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FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook
Epiphany I 2012
Mark 1: 4-11 The Baptism of Jesus
 | | Harry T. Cook |
Here Mark delivers the first written account of Jesus' baptism, a passage that strikes me as suspect, as having been invented, maybe, in order to connect Jesus the Galilean with John the Judean and his apocalyptic themes. Others would say it is a report of an actual event. In any event, Jesus does not linger long with the Baptist, and neither does Mark. The gospel narratives suggest, nevertheless, that the Baptist had a large following and that Jesus may once have been a part of it. The presence of the Baptist and his baptizing activities in the gospels bear witness to his importance in the greater narrative.
Once having dealt with the Baptist, his activities and his physical appearance, Mark introduces Jesus in person, having already alluded to him as "the Christ" in 1:1. He wrote: "At about that time came Jesus out of Nazareth and was baptized by John in the Jordan." How typical of Markan terseness that, like an Ernest Hemingway sentence, is says so much so briefly. Take this sentence from the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand die of it in the army." What those 34 words convey could in another medium be an immense scene on a textured canvas. The Hemingway reader knows and so should the reader of Mark know that each word in a spare passage counts for much. "At about that time came Jesus out of Nazareth . . ." There is an epic beginning.
What Jesus came for, Mark says, was specifically John's baptism. It is more likely that Jesus came to Judea, the center of things, with his message and encountered the phenomenon of the Baptist and his movement and maybe got swept up in it to the point that he let himself be baptized in the Jordan. Supposing it happened in just such a way, would it not have been necessary for mid-to-late first century C.E. Jesus Jews to put a spin on that story that would account for the fact that they along, no doubt, with many others followed in Jesus' train rather than the Baptist's? And this was the spin: "When Jesus came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens rent in two and the spirit descending like a dove on Jesus, and a voice came saying, 'You are my son, the favored one who gives me great pleasure.'"
It is unclear from the Markan text who, if anyone, besides Jesus might have witnessed the phenomena. Mark clearly meant for it to be taken as the vindication of his earlier pronouncement in 1:1 that this was "Jesus Christ, the Son of God." In an event, the incident was depicted to draw a line between past and future in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, both the man and the myth.
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Baptism is a primary subject of controversy in an already and historically conflicted church. The origins of the practice of infant baptism are rooted in the church's perceived problem of the forgiveness of sins. Out of infant baptism came the penitential rites, at first confined to one act of contrition after baptism, then, as that did not work out so well, multiple times ad infinitum. In the Protestant Reformation eventually there came to be a sect whose members called themselves "Separatists." The issue was infant baptism, which the Separatists did not consider valid - only believer baptism. One, at or after the "age of reason," had to confess correct belief in order to receive baptism. Then came the issue of method: full immersion or pouring or sprinkling -- a totally stupid scandal over what most self-consciously Christian communities consider a fundamental rite.
Then there is the theological problem of confessing belief in Jesus as the only Son of the Only God who must therefore be sinless, or as the absurdity of an Episcopal Church prayer puts it, "He lived as one of us, yet without sin."* If there was a person named Jesus (Yeshuah), he was born in the way every human mammal is born. If "sin" is the imperfection of human nature as compared to a "perfect nature" of a deity, then any human being would have it, viz. the propensity to think, speak and do harmful, unhelpful even violent things.
As a retired priest, I am occasionally asked to "do something" with regard to a couple's new child. They're not interested in the complex rite of baptism in a church with its myriad requirements of membership. But the couple has this almost primal urge to want to mark a new life, and do so with family and friends gathered. I do this kind of thing out of the conviction that people ought to be able to celebrate what they wish to celebrate how they wish to celebrate it.
To that end, I have created a template of a naming rite, which then couples are invited to edit. If the editing is tasteful and not trite, I polish it up, make it readable English and go to a living room or a patio, perhaps at a grandparent's house and do it. Couples always want candles and water, they know not exactly why, but I do. Those are symbols with which they are familiar, and they are unwilling to let the church have exclusive custody of them.
Baptism or naming or dedication or rite of intention -- whatever suits a couple who want to mark a life's beginning and offer intentions as to how they wish to raise the child in question and according to what values. What follows is a sample rite I recently used.
* Book of Common Prayer, New York, 1979, The Seabury Press, 374.
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