Mark’s
Baptism of Jesus
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 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 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. 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. 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.
Garry
J. Deverell
Baptism of Jesus 2006
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