Is.42:1-9 Ps. 89:20-29
Acts 10:34-38 Matt. 3:13-17
In a cursory glance at human behaviors within all cultures, people are ritual beings. Rituals are prescribed communal behaviors done with ceremonial intensity as a sort of play acting to teach and inculcate the chief values of the community. Ironically, most people are born into society but then have to go through ritual process of becoming a practicing member of the society. What ritual practice indicates is at some point beyond the natural place of birth, and the nurture that we receive from our communities, the individual within the community must choose to be a member of the community as an adult agent of the values of the community. A child has automatic belonging within a family; but an adult has to ratified that passive belonging through the ritual process of fulfilling membership roles within the family or society.
Where religion and society are one, the rituals of society and religion are unified. When religions exists in secular society, the secular rituals and the religious ritual are separate and different.
The presentation of Jesus in the New Testament is of a person who was born into a society where rituals were prescribed and practiced. Jesus was Jewish, but the Jews did not control the land where he lived. The Jews did not have "ritual" control over their homeland of Israel.
Today is a day when we ponder the ritual practice of Jesus, in his submitting to the rite of water baptism by John the Baptist.
The baptism of Jesus might baffle us as it is also presented as baffling the one who was to ask to officiate at his baptism.
We come to the baptism of Jesus, just as the writers of the Gospel did. We know the end of the story. We know about the many titles of Jesus. We know that writer wrote about the baptism of Jesus with all the meanings being a progressive explanation toward what Jesus had become as the Risen Christ in his afterlife in the early Jesus Movement communities.
The meanings are retraced. What was the logic of the baptism of Jesus? And by John? Jesus who had undergone the rituals of circumcision and presentation was regarded already to belong to his religious community. The Gospel writers had to seek for some logic about how the pre-resurrection was becoming the post-resurrection Christ. If Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, Lamb of God, Great High Priest, why did he have to submit to the baptism?
The Gospel are retelling a narrative life with the belief that Jesus lived out the meaning of God with us, or the name that had been suggested to them from the prophet Isaiah. The name Immanuel.
If Jesus is God with us, Jesus is God emptied into human form, as the Pauline hymn states, and so Jesus did very human things including the ritual practices of his specific communities. I say communities because, it seems that Jesus not only was familiar with the practices of synagogue and Temple, he also participated in the prophetic movement within Judaism which is seen in the ministry of John the Baptist. John the Baptist, even as an aloof ascetic was charismatic enough to attract a following and even generate a community with the seeming extra-liturgical rite of baptism in the Jordan as a way of publicly signifying a new life style commitment. Judaism had the practice of proselyte baptism for non-Jews convert to the faith. Why did Jews need a baptism? This is an indication of an addition ritual practice in a reformation movement. Was John's baptism and message meant to complement or succeed the message and practices of the synagogue and Temple? Did his message and practices compete with the rabbis and the priests of synagogues and Temple? Why did Jesus within his birth into Judaism need to be associated with John the Baptist?
Without knowing all the specifics of the details in the life of Jesus in his, we assume that Jesus was highly associated with John the Baptist and his community. We might even assume that John the Baptist was a mentor for Jesus and given that eventual followers of Jesus had been previous disciples of John the Baptist, we can assume that what became known as the churches had grown in Palestine from the model of the community which surrounded John the Baptist.
Jesus became baptized, immersed, into humanity; he was fully human initiated so that humanity might discover their initiation into solidarity with the divine. As the Eastern Orthodox notion of deification or Theosis states: Jesus became human that humanity might realize the divine image upon our lives.
The baptism of Jesus is presented with a divine heavenly proclamation: Jesus is declared to be the beloved Son of God on whom God's parental pleasure resides.
Beyond our attempts to figure out the purpose of the baptism of Jesus, we look for the meaning of our own communal baptismal practices. The grace of baptism is the recognition that we too as God's children can be those who have esteem because we can in our very interior beings know that God is pleased with us and that the divine favor resides within us in the full spectrum of what may happen to us.
Churches will disagree and argue about the rite of Christian baptism; how much water, adult, infant, ordinance, sacrament, who can officiate et. al. In the arguments about the best or ordained practice of baptism and perhaps prideful sense of exclusive access to thinking that one's own faith community does it best, we can miss the big point. God from creation wants people to know themselves to be children of God bearing the divine image, and doing so by living lives of love and justice with each other.
My prayer would be that each person would know the baptismal reality of the heavenly voice declaring them as a beloved child with God's parental favor. This is a vital interior affirming esteem which is especially needed when one's environment does not always provide the nurturing affirmation. Baptism is being made into people who have the maturity to live into this higher inward affirmation in the life of the virtues.
Our belief about Jesus in his baptism is that he is the Exemplar of God choosing solidarity with humanity to provide us with the example and grace of finding our solidarity with God, through living the godly Holy Spirit values of love, hope, faith, justice, and kindness.
Let us not argue about the baptism of Christ or our own specific ritual practice of baptism; but let us know the affirmation of our lives as children of God and let us live seeking to affirm each other as beloved children of God. Amen.
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