Today, the Church commemorates the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ.
There are many reasons why his baptism is important to the life of the world and of the Church. In his baptism, Jesus charts an alternate course and redefines what it means to be the Savior, the Lord.
His cousin, John the Baptist, wanted to present him to the great masses who had come out to be baptized, and to anoint him as the messiah and King of the Jews. John had spent years confronting the power of the Herods and the empire, and expected Jesus to do the same.
Instead, Jesus knelt in the river with the crowds, crowds of faithful Jews, gentiles, outcasts...with the great mix of the human family that he had come to redeem. John tried to prevent it...great kings don't kneel with the lowly masses!
But Jesus insisted. And the heavens were torn open, and the voice of God proclaimed "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!"
In this, and through the duration of his ministry, Jesus consistently inverted our human expectations about power, our obsession with having the power to compel others to be and do as we desire. He showed us that the power of God is manifested in humility, self-offering, compassion, and love.
We keep on believing that power has to do with the authority to compel others, usually through threat of force or through violence, and that this power will bring us peace, or security, or lead us to utopia. Human history has shown, if nothing else, our ability to deceive ourselves, our ability to believe the great lie, and our willingness to sacrifice others to achieve some proposed good. We have made the world a graveyard with our millennia of empires, kingdoms, political philosophies and movements, and economic philosophies.
Jesus teaches us that it is impossible to return to paradise without God, and that to ascribe to God any association or blessing upon our using power over each other is a lie.
And for this we murdered him.
We want to keep believing that we are able, on our own, despite the witness of history and of current events, that we can achieve paradise if only we can force people to act right, and failing that if we can only eliminate them.
Dear ones, we are unable to redeem ourselves, or to engineer paradise. Jesus refused to take up a sword; he refused to get into a contest of will with the empire. Instead, he dismissed the authority of empires and kings, and set about proclaiming the good news, that God is self-emptying love, and that God will one day restore the human family to paradise; and he asks us each to turn away from our quest for power and to embrace the power of God through lives of compassion, humility, reverence, and self-emptying love.
All of this is set in motion by his baptism, which we remember today. A baptism rather than a coronation. Kneeling with, rather than standing above, the masses, even those who would one day reject him.
How can we do any different?
Fr. Troy Beecham
