Our Extraordinary God

Baptism of Our Lord
January 15, 2012
Mark 1:4-11

It started out as an ordinary day for the Baptizer. He had taken his place in the wilderness just along the bank of the Jordan and folks were flocking to him to be a part of John’s baptism, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The folks had come to him from all of Judea and Jerusalem to be baptized, to confess their sins and to return home intending to live their lives anew, turning from their previous sinful ways. But then something happened that broke the ordinary nature of that day. John had seen it coming, he had even told people that it would happen one day…and today was that day. The one who was more powerful than John, the one who had sandals that John proclaimed he was unworthy to untie, had come to the banks of the Jordan to be baptized.
To the folks around him it may not have seemed like anything extraordinary…just a man from Nazareth who had joined the crowds in seeking out baptism from John. John was, after all, performing a unique form of baptism, different from the purity rituals of the temple…and his message of repentance that accompanied the baptism was unique as well. So for a man to travel from Nazareth to Galilee was no big thing to those who had also traveled a long distance to see what John was up to and to partake in his ministry. No, to the naked eye, this visit of Jesus to John the Baptizer was nothing out of the ordinary…Jesus approaches John, John baptizes Jesus, Jesus goes on about his day.
For Mark, there is a real sense of urgency to get right to the story of Jesus and his ministry. There is no birth story, no magi or angels or shepherds, no plot by Herod to destroy an infant, no teenage Jesus in the temple…The Beginning of the Good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God is Mark’s introduction to the Gospel and off we go meeting John the baptizer and witnessing the baptism of Jesus. So also for Mark, there is that same sense of urgency in the baptism of Jesus. It takes three verses to describe the whole thing from beginning to end…and only half a verse to describe the baptism itself. There is no argument from John about who should be baptizing who…Jesus goes, is baptized and goes on his way in three short verses.

But even in all the urgency of Mark, he knew to leave in the most important part of the story, the part that makes the baptism of Jesus so extraordinary.

There have been debates that have lasted centuries as to why Jesus needed to go to the Jordan to be baptized…as Christians, we confess that he was without sin, so why would he need to be baptized for the repentance of sins? Doesn’t that cause a bit of a scandal…that Jesus would need to be baptized?
But Mark is a very simple Gospel…he only wrote about what was truly important to him and his community when he penned his account of the life and ministry of Jesus. And so it seems that maybe, to Mark and his community, it wasn’t the baptism itself that made this event extraordinary. True, the baptism of Jesus was important…but when it comes down to it, it is what happens after Jesus comes out of the water, after his baptism is complete, that is the key moment in this part of Mark’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry.
“And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

For Mark, it only takes a half a verse to describe Jesus’ baptism, but it takes two verses to describe what happened afterwards…and it is in these two verses that Jesus’ baptism goes from ordinary to extraordinary. After Jesus was baptized, as he was coming up from the water, God tore open the heavens and came down in the form of a dove, claiming Jesus to be God’s son, the beloved. We don’t know who got to witness this part of the event, whether it was just Jesus, if it was just Jesus and John, or if it was the whole crowd who had gathered to also be baptized by John.
But we know this…at the end of the baptism of Jesus, God tore open the heavens and in doing so, God opened God’s self up to the world, letting God’s self loose in the creation that had been separated from God for so long by the sin that so strongly pervades the human existence. As God tore open the heavens and claimed Jesus as God’s beloved son, all the barriers that once separated us from God were shattered and we gained full access to the almighty through the one upon whom the dove descended and God’s powerful voice claimed as God’s own Son.

In the Old Testament, we hear about the creation that God made, a creation that was good and very good…about how humans fully relied on God for everything…but, not for long…soon, sin came into the picture when we stopped relying completely on God and began to rely on ourselves, thinking that we could do things just as well as God could. We see this in the eating of the fruit in Eden, in the building of the tower of Babel, in the creation of the gold calf, in the worship of idols by the kings of Israel. In our sin, a barrier is created between us and God, a barrier that…no matter how hard we tried…we could not and cannot of our own power or might overcome.
So God, in God’s mercy, love and grace, sent Jesus to come among us so that God could tear open the heavens and come down to us, breaking down the barriers that separated us from God. And when our sin blinded us to Jesus’ mission and crucified Jesus up on the cross, God tore open the curtain of the temple, rolled the stone away, and once and for all crossed that barrier that sin had created, allowing us to have full access to our God.
God is on the loose in the world, from the wilderness, to the suburbs, to the inner city…with the outcast, the downtrodden, the ill, the injured, the addicted, the poor, with all of God’s children…on the ready to bring light into the midst of the darkest places in our lives. God calls us by name and bids us to come to the font and to the table, giving us a place among God’s beloved children who have been granted full access to the love and grace of our heavenly father. This is why Jesus’ baptism was necessary, to break down any barriers that keep us from our God…because as hard as we can try, there is no stairway to heaven, but instead there is a God who comes down and brings his love to us. And THAT is truly extraordinary. Amen