Reborn

Propers: The Baptism of Our Lord, AD 2023 A

 

Homily:

 

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

 

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

It’s death. That’s what baptism is. It is death, and resurrection.

 

In ancient Rome, if you wanted to join the Christian community—to be baptized into the Church, the Body of Christ—you first had to undergo a period of three years’ instruction, an hour a week, plus prayer and preparation at home. During this time, you would be considered a Christian catechumen, welcome to join in the first half of the Divine Liturgy, what we call today the Service of the Word, yet expected to depart following the sign of peace, before the Holy Eucharist.

 

Should you be killed during these years of formation—a very real possibility within those early centuries of the Church—never fear, for then you would be considered to have been baptized by your own blood. Straight to the head of the class.

 

Jerusalem sped things up a bit. Rather than an hour a week for three years, the catechumenate would study instead three hours a day, six days a week, for the 40 days leading up to Holy Pascha, to the Easter Vigil, Sundays excluded. In other words, Lent. Lent was the period of intensive preparation for catechumens to be baptized at the Easter Vigil, a liturgy still to this day structured around Baptism.

 

If anyone here is itching to be baptized, or knows someone else who is, please consider the Easter Vigil. Never will the connections between Baptism, death, and resurrection be more clearly or beautifully lived out.

 

Why was it such a big deal? Isn’t Baptism just something that we do for babies nowadays, a chance for some nice pictures, pretty clothes, and perhaps a slice of cake? Familiarity, I’m afraid, often blinds us to the wonders before our own eyes. The early Church took Baptism seriously, dead seriously, because it was indeed the death and resurrection of the Christian, of the believer.

 

We die to ourselves, to the old Adam, the old creature, drowning in those waters, and we rise anew in Jesus Christ, as Jesus Christ. That there is Christianity in a nutshell.

 

In the time of the Gospels, during what we call Second Temple Judaism, baptism could mean many things to many people. The spiritual associations of water are universally human. Water begets life, brings fertility, nourishes fields. We are all born through the waters of the womb. We are all cleansed by living waters. We all drink from sweetwaters. And we all drown in floods. Life, death, rebirth.

 

There were many Judaisms in Jesus’ day, just as there are many Christianities in our own. For the Pharisees, baptism—the immersion in a mikveh bath of living, that is flowing, waters—represented one’s entrance into the Jewish community, into the people of God. Converts go in a gentile, and emerge a Jew. For the Essenes out in the wilderness, where everyone lived as a priest, baptism in mikveh baths proved a daily routine, once every morning before dawn, and thrice if ritual purity had been violated. Ritual purity, mind you, not moral.

 

John the Baptist looks to us a lot like an Essene. But he seems to have his own motivations for dunking people into the old River Jordan. The baptism exhorted by John is a rite of repentance, of turning back to God. And this is open, it seems, to everyone: not to one class or sex or denomination, but to all who would heed his call, all who would make the trek to come and find him in the wilderness. John didn’t go to you; you went to John.

 

Even the tax collectors came out, even the soldiers who worked for the Empire, and he turned none away. Of course, he didn’t mince words either. “You brood of vipers!” he spat. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He set them straight, but he never turned them away. And John’s baptism, mind you, was moral, not ritual. It didn’t have anything to do with emissions or dead bodies, but everything to do with turning hearts and minds to God, living out the Law of love.

 

And what’s more, John’s baptism was preparatory. It was preliminary. It was stage one. “I am not the Messiah!” John thundered. “I am not fit even to carry His sandals! I baptize you with water, but He shall baptize you with the Spirit and with fire!” John was the voice crying out in the wilderness, as prophesied by Isaiah, “Make straight the Way of the Lord!” He was laying the foundation. He was blazing the trail.

 

And then Jesus comes along—Jesus, to whom John would point and proclaim, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”—to be baptized by John in the Jordan. And John is perplexed. Rightly so. “Aren’t you the one for whom we’ve been waiting?” John asks. “You don’t need to be baptized by me, but I, Lord, need to be baptized by you!”

 

Yet Jesus gently insists. “Let it be so now,” He says, “for it is proper in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” And as we clearly heard in our Gospel reading this morning, the Baptism of Jesus Christ rends the heavens wide, the Spirit descends upon the Son, and the voice of the Father is heard: “This is My Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased!”

 

A full trinitarian revelation, right there at the Jordan, right in front of the crowds. And even that one line from Heaven comes to us rich and heavy-laden. “My Son,” is a title for the King of Israel, adopted as God’s regent on this earth. “The Beloved,” recalls Isaac, the son of Abraham’s promise, all of Israel summed up in one man. And even that line, “well-pleased,” comes to us from the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, a prophecy of the Christ.

 

Why is Jesus baptized? Surely He doesn’t need moral correction. God does not need to be turned again unto God. He is not converted; He is not purified; He is not adopted. And He is not a disciple of John. Rather, John is Jesus’ Forerunner. But righteousness, in the Bible, is always more relational than merely personal. By His Baptism in the Jordan, Jesus shows to us His unwavering solidarity with sinners.

 

More importantly, for us, for Christians, we know that from now on God shall meet us in those waters, in the waters of our Baptism, the waters of Creation. The Spirit hovers over the waters, as once She did in Genesis. She is the breath of Jesus, as once She breathed life into Adam. Here then is the New Adam, the New Creation, the reunification of God and Man.

 

But we’re not done yet, for Christ Himself speaks of another Baptism, with which He must be baptized, the Baptism of His Blood upon the Cross. They are inseparable, these two: the Jordan and Golgotha. In Christ has God entered fully into our humanity, to take on our flesh and our spirit, to shoulder our blessings and burdens, to live out His solidarity with sinners in all things, even unto death, even death on a Cross.

 

Christ must be baptized into death; not to satiate the bloodlust of a cruel deity, but to demonstrate to us, in His flesh and His bone, how nothing we could do could ever separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. The Cross was never God’s idea; it was always ours. Jesus didn’t have to die in order to forgive us. In fact, it’s pretty clear that He was already forgiving us, as though He were God, and that’s precisely the reason why we killed Him in the worst way we knew how.

 

He knew exactly what He was getting into when He joined us in these waters, in the mud and in the blood. He knew us inside and out, knew that He would be murdered by those He came to save. And He did it anyway. He loved us all, to hell and back. Just as Jesus’ death transformed death itself into eternal life, so does Jesus’ Baptism transform our Baptism. We are baptized into Jesus’ death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again. And we are baptized into Jesus’ own eternal life, already begun. The magnitude of that promise should drive us to our knees.

 

What an unspeakable blessing, to be made one in Jesus Christ; to be given His Name and His Spirit, His Body and His Blood; so that we are now Him, sent out as Jesus for the redemption and the resurrection of all this fallen world. Our Baptism kills who we were—the enemies of God—and makes us into whom we were always meant to be: children of the Most High, the sons and heirs of God.

 

Baptism is your eternal identity, your eternal reality, and it gives us new life every day. Come to the waters, and be forgiven. Come to the waters, and be reborn. Come to the waters, and know the endless love of God for you and for all people in Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.