They are heaven-ripping words—powerful, transforming words that change the heart in an instant, pushing in like a divine hand tearing open the sky: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Jesus hears these words at his baptism, as he emerges from under the water of the Jordan, and the Spirit alights on him like a dove. Mark doesn’t say that anyone else hears them, but Jesus does, and they mark the beginning of his ministry. How we long to hear them, too, directed at us! We search the world over to have someone name us as Beloved and bestow on us words of approval, words of unconditional love. Neglected souls wither for lack of hearing these words; pampered souls grab for them greedily. Even otherwise well-adjusted adults will do just about anything to hear them, turning to work or sex or manipulation of others in order to get the daily fix. As a child, my world turned on seeing an “A” for approval printed in red at the top of my schoolwork each day. A positive comment scrawled on one of my papers by a teacher would leave me smiling all day, feeling, at least for awhile, as if I mattered in this world. Whatever we think might bring us a jolt of approval—our brains, our youth, our artistic gifts, our self-sacrificial actions, our social standing—those are the things that we count on to bring us that stamp of love for which we all long so desperately.
I can’t help but wonder what Jesus was looking for when he came to be baptized by John. If he was without sin, why did he need to repent? Did he decide to set a good example for his cousin John’s followers? Was he wandering around waiting for a sign to begin his ministry? Was he seeking approval and love? Of course, we can’t know what Jesus was thinking, but we can get a pretty good idea of what Mark is trying to tell us by beginning his Gospel with Jesus’ baptism. Mark puts definite bookends around his Gospel, tying Jesus’ baptism to his death.[1] Mark doesn’t distract us with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem; he leaves out all of the angels and shepherds and kings. Instead, he starts in the wilderness, on the banks of the Jordan River, in the place of New Beginnings, where God first led the people of Israel into the Promised Land. Like us, Jesus doesn’t get to sit back and bask in God’s approval for long, however. Still dripping wet, he is driven out “immediately” into the desolate, dangerous desert to face temptation. God does not name him again as his beloved Son until the Transfiguration. And then, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, Mark clearly repeats the same pattern seen at Jesus’ baptism: Instead of receiving the Spirit- dove, Jesus breathes out his spirit; instead of the heavens being ripped open, the curtain of the Temple is torn apart; and instead of the voice from heaven, the Roman Centurion proclaims Jesus the true Son of God. In using such a similar pattern as bookends for his Gospel, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. Jesus is seeking neither purity nor affirmation as he wades into the Jordan with John the Baptizer. He is taking his first steps on his path toward the Cross.
It’s a strange, dangerous Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his baptism. Our decorous little silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over the foreheads of Episcopalian candidates for baptism, unfortunately no longer make clear to us the kind of love that we are really being baptized into as Christians. But it was different for Christians in the first centuries of the faith. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked, they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern Baptist style. Emerging choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even frightening--sacrament. While we don’t baptize like that anymore here at St. Thomas’, our baptism is still an entrance into Christ’s death, as well as into his Resurrection.
No one puts her finger on the dangers of baptism better than author Flannery O’Connor. In her short story, “The River,” O’Connor tells us about a little boy in desperate need of love. Only about 4 or 5 years old, he already lives in a gray, flat world of despair, neglected by his alcoholic parents, pawned off on a series of babysitters who ignore him. O’Connor describes him as plodding dully through life “mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out.”[2] He only knows the names of God and Jesus as curse words, until one of his sitters takes him with her to a revival meeting down at the river. There, the itinerant preacher speaks with passion about “the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood.” “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it” intones the preacher. “It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet.”[3] Pushed toward the preacher by his zealous babysitter, the little boy suddenly realizes that what is going on at this river is serious stuff, unlike anything he has ever known before. “Where he lived, everything was a joke” writes O’Connor. “[But] From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.”[4] And then the preacher speaks to him the magic words, the words that we all long to hear in our desperate searches for approval in this world: If you are baptized, “You won’t be the same again … You’ll count.” That is what we all want, isn’t it, to count? To be someone in someone else’s eyes, to be recognized as the child of God that we are, to have a meaningful place in this world? Grabbing the little boy and shoving him under the water, the preacher proclaims the truth triumphantly, “You count now … You didn’t even count before.”
Like Jesus and like us, the little boy in O’Connor’s story does not get to remain long in the triumphant moment of baptism. He is returned to the wilderness of his uncaring parents, to his boring, meaningless life, to a world where everything is a joke. But having tasted God’s powerful love, the love that makes him count, the little boy is drawn back to the river. Thinking about the river, “his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.”[5] Not waiting around for God or the Church, he goes to the river to baptize himself one more time, to find the Kingdom of Christ hidden down in the River. Gasping and sputtering in the water that is slowly rising around his neck, he keeps floating, he keeps being pushed back by the waves. Despairing that he has misunderstood, that God doesn’t even really want him, either, he fights and kicks at the water, until the current catches him and “like a long gentle hand” pulls him under and away. God’s love is a love that we must drown in, O’Connor seems to say. We must drown in it in order to re-emerge into the resurrected life, the life where we “count.”
In hard times, we fear more than ever that we do not count. When our jobs change or are threatened, we doubt ourselves and our futures. When we have to move to a new place, when disease or age diminishes who we think we are, when relationships end and we find ourselves alone … we become so desperate for affirmation that we are indeed ready to throw ourselves into the nearest river to find it. Yet, at the same time, sitting here comfortably as Christ’s Church, we draw back from that futureless, all demanding divine love that laps at our toes. We are afraid of what it might do to us, wary of how it might change us. We are caught between our desperate desire for love and our insistence that we do not need to change. So, even in the church, we hang back, proclaiming, like another one of O’Connor’s characters, that we don’t need to be dunked under the water of Love, choked and battered by waves that escape our control—we claim that “What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it,”[6] we protest.
But our protests don’t matter. When the chrism is placed on the foreheads of the newly baptized, they are “sealed as Christ’s own forever.” God has in baptism marked each of our hearts with the cross, and they will never be the same. I am God’s Beloved, no matter what, forever and ever. I count. And so do you. And so do each one of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are “one Body and one Spirit. One hope in God’s call to us. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all.”[7] We don’t need to run or to fight for our own spot in the sun. We are the Body of Christ. We will drown and rise together in the terrible, invincible Love of God.
[1] According to Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, “The River,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1988), 155.
[3] Ibid., 162.
[4] Ibid., 165.
[5] Ibid., 169.
[6] The Violent Bear it Away, 172.
[7] Book of Common Prayer, Baptismal service.
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