Kids are innately attracted to puddles.

My scientific theory is that entering and exiting a puddle is a re-enactment of life’s evolutionary climb from the primordial muck we come from. Whether my theory is ever proven right or not kids are drawn to puddles like Florida mosquitos seem to be drawn to my bare arms.

My kids were no exception to the puddles’ come hither call. Somewhere along the line my wife Nancy and I gave in and let them play in those puddles to their hearts’ content. By the end of their play you could barely tell the kids from the puddle, let alone from each other. They were saturated from head to foot with wet oozing Oregon mud. It was a site to see.

The deal Nancy struck with the kids was that when the play was over they had to endure being throughly hosed off. Now we had wonderful fresh very cold Oregon well water. So every time the kids played in mud the ritual was that they would run in and out of the spray and spin around as long as they could endure it.

Eventually, like magic, those clay-covered, horribly unclean kids the color and texture of dirt were transformed into clean children in colorful shorts and soaking wet shirts. It was a baptism of sorts that ended when they’d lay in the sun and dry.

We don’t tend to think of baptism today so much as a symbol of cleansing, as we do a ritual of initiation into the family of Christ and a visible outward sign of the inward grace of God . But John’s “baptizing activities should be viewed in relation to Jewish ablution practices – the use of water to cleanse for religious purposes.” 1

The bible you may recall has many references to bathing rituals. Things like hand-washing rituals for priests (Ex 30:18-21; Deut 21:1-9) and instructions on cleansing Levites during ordination (Num 8:7). Priests were ordained by immersion (Ex 29.4; Lev 8.6), and the high priest we are told ritually immersed himself twice on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16:4, 24).

There are also instructions in the Torah to sprinkle water and then later bathe in order to cleanse a person who has touched a corpse (Num 19:18-19). Additionally lepers were required to bathe – in the story of Naaman a leper is even cured by washing seven times in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:9-14). ” [W]ithin the Judaism of [John the Baptist’s] day, ablutions could take the [form] of sprinkling, washing, or immersion.” 2

These cleansing rituals were used to indicate transformation from being impure to being pure again, that is the symbolic washing of one who was unclean provided a visual sign of cleanliness.

We heard a few weeks ago that John was calling folks to the desert wilderness to confess their sins and come into the river Jordan to be immersed by John as a baptism of repentance of sins and to be cleansed and initiated into the group bearing “good fruit” in anticipation of the Coming One who would bring about the end time.

In today’s selection from Matthew we get a glimpse of most of what John is believed to have been doing and preaching. The Jesus Seminar took an extensive look at all New Testament sources and extra canonical writings about John and concluded that

John’s call to repent and be cleansed has always begged the question: why would Jesus the Christ, the very Son of God, need to be cleansed? It has seemed very weird to readers that Christ the perfect being, God incarnate, would need to be purified.

Historians argue that Jesus the man basically lived an apparently obscure, and certainly unrecorded early adult life, but that he did indeed join John’s movement and would have understood, like the rest of Palestine at the time, that John’s movement was a direct challenge to the temple’s monopoly on who receives forgiveness and purification. John’s way was a “free” alternative route to cleanliness. 7

The temple had been corrupted by Rome and its leaders helped oppress the Jewish peasantry. 8 John’s offer and practice of forgiveness by baptism side-stepped the temple, its rites and its expensive temple fees. 9 Consequently, “[a]s John grew in popularity, he [was] probably . . . perceived as a real threat to those whose authority was grounded in the temple.” 10 His movement was a direct protest against the temple. 11

It was also an invitation for followers to go into the desert wilderness and cross the Jordan as a symbolic reconquering of the Promised Land for Israel, 12 a re-enactment of Joshua’s river crossing and conquest of the Promised Land in anticipation of the Coming One’s intercession, on behalf of Israel.

