Reflection on next Sunday's Readings by Frances Flatman :
Our Readings for the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism, far from being the serene and cosy picture we attach to Baptisms, are in fact heralds of colossal change, ones where the faith, seen as the ‘possession’ of Israel, is flung out to the world and things are never again to be as they were always thought to be. If we too could understand our own baptisms in this way, as a huge challenge and a terrifying encounter with the divine, perhaps many of us might seriously consider if that was what we really want as we begin to enter into the mystery of the Lord whose ministry kicks off with this event. We have to remember that Matthew wrote his Gospel as a lament for failed Israel, that had rejected its Messiah and which by the time he wrote was ruined, conquered territory. Jerusalem was forbidden to Jews and the Temple totally destroyed never to be rebuilt. Many of the inhabitants of Israel were enslaved as a result of the failed revolt. His Gospel is accordingly a kaleidoscope of sharp, conflicting edges as he tells his story of Jesus.
Our Readings begin with Isaiah (42:1-4.6-7) - so 2nd Isaiah of the 6th century BCE Babylonian Exile). Included in this writer’s work are a series of great ‘Servant Poems’ (41:8-10. 42:1-4. 49:1-6. 50:4-9. 52:13-53:12 known to us through its reading on Good Friday.) In these the Servant is sometimes seen as the nation, Israel, but latterly personified in a man, the Suffering Servant of God. It appears that Isaiah expects the nation, as we see in our Reading, to behave as God’s agent in the salvation of his chosen people, behaving with the grace and finesse of God himself. Yet later in his great work, he comes, tragically to understand that the nation has failed and this task is given into the hands of one man, the man who will be torn to bits by no less than the society to whom he had been bequeathed. Originally so full of hope and expectancy for his nation, Isaiah comes in shame and sorrow to look for salvation elsewhere, in the ‘man of sorrows’ hung out to dry by his own, who will confound the nations and bring them to heel. It’s a dark picture, full of foreboding for the time of Jesus.
Our Gospel, (Matthew 3:13-17) immediately takes us into this uncertain world. We have just met John the Baptist and seen his ministry to the ordinary people out along the Jordan away from Jerusalem and its elite. We have seen his savage and hostile attack on the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to check him out. ‘Brood of vipers!. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Then we have his meeting with Jesus and the latter’s insistence on baptism by John with Jesus’ strange statement that John ‘Do all that righteousness demands.’ Apparently this refers to two passages in Jeremiah (23:5-6. 33:15-16) speaking of the action of the Messiah and of God’s own action in the salvation of his people when his ‘shepherds’ fail. At once then, we are given clues as to who we are meeting in the person of the man baptised by John, just as we have already experienced in the Infancy Narratives in Matthew’s Gospel with those dreamers, Joseph and the Magi, who met God in their dreams, and Mary and the angelic vision. All those, it is so clear, who stand aside from Temple Judaism and where we find Jesus’ adult life and mission in iffy Galilee, a Roman occupied cosmopolitan place where he rubbed shoulders continually with foreigners. Jesus is baptised ‘And suddenly the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending…’ This it appears is an experience for Jesus himself, as it signifies his total identification with God. Subsequently Matthew says that the watching crowds hear the divine voice telling them, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on him.’ Jesus’ identity is spelled out to the crowd so that we too are now players in the story. It’s an invitation hard to refuse and now the story gathers pace as they/we enter into the life of the redeemer of the world.
We get a glimpse as to what that experience grew into after the resurrection, and with the growth of tiny Christian communities all over the Mediterranean with our Reading from Acts (10:34-38). Luke’s story, written for converts from paganism, is a very different view of things and here we read part of the story of Peter’s dream of the sheet let down from heaven, with all manner of seafoods inside, and the divine voice instructing Peter, still a devout Jew to eat prohibited foods. The message is an allegory, instructing him to take Christian acceptance out to pagans completely free of Jewish dietary and other restrictions. And he goes to Caesarea, that great Roman port-citadel on the Mediterranean and a huge Roman base for the army. He is directed to the house of the Centurion Cornelius, so one who would be in charge of a Cohort of soldiers, one whose expertise in war would have made him amongst the most hated by Jews during the Revolt which ended in Jewish defeat in 70 CE. Most likely, if retired by now, Cornelius had been active in the war against the Jews; so Peter is not given any gentle introduction to the conversion and inclusion of pagans, but chucked in headfirst, with all that vividness we have come to experience in Matthew’s life of Jesus, and he and we are called to grasp the nettle, to take to heart precisely the implications of following Jesus. Just as Peter was called to put aside the habits of a lifetime by becoming true to Jesus, we too by our baptisms into the Lord Jesus are called to share in the life of the Beloved Son, God flung into the world for its salvation.
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