Jesus’ baptism is clearly
important. In Luke, it’s our
introduction to the adult Jesus, all four of our gospels narrate it, which
means it beats out Jesus’ birth by a factor of 2:1 there), it’s important
enough to me that I picked an image of it from my first parish to put on the
holy card we gave out at my ordination.
Yes, Jesus’ baptism is clearly important. But, Jesus getting baptized isn’t what struck
me as the most important thing in this gospel.
Studying and praying with it over this week, one sentence stuck with me:
“He will baptize you.”
And he
has. The promise has been
fulfilled. Brothers and sisters, Christ
has baptized us. That’s what makes us
sisters and brothers! It was something
whose awesomeness I think I only realized after I’d first baptized. Like Jesus who encountered the gift of the
Spirit as he was praying after his baptism, it was when I was praying in my
room after the baptism that an awe came over me, awe over the impossibility of
neatly dividing up agency: I had genuinely poured real, physical water over a
flesh and blood human being, I had said the words, said “I baptize you,”
and God had done something. God had
baptized Alyssa. I hadn’t cleansed her
from original sin, adopted her as my daughter, brought her into the fold of my
disciples or started her on the pilgrimage of ongoing growth in holiness. God had done that. But those were my hands, and my lips, words
my breath made mine, though I can never claim them as any other than gift, gift
from Christ, who baptizes us.
And it’s
not just with water, though that would be enough. Water, live-giving and cleansing, richly
evocative, calling out to us of healing from sin, leveling the path to virtue
that sin makes mountainously arduous.
Baptism with water would be beautiful enough. But he goes further. Christ baptizes us with the Spirit. We immersed in God’s own life. God’s life-giving creative breath, that
inspired prophets, that hovered over the waters of creation, covers us, clings
to us, inhabits us more deeply than we dare to probe ourselves. Yes, the Spirit of God is upon us, between
us, among us, and the Spirit’s doing wonderful things.
And in that
Spirit, we hear God’s voice. And God
says to us something new: “You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. In you, I am well pleased.” And that’s something new, that’s something
that’s wrought in us by baptism, by the first embrace of God that tenderly
excites us to holiness enough that we walk, we keep walking until we rest
forever in His lasting embrace. And
that’s why, in a very real sense, each of our baptisms were more important even
than Jesus’. Because in our baptisms,
something new happened. We who were
estranged were brought near, we who were outside the fold were made sons and daughter, claimed,
embraced. Jesus was already God’s Son,
Jesus was already King, already prophet.
But it’s in baptism that, as the letter to Titus puts it makes us heirs,
and begins a process of training in us, training for virtue, training so that
we may live heavenly lives forever with God and with each other. Because that’s what all this is directed to:
being brought into God’s friendship, God’s fathership in a real way now, that
we might be strengthened to walk that pilgrimage to virtue, that we might live
forever heavenly.
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