“I have baptized you with
water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” From the Gospel according
to Mark, the first chapter, verse 8.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
We can hear today’s Gospel as a summary of
steps in our spiritual lives, as a pattern of spiritual development as we grow
spiritually. The story describes events in the lives of John the Baptist and
Jesus, “and people from the whole Judean countryside.” These events are more
than external, visible events happening to the participants, to someone else, but
not to observers; they are also spiritual events which bring about important
changes in everyone involved, including observers. And they are a pattern, a
way of thinking about our own spiritual changes.
“John the baptizer appeared in the
wilderness.” The wilderness, uninhabited places, the desert, is never far away,
in the story and in the world that we know. In California, we don’t need to
travel very far to find ourselves in wilderness, whether it is the rocky, sandy
wilderness of a desert, or mountains and forests that cover so much of our
state. The wilderness was, still is, a place where people can go to search for
God, to encounter God directly without the temptations and distractions of life
in cities and towns. In the wilderness is the world as God made it, before
humans rearranged it. So it is understandable that a prophet would appear in
the wilderness, and that people would flock to him there. There John heard
God’s call to him, to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For
John this took the form of the baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of
sins.
Mark the Evangelist makes it clear that
John the Baptist is a prophet descended from the prophetic tradition of Elijah
and Jeremiah and Isaiah. Camel’s hair and a leather belt were apparently the
standard uniform of prophets. But I’m not sure that John’s diet was standard
prophetic fare; one scholar suggests that John wasn’t eating insects, but
actually a kind of bean, which evidently the Greek seems to hint at. Another
scholar suggests that the locust image comes from the book of the Revelation,
in which locusts are demons. Then John the Baptist is a prophet who devours
demons, the way locusts devour plant life. The prophets of the Hebrew
Scriptures didn’t eat demons; this makes John’s prophetic ministry something
new, a step beyond the old prophecy and a step toward something, and someone,
completely new. John was a charismatic figure able to draw people out of their
villages, into the wilderness where God could be found, where God was waiting
for them. There God, through the ministry of John the Baptist, was able to
release them from their sense of sin, to prepare them for the next step in
their spiritual lives, an encounter with the one more powerful than John. All
that John was able to do was to baptize them with water, to free them from
their sins. No small thing, to be sure, and a necessary thing, a step closer to
their encounter with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Today’s story is about prophetic religion,
in which prophets point out spiritual and other shortcomings in society and in
individual lives, and they proclaim God’s will as the prophet has received it,
which is usually a proclamation of what God requires as a way to curing the
ills that the prophet has perceived. Prophetic religion is a necessary balance
to priestly religion, the religion of the Temple. Although today’s Gospel
doesn’t mention the Temple, everyone in the story knows about it and takes its
existence for granted. Prophetic religion is a perpetual reminder that there is
more to spiritual life than the performance of canonical ceremonies and
scholarly study of Scriptures and the maintenance of impressive sacred
buildings. The “people from the whole Judean countryside” respond to John’s
ministry because there is something in it that they don’t hear anywhere else.
God is offering them something more immediate than what they experience in
their ceremonial duties in attendance at Temple rites.
And that ‘something more immediate’ is an
encounter with “the one who is more powerful” than John the Baptist, more
powerful than the priestly religion of the Temple in the city. There is a
progression here: from the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures to John the
Baptist to “one who is more powerful.” And that encounter is in the wilderness,
where there is nothing between the people and God, and where God’s forgiving
presence is made known to them in baptism. That makes them ready for the
appearance of Jesus, and baptism with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus accepts John’s baptism. In doing
this he is not so much repenting of anything, as he is placing himself on the
same level as the people around him. He is enabled, dare I say it, to receive
the descent of the Spirit, because he has accepted the same condition for it as
everybody else. That condition is acceptance of the reality of ordinary human
life. We are granted a look, so to speak, behind the grandeur of later
theological statements, behind the ‘two natures of Christ’ and the ‘second
person of the Trinity’ and the ‘procession of the Holy Spirit’ and so on, a
look at Jesus as ordinary, as one of the “people of the whole Judean
countryside” getting into and out of the water like all the rest of them. Only
then, when he accepts human ordinariness, human realism, is he ready for the
next step in spiritual life, the descent of the Spirit.
And what a descent it is! “He saw the
heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove!” What a stunning
contrast of images: the torn-apart heavens producing a dove! I don’t know what
“the heavens torn apart” could have looked like, if it were a physical,
external event at all. As a description of a life-changing event, it is very
dramatic and suggestive. By accepting the ordinariness of human life in the
baptism of John, the heavens opened to Jesus. Ordinariness, human reality are
the clues here. Heaven and earth, humanity and divinity, are not far apart. The
realization of this closeness through direct perception of reality, which the
baptism of John prompted, is what is happening here. The torn-apart heavens
suggest a lightning bolt, a flash of awareness that leads to new perception.
And that new perception is called the Holy Spirit, and its arrival is heralded
by the appearance of a dove, a small, quiet, undramatic creature, gentle and
not the least bit noisy. “And a voice came from heaven,” which sounded like
thunder, probably, to everyone else, and in that sound Jesus heard the voice of
his Father, proclaiming his nature, which we call the Incarnation.
It is a nature in which we are called to
participate, as it says in the Second Letter of Peter. The Incarnation is a
sign of our true calling and destiny. Today’s Gospel summarizes and illustrates
what the steps are that lead us to that participation: hearing the words of the
prophets, accepting the baptism of repentance, which is really accepting the
truth about ourselves. That in turn opens us to the baptism of the Holy Spirit,
which is awareness of our destiny in God, participation in the life of the
Trinity.
“I have baptized you with water, but he
will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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