Texts:
Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29; Mark 1.4-11
Today the church celebrates baptism within
a social and cultural environment where the rite has been largely sanitised of
its dangerous and subversive qualities. In the churches that allow the
baptism of infants the rite is all-too-often reduced to a quaint and pleasant
little naming ceremony. Friends and relatives gather in their finery on a
bright Sunday morning; the child’s forehead is wetted with a few tiny drops of
water while his or her godparents are content to make promises they can neither
comprehend nor keep. In the so-called ‘baptist’ churches, on the
other hand, the rite is often reduced to its pre-Christian tribal meanings,
i.e. baptism as a rite of passage into responsible adult membership of the
tribe or congregation. Unfortunately, neither of these practices is
adequate to the baptism undergone by Jesus, the baptism that is paradigmatic
for Christians. For while the baptisms of the tribe pander to social and
anthropological needs, the baptism of Jesus models the rather contra-cultural
action of God by which the baptised person is torn away from his or her
‘natural’ tribal roles in favour of a way of life which actually subverts and calls
into question the most common paths by which we journey through life.
The confession that makes us genuinely Christian
in the sacrament of baptism is infinitely more difficult than the choice to
fulfil the symbolic law of tribe, society or culture. For, in theological
perspective, the impossible journey towards the joy of salvation goes by no
other way than by a rather traumatic
encounter with God who was in Christ. For
it is the view of the New Testament we can never become who we truly are apart
from the interventions from beyond either self or tribe that we call
creation and redemption. Christian baptism is not, therefore, any
easy thing to undertake. It is not
something that everyone can or should do as a matter of course. Far from it.
If it is genuinely Christian, baptism should be difficult and
painful. For in baptism we admit that it
is neither ourselves nor our tribe that gives us life in all its fullness, it
is God.
When a human being comes face to face with
this truth, there is a breaking down and a loss. Like the man on death
row in Tim Robbins' film Dead Man Walking, who for most of the story
protests his innocence and holds himself together by the sheer wilfulness of
his fantasy. And yet, when death is imminent, he can hold himself no
longer. Death comes like a paschal angel and exposes the lie on which his
life has been built. He collapses, he falls apart before our eyes.
There is weeping and a disintegration. But finally there is the truth, a
truth which is finally able to resist and overcomes his fantasy as from somewhere
or somebody else (indeed, in and from the face of his prison chaplain),
and he claims this truth as his only hope of joy or salvation.
To confess or avow the truth which comes
from another, rather than from ourselves alone, is painful in the extreme, for
here we touch the raw wound of that founding trauma that most of us
spend our whole lives running from. The founding trauma who is God.
“In the beginning,” says the Book of Genesis, the universe was a void and
formless waste. It was a watery Nothing. But over this dark
Nothingness the Spirit of God brooded, and that Spirit spoke. “Let there
be light!” and there was. This is a story about the making of the world,
certainly, but it is also about the making of the human self. It tells us
that the Self is never itself without the traumatic intervention or presence of
another. The call or voice of this other summons us from the womb-like
Nothing of infinite solipsism into the real world of consciousness,
inter-dependence and relationship. Thus, we are called to ourselves by an
intervention, a creation, an interrupting trauma that leaves its mark on us
forever.
In this, says Slavoj Žižek, Christianity
and psychoanalysis are agreed: that the first event is the traumatic
arrival of another, and that most us spend our lives running away from this
event, pretending that we can found ourselves, or make our own salvation.[1] Ironically, the way to healing is to return to the founding
trauma, and find there a God who is irrevocably for us, who longs for
and promises our liberation. For those who are baptised, this constitutes a
return to the violence of the cross, that sacrifice to end all sacrifices in
which is revealed, as René Girard has said, a God who asks for the worship of
mercy rather than sacrificial appeasement.[2] This is not to say that a
return to the founding trauma can be accomplished by human beings in and of
themselves. For a trauma is exactly that
kind of event that cannot be in/corporated or re/membered. Yet, and this is the hope and grace of
baptism, God is one who makes the return possible from the side of
divinity. In the Spirit, God makes of
Christ the saving link between the founding trauma and the event of baptism, so that our baptism ‘into Christ’ becomes
a real submersion of the self in the yet more real selfhood of Christ in his accomplished humanity,
the only humanity finally competent to perform the unique mercy of God. So here, in baptism, the human self is both
lost and recovered more wholly than ever before; trauma is transfigured into
joy. Joy, of course, is a vocative
language, a language of prayer. Its primary
motivation is neither to constitute the other as a version of the same, nor to
reduce the transcendence of the other to a particular appearance. Joy simply celebrates the
always-already-accomplished fact of the other as the salvific centre of itself.
