A Thought on Jesus’ Baptism
There is something so embodied, so incarnational, about baptism. In Preaching the Gospel without Blaming the Jews, Clark and Williamson say that “Jews in antiquity valued hearing more than engaging the other senses,” but this story, and the story of all of our baptisms, has so much more than just hearing. In the first place, the people come out to the wilderness and see something of a wild man. Then, after they listen to John, they don’t have intellectual discussions about what he has just said, and they are spared today’s pundits who would want to explain to them what John meant. No, instead, they get down in the river and feel the water and the mud and John’s hand upon them. They bring their whole selves, to be washed clean and made new, not just on their own, but again, as part of a new people, in a sense, longing for what is about to be. Kim Beckmann observes the difference between “the Pentecost tongues of fire” and the “bodily, enfleshed form as a dove [in which] the Spirit appears.” Jesus’ own baptism is an epiphany that reveals that he is fully human and fully divine, even though we mostly forget about the first part. Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that Jesus “took the plunge right along with the rest of us” and “never asks us to go anywhere he has not been first.” Ann M. Svennungsen also describes Jesus in the water with us and calls it a sign of the God “who identifies with people who are sinful, broken, and overwhelmed.” Stephen Wright goes even farther, saying that Jesus “identifies totally with his compatriots’ sense of shame and yearning for a new start in the humiliating ritual of baptism.” I have never heard the word “humiliating” associated with baptism before; how does it strike you?
Kate Huey