In other words “John’s message was an announcement of imminent apocalyptic intervention by God . . .” 13 John’s movement itself was non-violent, but it was nonetheless a highly explosive challenge with overtones of political subversion. 14

John indicted the governing system of Rome and called for the “Coming One” to overthrow those in power. 15 This was a threat to Herod’s rule and the Roman Empire and as a result John was executed. 16

Historians assert that the man in history who lived as Jesus was initially a part of this movement 17 that taught not just repentance but resistence of Rome in hope of an apocalyptic end to Rome’s rule of Palestine. John foresaw a Coming One who would wrest Israel from Rome and its temple goons with divine vengeance, and violence through chopping ax and burning fire (Matt 3:10).

At some point Jesus parted company with John’s movement. Indeed John Dominic Crossan thinks that John’s execution itself “may have convinced Jesus of a different type of God– the non-violent God of a non-violent kingdom, a God of non-violent resistence to structural as well as individual evil.”18 In other words while Jesus started out as a follower of John the Baptist

Crossan contends

John saw God as one who punishes and initiate acts of violence. John preached “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit shall be cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matt 3: 10) And John expected some one to follow him who would baptize, not with water, but “with the Holy Spirit and with fire!”(Matt 3: 11).

John was not the only one who saw God as a vengeful violent God. Throughout the Bible God was often understood and experienced or called upon as a warrior or destroyer or deliverer of punishments. Jewish rebels throughout first century Palestine used and advocated violence to oppose Rome. This vein of warring for God, committing acts of violence in the name of God in attempts to gain peace, of course, still exists today.

And John’s notion of a vengeful punishing God can be found touted in one way or another in many a church today. John saw the holy as a Spirit like destructive fire.

But that’s not the Spirit that alights on Jesus. Listen again to verse sixteen from today’s reading:

Jesus and his movement, his Way, was and is all about peace. Jesus rejected all notion of God being a warrior, or vengeful or violent or, well anything but the God of Love and peace. Jesus’ movement was about bringing peace to earth through non-violent justice. Equality and fairness and food and love for all. His life and death and experiences of him after death were so vibrant that people remembered him as God incarnate. People experienced him as Christ, the very presence of God on the earth. The Prince of Peace.

The Bible has these conflicting views of God. Some passages have God as angry and violent. Some have God as peaceful and loving. Humans had soiled the image of God, had muddied God’s image by claiming God condoned violence and backed war and victory through violence.

Jesus washed these human imposed layers of violence away from the image of God.

The cleansing of Jesus in baptismal waters with a dove alighting on his purified body is symbolic of his freeing the image of God of the impurities of violence.

Through Jesus we experience God only as pure love and pure peace. The human way, the Roman way of war, the rebel’s ways of violent upheaval is rejected. Peace through victory is not God’s way.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan put it like this:

Jesus claimed it comes through non-violent justice. It comes through letting everyone– everyone– into your community and at your table. It comes through loving everyone– everyone. It comes through caring for everyone– everyone.

In both biblical and non-biblical Jewish texts “justice as equality” in Jesus’ day had long been understood as demanded by both divine decree and God’s very own character. 22 Jesus understood this. Jesus taught it. Jesus embodied it.

And Jesus’ baptism symbolizes just that. The one whom the spirit landed on like a dove, like peace, and stayed with him throughout his ministry was God’s Son, the Beloved, with whom the Great I Am was well pleased.

Jesus cleaned the muck of violence off the very image of God. Through him we can know the clean and pure God of peace, the God of justice, the God of steadfast love. When Jesus entered the ministry –which we remember as beginning with his baptism– he started a movement that gave us a clear clean picture of the God of peace.

Our job is to keep that picture in our mind. To remember always Christ’s call to peace through love which is God.

AMEN

Scott Elliott Copyright © 2008

– ENDNOTES–

1. Tatum, Barnes, John The Baptist and Jesus: a Report of the Jesus Seminar, Sonoma: Polebridge Press, (1994) 119.