Article
- Date:
- Sunday 4th December 2022
Year A, The Second Sunday of Advent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Isaiah 11.1-11
Matthew 3.1-12
Although the Lectionary does some rather odd things between the beginning of Advent and Candlemas, not least putting the Massacre of the Innocents before the arrival of the Three Wise Men, I do not think that it is at all an accident that there is a foreshadowing of the Baptism of Jesus in Advent and then an account of it within the Festival of Christmas, for in the Christian story and in our witness to Christ, baptism has a unique place. So often merely a cause for the late celebration of birth and an the insertion of a few historic leaves in the family album, Baptism is a necessary precondition for our life in Jesus Christ and it is also a demonstration of the life of Jesus Christ in us. For the first and most exalted person to be baptised in the New Testament was Jesus himself, an act witnessed by God and Graced by the Holy Spirit.
Over the centuries there has been some debate about the specific circumstances of the Baptism of Jesus: why should he be baptised when he was born without sin; and what does this act say about the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist? But these questions are surely diversions: Jesus was Baptised by God in the power of the Holy Spirit, as we all are; and the purpose of that Baptism had nothing to do, as ours does not, with sinfulness but, rather, it is a supreme confirmation of the Incarnation. Jesus was Baptised by God precisely because he was a human being who existed, in his unique way, to bear witness to the sovereignty of God.
One of those subsidiary questions, concerning sin, came to haunt Medieval Christianity to such an extent that many pious people, including monarchs, would not consent to be Baptised until they were on their death beds beyond, they thought, the means to sin, believing that if they sinned after they were Baptised then they would have lost the means of salvation. This was not only deeply flawed theology but it also overlooked the capacity to sin on your deathbed by wishing all sorts of ill on all sorts of people without the power to draw the sword. What people misunderstood was the difference between the power of Baptism to free us from the mortal consequences of sin and our inevitable sinfulness; after all, if Baptism freed us from sinfulness, the world would be a much better place, but that isn't the point. The freedom to love, without which love is meaningless, necessarily carries with it the freedom not to love; but to be Baptised means that whatever errors we make will not lead us to the death which was promised as the result of sin in the creation story.
So, having cleared up that little theological difficulty, we can see that the Baptism of Jesus underlined its importance in our salvation. Baptism is the means by which we enter into active participation in God's plan for the world. We are no longer collateral beings, on the margins of the narrative, we are part of it, Baptised to live, to bear witness, to proclaim the purpose of God for all his people.
The trouble is, the people in the Middle Ages who were so worried about not dying in sin lest they should at least languish in Purgatory until their survivors prayed or paid their way out, was that they narrowed the purpose for which we were created to a transactional process whereby we had to make sure that our souls were saved from hell, a far cry from the glorious promise of our reading from Isaiah.
There is something wonderful, almost surreal, in the language of the Prophet Isaiah to describe that day when the promise of God will be fulfilled. There will be unimaginable reconciliations perhaps best symbolised by the wolf lying down with the lamb. What this language means is that the fulfillment of God's promise will not be some ethereal abstraction but will be a realisation in physical terms of what the Creeds describe as the "resurrection of the body". This is not some kind of celebration of the immortality of a disembodied phenomenon called "The Soul" in a place called "Heaven", it is the timeless union of God's realm with our realm where God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
I recognise that the theology of Baptism and salvation is hopelessly approximate but the underlying point is important and simple: Baptism confers a privilege and a concommitant responsibility. The privilege is that we are taken up into the life of Christ so that he is brought down into our lives; the responsibility is that we must carry this news to all who are ignorant of it. There are those who believe that Baptism is a necessary precondition for sharing in the culmination of God's purpose; but I cannot see how most of the world which has never heard of Jesus or who lived before he came can be considered to be creation's collateral damage. I would rather say, in line with my use of the words "privilege" and "responsibility" that the Baptised are in a unique position to understand the sorrows and joys of our earthly condition and that that understanding would be of benefit to all who grasp it. We know the value of sacrificial love, we understand the purpose and the limits of sorrow, we know the missionary obligation of Baptism, we enjoy the nourishment of the Eucharist, we are buoyed by the anticipation set out by Isaiah in his language of wonder and celebration; in a necessarily limited way we have a hint of the meaning of glory. It is hardly radical to say that those deprived of our privilege lead more difficult lives and are surely subjects of God's mercy.
So just as the Church of England exists for everyone, Christian or not, so we as Baptised Christians live for everyone, Baptised or not, constantly setting forth before ourselves the purposes of God in creation and also setting before everyone else those purposes, firmly but gently, so that everybody we know hears the good news which makes human life more bearable, more purposeful and, in these troubled times, more hopeful.