Today the church commemorates the baptism of Jesus in an era when the meaning of the rite has been all but lost.  In the paedo-baptist churches, where children are baptised, the rite has been 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 make promises they cannot possibly keep.   And in the baptist churches, those that baptise “believers” only, baptism has become a rite of passage into adulthood; it is something one does to grasp hold of a fuller and more responsible membership in the tribe.  Unfortunately, neither of these practices are adequate to the baptism undergone by Jesus, the baptism that ought to be paradigmatic for Christians.  For while the baptisms of the church pander to social and anthropological needs, the baptism of Jesus models the rather anti-social 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 contests and fractures those roles.

Baptism, as Mark understood it, was essentially a symbolic performance of confession and repentance:  a ritual act by which one’s sins were acknowledged before God, and then done away with, in exactly the way that water does away with dirt.  Now that, to my mind, is where all the trouble of the Christian life properly begins.  For the confessing of one’s sins is . . . now how should I put this? . . .  not something that human beings routinely do!  Most of us would like to believe that while the rest of the world might be going to hell, we ourselves are not because hell is, in fact, other people.  If only other people would get their act together, then maybe things would be better.  If only other people could do things the way I do them, then all would be sweet.  Of course, such thinking is not only a blinkered form of fantasy, it is also, perhaps, the paradigmatic example of what sin actually is:  Nietzsche’s “will to power,” an absolute confidence in one’s inalienable right to make the rules, and hang what anyone else might want or need.

Christian confession, then, is far more than listing off a series of transgressions against the tribe.  If that was all it was, then most of us could come at it without much trouble.  For secretly, most of us feel legitimately exempt from what is socially acceptable.  Each of us have a sense of the “higher law” in whose name we regularly break the law or contravene what our tribe would expect of us.  So confessing such transgressions is today, frankly, passé.  When slightly drunk at dinner parties, we will all put our hands up to confess.  Speeding tickets, tax evasion, even sexual misdemeanours.  These are no big deal.  If the television show Seinfeld is about anything, it is about watching other people actually do what most of us still baulk at doing, even though we have no real reason not to.  Seinfeld is about the higher law to which we all subscribe today, the Nietzschean law of the will to power which says:  I can do anything I like because, in the end, all there is is what I make of myself.

Genuinely Christian confession, the confession that actually makes us Christian in the sacrament of baptism, is infinitely more difficult.  Why?  Because in baptism we confess a profounder and more painful truth:  that there is no higher law; that the higher law is simply a fetish we have made for ourselves to escape the unbearable reality of God; that we can never, in fact, become ourselves apart from the traumatic interventions which the bible calls creation  and redemption.  Christian confession is painful because here we admit that it is not ourselves but another, God, who gives our life and livelihood; that we are not the masters of our destiny or the makers of our own salvation; that our fetishized lives therefore have no more substance than a house of cards.  When a human being comes face to face with these truths, 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 is life has been built.  He collapses, he falls apart before our eyes.  There is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  But finally there is the truth, a truth which finally resists his fantasy as from somewhere or somebody else: and he claims this truth as his only salvation.

To confess the truth which comes from another, rather than from ourselves, 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 which leaves its mark on us forever.  In this, says Slavoj Zizek, 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.  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 our liberation.

In doing so, like 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 which 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 which, 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 has 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 his affection.

Still, the most potent trace of arriving hope, in Mark’s story, is the bit about the heavens being ripped open as Jesus comes out of the water, and the Spirit of God descending 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 which 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 himself, from his ‘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 son reveals the form and character of his father.

There is something marvellous in this.  For what Mark proclaims here is not simply something that happened to Jesus alone, as the more sanitised version of the story usually has it.  It is something that can happen to all of us.  After the collapse and breakdown of the false self that is part of a genuinely baptismal confession, God promises that he will 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 Philippians:  “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.”

Mark’s story confronts our usual understanding and practise 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.  The entire season of Lent was given over to the work of learning the faith and wrestling with one’s soul prior to the rite of baptism at Easter.  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.  God sends his Spirit, the Spirit of his son Jesus, to hollow out the old self from the inside out, and replace it with a Self of God’s own making and design.  In this sense, baptism is not simply about the ceremonial occasion itself.  It is rather a cipher and a ritual performance of the Christian life as a whole:  a calling and a pledge to leave the false self behind, and wrestle always to find the truth about things which is God’s gift to everyone who asks for it.  This second movement confronts our fantasies about self-foundation, about the will-to-power which makes a higher law for itself without reference to another.  For here we learn the difficult and liberating truth that we have never been on our own, that even the breath that we take this moment is possible only because God has made it possible.

Baptism, then, is a destroying and a building.  It is the Christian life.  It is a gift from God that can only be received by walking the road of the cross.  So the question for us is this:  having been baptised, are we prepared to make that baptism real in our lives?  Are we willing to cede our will into the hands of another, to lose ourselves in order to become the new Self which is Christ in us, the hope of glory?  I pray to God that it be so, even as he wills and desires.

Maranatha.  Come Lord Jesus Christ.