Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Baptism of Our Lord Year A - Matthew 3:13-17

Matthew 3:13-17
Happy Epiphany! For the first three centuries the church celebrated the nativity and the epiphany on January 6th as the 25th of December was already occupied by Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. When the Christians took over the empire (or was it the other way round?) the sun set on Sol only to rise on the Son and the Christ Mass. The text for Epiphany is the star that rose in the east to guide the wise ones bearing gifts for the babe born in Bethlehem of Judea. The word epiphany means “shining forth” which is understood as a divine manifestation. You might think I’m going on about Epiphany to avoid the obvious question about the text for the Baptism of Our Lord which is “Why does Jesus need to be baptized at all?” I think the two go together quite nicely if we think of “fulfilling all righteousness” as a divine manifestation and not “payment for sin” or our relationship with God being restored by the obedience of Christ. What if Jesus’ baptism has nothing to do with us at all and everything to do with Jesus’ relationship with the One who calls him the beloved Son? If God chooses to be the one who is just and the one who justifies (granted that comes from Paul and not Matthew) then this “baptism” is nothing like our baptism but a divine manifestation of the One that justifies being affirmed by the One who is just while the One who is “like” a dove is a physical manifestation of the relationship of the Three that are One and the One that is Three. It only takes a single sentence from Jesus to get John to agree to the thing he can’t understand and I can’t imagine John suddenly sees his cousin as a sinner in need of the baptism of repentance he’s been preaching all this time in the wilderness. No, something else is happening and I think that thing is an epiphany, a shining forth of a new reality where the righteousness revealed is not payment for sin but God pleased to dwell with humanity.

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