Baptism of Christ

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

I have never really gone in for New Year’s resolutions. Partly it’s because experience has taught me that I’m no good at them: shiny new trainers stay shiny and new; the gym membership was better at reducing my bank balance than my weight; and for all my good intentions I’d still be more likely to put on Netflix than to pick up a one of the Great Works of Literature I thought would be improving. I found theological justification, too: ‘works righteousness’ or the attempt at self-improvement without God’s grace is pretty futile, I would reassure myself. Anyway, if resolutions were to be made, they were better suited to Advent, and the start of a new church year, or to Lent, with its particular call to self-examination. ‘New year: new you’ always left me feeling slightly disappointed and guilty with just being the same old me. 

This year, though, I was at least pleased to see the calendar tick over from 2020 to 2021, and the prospect of being able, at some point, to emerge from the pandemic which has disrupted all our lives. But so far 2021 has not been so much a new year as the same old one: within its first week Covid cases continued to soar, a new lockdown was imposed, and rioters incited by the President of the United States stormed the Capitol.  Not much of a happy new year. 

Liturgically, all this happens in the season of Epiphany, where Christ is revealed as the Son of God and the light of the world. And on the surface, it can seem quite jarring, the contrast between all this talk of light and revelation, and the bleakness of what’s going on in the world. Last week we celebrated the visit of the wise men to Jesus and acclaimed him as light for the whole world. But light, by its very nature, shows up darkness. That which is hidden is revealed, and the works of darkness are exposed. And the Christian gospel knows all this: it deals in truth, not in ‘alternative facts’, and the child we acclaim as the light of the world will himself be subject to all the world’s sin and violence. As soon as the wise men leave, this violence rears its head in Herod’s murderous plot to kill the infants in Bethlehem. This light is not immediately good news for Herod, or any other tyrant who follows after him. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t like that. It will fight back and seek to extinguish the light. But it will not win. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. God doesn’t save us by lifting us up out of the world, but by entering into it and redeeming it. 

And today, as we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, we find Jesus right in the midst of humanity. People from the whole Judean countryside and all Jerusalem were going out into the wilderness, Mark tells us, to listen to John the Baptist, and to be baptised by him. In the crowd are the curious, the bored, and sinners of every kind – gossips and liars and cheats and soldiers and collaborators, the mean, the selfish, the proud, the greedy – and Jesus. 

This is not where people expected to find God. God’s holiness kept him separate from sinful humanity, approached through prayer and sacrifice. Ritual laws drew strict boundaries around what and who was clean and unclean: bad news if you were sick, or disabled, or a woman or a foreigner, or your job made you unclean or you’d sinned. 

But here, in among the crowd milling around on the banks of the river Jordan, is the Son of God. Right in the midst of sinful humanity. This is what it looks like that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And there’s more: the crowds have gathered to hear John preach and to be baptised by him as a sign of repentance. There is grace and truth at work here: people recognise their sin, desire to turn their lives around, want to live for God. This baptism is a cleansing, a turning away from sin and towards God. 

And not only do we see Jesus among the crowds on the river’s bank, we see him in the Jordan, submitting to baptism by John. Other gospel accounts show us John’s consternation that it should be this way round, but this is Jesus’ call: to identify completely with the lot of sinful humanity, to stand in our place, even though as the Son of God there is no sin in him. 

And the way the Gospel writers tell it, not only is this an act of solidarity by Jesus with all of us, it is a new creation. In our Old Testament reading we heard the beginning of the creation account in Genesis: God’s speaking the world into being, and a wind from God, or the spirit of God, moving over the face of the waters. In at least one strand of ancient mythology, the formless void and dark deep out of which God created life was a watery chaos. Jesus’ descent into the waters of the Jordan is an entering in to all that is chaotic and unformed and deathly. At the beginning of his ministry it is a prefiguring of the end: the crucifixion which he refers to as a baptism, in which death and sin are finally overcome. 

Here, in Jesus’ baptism, we glimpse the new creation. The Father’s voice is heard once more from heaven; the Spirit descends over the face of the waters, and Jesus rises from the depths in identification with us, and in anticipation of what his death and resurrection will achieve for us. ‘You are my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.’ Here is creation made new: creation sharing in the life for which God made it, as Jesus’ plunging into the waters hallows them, and his rising anticipates the way of salvation opened to us where, through our sharing in his life, death and resurrection, we too are called beloved sons and daughters of God. 

This is what makes us new. Not a new year, not our resolutions, nor even our best intentions. We are made new in baptism by water and the Spirit, by our sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And in this season of Epiphany where the light shows up so much that is dark in the world, and in our lives, this is the promise: all that is evil, all that is deathly and chaotic, all that separates us from God and one another is drowned in Christ’s descent to the depths. With him we can emerge from the waters gasping as we breathe in new life. In him we hear God calling us beloved. And through him God makes new creations of us all, unwilling to let anything separate us from the love for which he made us, as in Christ he comes to share our life, that we might share his.