stubborn wanderings of their hearts to the promised land of forgiveness and grace. And so, there they stand, bunched along the shoreline, lined up on the muddy shore and in the water, waiting their turn to be washed clean. Among them stands Jesus, waiting his turn. And when it is time, Jesus enters the river and wades over to John.
Even if those around him can’t tell, John knows that this Jesus is the one about whom he preached, the Messiah, the one whose sandals he wasn’t worthy to untie, let alone baptize. John refuses to baptize him at first, but Jesus insists. He tells John that it must be so to fulfill all righteousness, and John relents. And so, he puts one hand on Jesus’ head and one on his shoulder and he pushes Jesus down all the way into the river. He pauses and then reaches down and pulls Jesus back up. The sky breaks, the dove flies, the father’s voice sounds. Jesus and John look at each other. Then Jesus steps out of the river and heads off to the wilderness, as the next person in line comes forward.
In most Christian artwork, the baptism of Jesus looks a particular way. There is Jesus and John standing in the river, and overhead, the dove and a light piercing through the clouds. But this is only a sliver of the entire scene. For, this is not a private baptism, but a public event, a revelation, with crowds all around. If we only focus on the end of the story, we forget just how much grace there is at the beginning. We forget that it was a miracle in and of itself that Jesus came to the river. After all, he was the Messiah, the Son of God, sinless and blameless. He didn’t need to be baptized. But he joined in solidarity with those he came to save. Jesus joins these people in their seeking, their longing, their sin. He joins them, and us, and all humanity in the river. “In Jesus, God’s being-with-us included God’s being in the river with us, in the flesh with us, in the sorrow of repentance and the joy of new life with us.” In the river, Jesus was “wrapped up with all other human beings: the well ones and the hurt ones, the brave ones and the weak ones, the successful ones and the ones who cannot seem to get anything right” (Barbara Brown Taylor).
Jesus took their longing, their hopes and not only fulfilled them, but made them his own, and took them to the cross.
The Cruciform Pattern
Baptism is more than just a washing clean. It is a symbol of death and resurrection. This is easier to see in full immersion baptism, where you go under the waters and have no breath, and then rise up to new breath and new life. For Jesus, this baptism starts a pattern of death and resurrection that continues throughout his life. Jesus’ life was a pattern of dying (rejection, scorn, abuse) and rising (healing, hope, salvation). And this was his final mission: to die on the cross and rise from the grave for our sake. In fact, one commentator says that this day “the Baptism of Jesus…is at once a Good Friday and an Easter Day. Christ’s descent into the waters is his death and his burial; his emergence from them is his rising from the dead.”
In our baptisms, we say that we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus. When we say this we mean that we share in his salvation. But it also means that the Christian life follows this pattern too. It begins at our baptism, and the pattern repeats itself throughout our lives: sin and forgiveness, failure and redemption, tragedy and recovery, grief and healing, until, at the end of our lives, we physically die and know the final resurrection to eternal life in Jesus.
As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says in his very good book Everything Belongs, “Jesus crucified and resurrected is the whole pattern revealed, named, effected, and promised for our own lives.”
The grace, of course, is that despite the death that we experience in this life: our sin, our brokenness, our failings, our tragedies, losses, we will and do already share in the new life that Jesus gives. It is the promise that no matter how bad life gets, grace, hope, and love persist and ultimately prevail. The grace is that feeling of being pulled up out of the water, and hearing the voice of God saying that we too are God’s beloved children. The grace is that in Jesus, God came to be with us in the dying, so that we would be with God in the rising.
But it is also more than that. You know, dying is not a very pleasant thing. None of us is very comfortable with the hard, broken places in our lives. We try to disguise them, ignore them, negate and deny them. When we do this, we deny a part of ourselves. When we do this, we deny this baptismal pattern of life, and deny the grace that can be found, even in the dying.
The grace in this baptismal pattern of life is that God is equally present the dying and in the rising, in the going down and the rising up. Both parts are in God, and so, as Rohr says, “everything belongs.” In the same book, he quotes the 14th century mystic Julian or Norwich who said, “First there is the fall, and then there is the recovery from the fall. But both are the mercy of God.” Both are the mercy of God. Both the going down into the water, and the coming up, both failure and redemption, both the tragedy and the recovery, both the grief and the healing. They all belong. They all belong to God. Because of Jesus’ faithfulness in living and blessing that pattern of life, they both hold grace for us, even though most times the last thing they feel like is grace.
Often times, in this Christian life, the challenge is not to accept the grace of resurrection, forgiveness and salvation, it is to accept that the broken places, the places of death in our lives, the places we would rather not look at our touch, also hold grace for us – if we are willing to trust God and trust that, in God, everything belongs and everything is redeemed.
In this regard, Rohr describes the work of the Spirit as, in fact, a river, which I think of as the baptismal river we all stand in with Jesus and those crowds.
He writes, “I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the river, to trust the flow…[and God]. It is a process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We need to allow it to flow. That takes immense confidence in God, especially when we’re hurting. Usually, I can feel myself get panicky. I want to make things right, quickly.” We start of obsess. We want to hurry it along. We start trying to push the river – the river that is already flowing through us. However, “faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river. …the river is flowing; we are in it. The river is God’s providential love – so do not be afraid.”
And so, on t
his day when we celebrate the baptism of Jesus, we give thanks for our baptism, and for the gift of a pattern and rhythm of life that Jesus’ established, blessed, and gifted us with. We give thanks that he has joined us at the river, so that we can join him and share his life.
Amen.
