The First Sunday after the Epiphany

There are two things that, for me, resonate through today’s readings. The first, of course, is baptism, which is fundamental to our faith and is the first sacrament many of us experience. It is also the only one which can be performed by anyone, clergy or even laity, in case of emergency. For example, when my mother entered nurses’ training in the 1940s, one of the first things the nuns taught their students was how to perform baptisms, in cases of newborn infants or other individuals who seemed on the verge of death, when no priest was nearby,.

The second thing that stands out for me is the idea of family, a word that we use in a variety of ways. Probably, if we stop to think about it, most of us think first of our human families, nuclear families made up of parents and children, but expanding outward to cousins of varying degrees, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and chosen families made up of friends and associations, such as church families, or faith families. Baptism joyfully initiates us, and perhaps those close to us, into those chosen families. And then we have the larger family of all humankind, the one some people don’t think about much, and which we might sometimes see as more problematic. But Isaiah promises that will change, in his prophecy of a time when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

What I want to do is try to show a little bit of how today’s gospel brings those two important concepts together and to talk a little more about each one.

The gospel account of Jesus’s baptism does not make direct reference to his human family, but it should be understood as an important part of the story. The mothers of Jesus and John the Baptist are cousins, which makes their sons cousins also. Not first cousins, or second cousins, but still kinfolk, even though the two women come from different lineages: Mary is of the house of David, though her material circumstances are far from royal, and Elizabeth descends from the priestly line of Aaron. We see these inheritances play out in the lives of their sons, as John carries out the priestly function of baptism and Jesus will later be recognized, albeit mockingly by his enemies, as the King of the Jews. But mockery cannot negate a deeper and larger truth.

At the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel told Mary that her cousin was also miraculously pregnant, and Mary embarked on what would have been in those days a long journey to visit Elizabeth, who was by then six months pregnant. When Elizabeth greeted her, the unborn infant John leapt in her womb in recognition of the coming savior, and the two women’s greetings gave rise to some of the most beautiful and spontaneous poetry in the Bible. Elizabeth echoed and expanded upon Gabriel’s salutation at the Annunciation with words that would become the second part of the Hail Mary prayer, and in response Mary recited the marvelous Magnificat. Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months and was almost certainly present at the birth of John the Baptist. It is not difficult to imagine the bond that would have been established between the two during this time, a bond not only of kinship, but of women sharing one of life’s most unforgettable experiences.

We cannot know whether Jesus and John knew each other as boys. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Virgin of the Rocks shows the baby Jesus being worshipped by his mother, an angel, and his toddler cousin, but there is no textual evidence that the children had contact, and the distance between Nazareth and Hebron, where John would have likely grown up, is significant.

Now we skip ahead, over those unrecorded years, to the River Jordan, where John, now known as the Baptist, has “appeared preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, ‘Repent, for the realm of the heavens is near’ . . . . [and] the women and men of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, confessing their sins.”

While baptism has come to symbolize initiation into the Christian family, we must remember that John and his contemporaries at the Jordan would not have seen it that way. People’s confessions were indeed followed by baptism in the river, but not as a Christian ritual of purification, because Christianity as we know it did not yet exist. What they experienced would have seemed more like the mikvah or cleansing ritual bath, which still has an important place in Jewish tradition, where it is used by individuals preparing for spiritual moments or before Shabbat or holidays, by women after their menstrual periods or, significantly, by converts to Judaism.

The baptisms John provided would not have seemed foreign, then, except that instead of a periodic cleansing, to be repeated as needed, this baptism signified something larger, a more powerful lifetime commitment, a sort of conversion, though those who flocked to the river may not have understood what that meant, since they likely felt secure in their Jewish identity, so long as their mothers were Jews. According to Halakhah, the collective body of Jewish religious laws derived from the written and oral Torah that guides all aspects of Jewish life, you are only a Jew if you are born of a Jewish mother. The water ritual that accompanies conversion, whether to Judaism or Christianity, thus carries great power, and both the powerless and those with varying degrees of power are still drawn to it.

This was the case when, at the river, “John saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism [and] he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? . . . And do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor.” For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham.’”

The Pharisees and Sadducees were the two most powerful Jewish groups in Jesus’s time. They were rivals, but both wielded significant influence. The Sadducees, wealthy aristocrats who often allied with Rome, held political power, while the Pharisees had greater religious authority and popular support, though both groups would ultimately collude to have Jesus executed. Certainly they were convinced of their own importance, both by virtue of their social power and their Abrahamic ancestry. But something has put the fear of God into them, and John responds to them by brutally stripping away their claim to political, moral, and especially ancestral superiority. When he says “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham,” he consciously denies the concept of a “chosen people” and proclaims the equality of all, as well as God’s limitless power.

In metaphors that would have strongly resonated within an agrarian community, John compares those men, with their rich robes and social capital, to things of no worth. “Every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire,” he says. Likewise, the worthless chaff that is left after “the one more powerful than [John]” has come and has gathered the nutritious wheat from the threshing floor, will also be burned. We do not know how the Pharisees and Sadducees reacted to this shocking and powerful rebuke because, in verse 13, Jesus finally appears:

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John forbade him, saying ‘I need to be baptized by you, yet you come to me?’” Jesus says “Let it go,” and John does. But why, and how? Is it because the Baptist, in a sort of second Annunciation, once again experiences the same recognition of Jesus as his cousin, and more than his cousin, that caused him to leap for joy in his mother’s womb?

We cannot know. What we do know is that through these two members of a particular human family, in the presence of a crowd representing the larger family of humankind, we receive evidence of another, this time divine relationship:

“Now when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God, she descended like a dove and came upon him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

And there we have it, the divine family: in the voice from heaven, God the Parent; arising from the water, Jesus the Son; and the Holy Spirit, visually validating with her gentle presence, the power and constancy of God’s love.

Amen.