Urban Village of Pasadena

A recent lectionary reading was the passage from Mark about the baptism of Jesus.

The baptism of Jesus has, I think, been woefully under-appreciated. Because we tend to think of Jesus as divine and without sin, we assume that he did not need to be baptized, and so we find some easy and simplistic explanation for why he was baptized, e.g. to be an example for others because that's what a good leader does.

But I think such explanations pass far too quickly over an event in the Gospel story that can teach us something much more deep and profound, especially with regard to Jesus' divinity and his humanity.

When Jesus was baptized, God was baptized.

John's baptism was an initiation into a radical movement. In Israel, the temple establishment controlled purity and forgiveness, but there was John, out at the Jordan river, usurping their power, giving away purity and forgiveness for free.

Forgiveness of sins was not just a religious matter; it had grave social and economic consequences. Sin and purity determined a person's or family's social status. In Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his disciples, the word for "debt" and the word for "sin" were the same word. Forgiveness of sins, therefore, had major consequences in terms of social, political and economic liberation.

So God, in Jesus, was baptized into a radical movement.

In Jesus God entered into our full humanity, into all that it means to be human: the joy, the pain, the confusion, the humiliation of the human experience, especially the experience of the majority of the world's people who are poor and oppressed.

In Jesus, God took on the shame and indebtedness of the common poor. As Paul declares in 2 Cor 5:21, "He who knew no sin became sin for us."

Jesus had to be baptized.

Entering into the full reality of the human experience in the form of a poor Palestinian peasant, living under a brutal Roman occupation, was no cake walk for God. Jesus bore the humiliation and confusion of that experience. He had to make decisions. He had to decide to be baptized into a movement for radical liberation. He had to commit himself to that movement. He had to confront his doubts.

We are told that later in the garden of Gethsemane he pleaded with God the Father not to have to go through with the crucifixion. God, in Jesus, had doubt and fear.

God in Jesus was fully human. And therefore he needed to be baptized .

Jesus was baptized into this radical movement with all the others who were baptized by John. With them he cast off his shame and asserted himself as a child of God.

He then went on to spread the movement. He went around spreading the forgiveness of sins. He pronounced other people forgiven of their sins and taught them to do the same. He taught them to go forth with the authority of priests to liberate each other from sin, indebtedness and shame. He gave them, as Paul would later call it, the ministry of reconciliation.

He taught them to create fiercely egalitarian communities where they would all be priests for each other.

Before he did all of this, however, he had to be baptized into the movement.

God, in Jesus, had to be baptized with us.

If we are to follow Jesus, we must follow him into this sort of baptism, a baptism of solidarity.

Before Occupy LA was forcibly removed from the grounds of City Hall, the city tried to lure them off the grounds with offers of office space and other incentives. And I have to admit that were I in their place, I would have found those offers rather tempting. But Occupy LA had more integrity than I did. They responded with a public statement as to why they could not accept these offers. One brilliant line, borrowed from the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, written in bold at the top of their statement read:

For everyone, everything; for us, nothing!

That is the kind of solidarity that Jesus and John the Baptist were talking about! That's the kind of Baptism, the kind of spirit, that they baptized with:

For everyone, everything; for us, nothing!

If we want to find God, we've got to be baptized into this kind of solidarity (whether it is directly through the occupy movement or some other way)
If we want to go up to heaven, we've got to first go down into the waters of solidarity.
If we want the vertical relationship with God, we've got to first go horizontal with the people.

That's what Jesus was talking about when he said that if you come with a gift to the altar and you remember that someone has something against you, first go and be reconciled to them and then come back and offer your gift at the altar.

He was saying that you've got to go horizontal to reach God. He was saying religion that focuses solely on a vertical relationship with God doesn't cut it.

We've got to be baptized. We've got to go down before we can go up.

For everyone, everything; for us, nothing!!

That's the baptism of Jesus.

That is the baptism of God with us.