In this, as with the prisoner in Dead
Man Walking, we catch a glimpse of the absurdly paradoxical hope
inscribed in Christian baptism. For baptism is not only a letting-go of
the fantasy-self, the lie of a self that is its own law and judge, but also the
arrival of another self, a truer self given in love by God. Such arrivals
are inscribed everywhere in Mark’s story, literally everywhere. The river
in which Jesus is baptised is the Jordan. It is the river that,
in the memory of Israel,
marks their exodus from the land of slavery into the land of promise, their
transformation from a loose collection of tribal nomads into a federated nation
with a land and a holy vocation given by Yahweh. The baptism therefore
recalls that God is one who liberates, who takes a broken people to his breast
and gives them both a new name, and a new purpose. Note, also, that the
baptism of Jesus is placed by Mark alongside a memory of the exile in Babylon. Isaiah
interpreted that event as an intervention by God to change the people’s
hearts. The city’s nobles had become obsessed with their own power and
prestige. They had forgotten the claims of charity and mercy, and so God
destroyed the city. In that context, the baptism of Jesus can be read as
a renewal of the work of God in human society: after destruction and
exile comes forgiveness and a new covenant, the advent of a new relationship
between God and the people of God’s affection.
Still, the most potent trace of joy’s
arrival, in Mark’s story, is when the heavens are ripped open as Jesus comes
out of the water, and the Spirit of God descends upon him like a dove.
Again, one does not necessarily understand these symbols unless one knows the
stories of the Hebrew Bible. There one reads of a God who dwells in a
holy of holies, an ark that is placed behind a curtain in the innermost chamber
of the temple. Only the High Priest, or some specially appointed leader
like Moses, may approach God there, and usually only once per year at Yom
Kippur, the Day of Atonement. To my mind, the theatre of these Jewish
rituals is about the irreducible otherness of God, the danger of assuming too
close a familiarity with God. God is in heaven, hidden behind a veil that
we may not open from our side. Yet, here in the baptism of Jesus, the
veil that separates God from ourselves is not simply put aside, but ripped
to pieces. Furthermore, it is done by God, from God’s ‘side,’
if you like. In the Spirit, God actually leaves the holy of holies
in heaven, and comes to dwell within the heart and spirit of one who is not
simply a prophet, but a Son, a beloved one. No longer is God to be
understood as the other beyond us, beyond our being in the heavens. From
now on God is to be understood as the other who is Christ, a human being
who walks amongst us, who speaks our language, who shows us what God is like as
a child reveals the form and character of his or her parent.
To put all this another way, what Mark
proclaims about what happened to Christ is also something that may happen to
all of us. After the collapse and breakdown of the false self that is
part of a genuinely baptismal avowal, God promises to come to us with the gift
of a new self: a self forged within by the cruciform activity of the Spirit who
was in Christ and now bears, forever, Christ’s form and character. In the
Spirit, Christ himself comes to us as the love and vitality that empowers us to
put off the old and embrace the gift of the new and truer self. Paul said
it perfectly in Galatians: ‘Now I live, and yet not I; it is Christ who
lives within me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son
of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me’ (2.20).
To conclude, then, Mark’s story confronts
the common-place understanding and practice of baptism in two ways.
First, it tells us that there is no such thing as a Christian baptism without
the hard and soul-destroying work of confession and repentance. In
the first centuries of the Christian church, this was taken very
seriously. Several years were given over to the catechumal learning of the
faith. Through a process of action and
reflection, the catechumens wrestled against the demons of both self and tribe;
and they did so in the power of a newly arriving self, symbolised for them in
the mentor or sponsor who was, themselves, a figure of Christ. Second,
the story tells us that baptism will bear its human fruit not because of our
own will or determination, but because God is faithful. The Father
sends the Spirit, the Spirit of his son Jesus, to hollow out the old self from
the inside out, and replace it with a selfhood of God’s own making and
design. In this sense, baptism is not simply about the ceremonial
occasion itself. It is rather a parable and a ritual performance of the
Christian life as a whole: a calling and a pledge to leave the false self
behind, and to wrestle always to find the truth about things which is God’s
gift to everyone who asks for it.
Baptism, then, is a destroying and a
building. It is the Christian life. It is a promise from God
that may only be received and performed by means of a human promising:
to walk the way of the cross by which trauma is transfigured into joy.
'Death comes like a paschal angel and exposes the lie on which his life has been built' - I love that line. Thanks for posting your sermons Garry. I'm always edified in the reading.
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome Jason.
ReplyDelete