A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3: 13-17) recounts the episode of
Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan at the hands of his cousin John the Baptist. How
strange are the paths of the Lord! Behold John, six months the elder of Jesus,
sent before Him to make straight His paths, whose sandals he was not fit to
loose, now performing for His Lord the ritual of symbolic cleansing from sin. Why?
Why, indeed, when it was the sinless Jesus, the sacrificial lamb born in
Bethlehem, who had come to deliver the world from sin? John himself is stricken
with the question to which Jesus answers gently: it is fitting for us to fulfil all
righteousness. In other words, this is the will of the Father whose ways
are nothing but justice and peace. While the voice of the Father thundered from
the sky (according to St Mark), the vision of the opening heavens and the dove
appear to be a private experience of Jesus, undetected by the assembled crowd,
for the gospel says he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and
coming to rest on him. This is another kind of Epiphany of that mysterious
province where the ineffable Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, the Son, is
joined to His humanity in hypostatic or existential union – body, blood, soul,
and divinity, to use the classic formula. But why was His baptism a matter of all
righteousness, according to Jesus’ word?
There is some mysterious link here between the passage that
Jesus must follow, the journey He must undertake, in advance of our passage,
our journey, towards God. It is not just that redemption by Jesus is a
transaction of ransom paid to recover us from the slavery of sin. It is that of
course, seen from one perspective. But from another, that redemption, the means
chosen by the wisdom of the Father, required a transformation of the Son. Not,
of course, that the Son can be transformed; properly speaking, as God there can
be no change in Him. But here is the mystery of the incarnation, that the
eternal Word of God at some point rose in human history like a newborn Sun to
illumine the world, the eternal glory of whom was, as it were, emptied out so
as to allow His eternal light to dwell substantially in the physical flesh of
an Iron Age Israelite. When He tells us again and again in the gospel that
where the Master is, there must the disciple follow, He is not simply pointing
out an ethical or ascetical path of moral reform, like some Greek or Roman
moralist, but signalling the need for a deeper, inner transformation whereby,
in our own way but like Him, we too must be emptied out, not of eternal glory
but of our bitter shame and rebellion, of our waywardness, of our
unrighteousness, cleansed of the malice of our will and of the milky cataract
of self-delusion that forms again and again over our inner eye. This
transformation is part and parcel of our mystical death and resurrection in
Christ, achieved sacramentally in our baptism, but requiring of us a faithful
living out of its meaning in order for its reality to take flesh in us and
transform us too, to make us like Jesus rising from the waters of the Jordan.
These are high matters and hard to define and grasp, yet their
implications for us are spectacular. And light comes, as it so often does, from
the letters of St Paul, specially the second letter to the Corinthians, where Paul
specifically associates transformation in Christ with the attainment of righteousness.
I give you the last section of Chapter 5:
From now on, therefore, we
regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from
a human point of view, we know Him no longer in that way. So, if anyone is in
Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new! … we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled
to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we
might become the righteousness of God.
He made Him to be sin, i.e. as He would appear
symbolically in the figure of a brass serpent healing the Israelites of a
poisonous serpent encountered in the desert; as He would appear emerging from
the River Jordan, baptised by John; as He would appear also eating and drinking
with sinners; as He would appear most acutely of course, hanging on the tree of
the cross, crucified between two thieves and despised and mocked by the holy
leaders of God’s chosen people.
Why does God require us to step beyond the appearances in
order to attain to a vision of His truth? Why does He not simply reveal all,
blast His enemies, and be done with it? His reasons may remain inscrutable for
eternity but what if they are something like this: what if the journey He takes
us on, following the Son in a self-emptying, is also about working in reverse,
about detoxifying, the self-dependent, arrogant seizing of knowledge and enlightenment
inscribed in our first parents’ rebellion? Now, we can no longer proceed
exclusively by knowledge, for we have abused it. We cannot judge Jesus by our
senses alone, by our untrammelled logic and human wisdom. From our disobedience
before that first tree of knowledge when we thought it would make us like gods,
God intends to draw us to Himself by a new tree of apparent folly which will
make us like his Son.
From the moment of this second tree onwards, we must go by
the way we do not know, resigning ourselves to an act of confidence in this
apparent failure of a Saviour, humiliated by an act of capital punishment. That
now is the righteousness of God, for God’s righteousness can no longer be
committed to our unsteady minds and hands except when we are transformed in
Christ. Literally, He must remake us in Christ in order for us to be welcomed
back into His kingdom. This is a mystery but not one we can access without the
emptying out that God requires from each and everyone of us.
Ultimately, this is a mystery captured most exquisitely in
those words of St John of the Cross at the beginning of the Ascent of Mount
Carmel:
To reach satisfaction in all
Desire its possession in
nothing,
To come to the knowledge of
all
Desire the knowledge of
nothing.
To come to possess all
Desire the possession of
nothing.
To arrive at being all
Desire to be nothing.
To come to the pleasure you
have not
You must go by a way in which
you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you
have not
You must go by a way in which
you know not.
To come to the possession you
have not
You must go by a way in which
you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
You must go by a way in which
you are not.
When you turn toward something
You cease to cast yourself
upon the all,
For to go from the all to the
all
You must possess it without
wanting anything.
In this nakedness the spirit
finds its rest,
for when it covets nothing
nothing raises it up and
nothing weighs it down,
because it stands in the
centre of its humility.
…in the centre of its humility,
like Jesus rising from the Jordan.
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