What image does Jesus’ baptism conjure in your mind (Mark 1:4-11)? Does it make you think of a shallow river bank where it is easy to wade into the middle on a warm sunny day with a gentle breeze? Not perhaps something that springs readily to mind in a cold January. Is there a crowd there and what are they doing? Just what kind of spiritual atmosphere surrounds this key event that begins Jesus’ ministry? Commemorating this adult baptism just after Christmas, when our minds are full of pictures of a baby in a manger, is quite a jolt. It is also a contrast to our usual experience of a baptism, where the candidates are infants and the water comes in a stone font set inside a medieval building.

The reason for putting this event in our Church’s year at this point is because we are in the season of Epiphany. And Epiphany is about much more than three wise men with their three gifts, as indeed baptism is about so much more than babies and presents. Epiphany is about God’s glory being made known in our midst. It is about the ways we see who Jesus is. For Matthew and Luke that was shown with visitors coming to adore him at his birth. For Mark the glory of God in Christ is made known at his baptism in the river Jordan at the hands of John the Baptist. Here he submits to John’s washing of those who wanted to prepare themselves ritually for the kingdom of God. It is a beginning with many resonances around it.

Baptism is very ancient. It has its origins in ordinary daily washing, the getting rid of all that has made us dirty in the toil of the day. It is not a major leap from there to developing a notion of needing to be spiritually clean before we can approach God. Interestingly all the major religions have some form of ritual washing. There seems to be something about this that rings true and touches something very deep.

There are references in the Old Testament to people being sprinkled with pure water as a sign of God’s kingdom (e.g. Ezekiel 36:25). Behind these images is a longing for purity and holiness, and it picks up on the spiritual links with water. Water is a powerful symbol and has an importance in the designer spirituality of Feng Shui! We are used to talk of the river of life and water is of course one of the basic elements of life. So there is long and distinguished use of water in spiritual traditions and Christianity is no exception to this.

There is also an honorable tradition of Old Testament prophets acting out their message - using symbolic actions to press home their point. One went as far as walking around with a yoke on his back to make the point that hard times were round the corner!

John the Baptist has all of this behind him when he wanders out of the wilderness and starts baptising people in a river. Dipping people in the water draws on these traditions of water purifying and the looking forward to God’s kingdom. It is an acting out of his message and his point is that we need to prepare ourselves for God’s kingdom.

So enter stage left Jesus who comes to be baptised. Why does he need to bother with this ritual? We can only guess but it does link him quite firmly with all that lies behind baptism: the purifying for holy living; the need for forgiveness and being deeply sorry for our part in the sins that fracture so much in our living; the longing for the kingdom of God.

It is easy to think that a lot of this has got diluted over 2,000 years to a point where modern baptism seems positively shallow. But I wonder. What was the atmosphere at that riverside in the first century AD? What were the motives and the intentions of those baptised at the same time as Jesus? I suspect many of our modern baptism congregations would not be out of place. And into the middle of them walks Jesus. He has a habit of going where holy people don’t expect him to. He has a habit of seeing deeper than the rest of us tend to on the surface. He has a habit of challenging so much of our practices and attitudes. He has a habit of spotting the genuine spiritual yearnings that respond when they find genuine spirituality in action.

It is easy to be sentimental and cynical in equal measures and both sell those who come for baptism short. We can delude ourselves that the motives are holier than they might be, assuming a deeper level of engagement than might be the case. Equally we can dismiss them as treating it trivially where what might be going on is profoundly spiritual, but just more riverside than religious institution. Somewhere there is a balance between conspiring with treating baptism as a one off event and therefore missing out on the deeper connections to the rest of life, and on the other hand being so rigid that we leave no room for Jesus going anywhere near that riverside baptism by a scruffy preacher (who eats locusts for goodness sake!).

In this familiar scene we are invited to see God’s glory being made known in places we still least expect. The wise men look for Jesus in the most obvious place, in the royal palace. He isn’t there and they have to go and find a house in a village down the road. Mark begins his gospel with God’s glory being made known far away from the centre of religious life. Instead of being set in the Temple we find Jesus at a river bank with a scruffy preacher dipping all sorts of people in the water. We are so used to these stories that we can miss their surprises and therefore their challenge.

Last week I spoke about the star, which the wise men followed, pointing towards the starting points that make faith possible. Today we have Jesus walking into where those starting points find something to latch on to. By joining in with them he picks up what is the seed of the holy, the elemental resonances, and calls on us to follow him. He takes our longing for God’s kingdom and the sense that we need to be purified for this. It is not just any old star that will do, as Rowan Williams said in his Dimbleby Lecture about the song in the musical Joseph that “any dream will do”. It is not ‘any dream’, but dreams that long for the kingdom and we find these in surprising places. They don’t always dress up as we might expect. Some of them even eat locusts or whatever the equivalent of that might be!

The Epiphany event at the Baptism of Christ, the glory that is made known among us, calls us to ally ourselves to the Kingdom he announces. That kingdom does not just come to the palaces of faith, indeed it has a habit of going to much more humble places because he tends to get a better response there. The challenge is to recognise the presence of God outside where we all expect to find him and to respond to his call to follow wherever we are.

© Ian Black 2003

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