Whose Voice Is That?
Pope Benedict speaks of the Baptism of the Lord and His death and Resurrection as two bracketing events with Jesus. Both in their own ways were both scandalous and salvific.
One of the key facts of Jesus’ public life was that He was baptized by John at the start of His career. The difficulty is that Jesus came down from Nazareth in Galilee, in a different part of the nation, and listened to John. However, John’s message was that the people were called to repentance, to turn from the sins and to hope for God’s forgiveness. The submersion in the River Jordan represents a death since water can drown us as well as Israel’s safe crossing of the Sea in the great story of Exodus. However, the rising from the River Jordan represents a new life, the liberation after YHWH brought Israel to safety, symbolized either by the life-giving effects of water and/or by the amniotic fluid in the pregnant mother’s womb. To what was Jesus dying and into what was He being born? What was up with Jesus’ baptism for the forgiveness of sins?
The solution seems to be that Jesus came forward in solidarity with the people of Israel. They were called to repentance and to baptism by John. Jesus, the Consummate Jew, came forward with His people to share in their response to John’s call. It is obviously not that He Himself was a sinner; rather, He was a member of a sinful people. As St Matthew tells us, John objected to the appropriateness of Jesus’ gesture. Both agreed. “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”
Ultimately, Jesus died as the Consummate Jew. Though innocent, He died in place of the guilty. His death was the other side of the Resurrection, the victory that the Innocent One won over sin and death for His people.
While both the Baptist and Jesus agreed that God was in the process of doing something new in the world, the two disagreed on the nature of God at work. John had a deep experience of God, but his message was fire and brimstone. He loved Judaism, but he stood outside it, in the wilderness. He offered no promises, but the possibility that God might relent on God’s judgment on reality as it was.
Jesus, John the Baptist’s disciple, also had a deep experience of God, but His experience was a different one. Pope Benedict stresses, as do other modern theologians, that the basis of Jesus’ ministry was His experience of YHWH as Abba, viz., “daddy”, “poppy”, “da”. The love of Abba of Jesus was unconditional and Jesus never wavered from teaching that to His listeners. God loved you no matter what; the problem is that people felt that they might be incorrigible, beyond God’s love.
There are certain indisputable givens about Jesus’ ministry and message. Among them are the following: 1) He proclaimed a message that nobody was outside the pale of God’s love. 2) He practiced inclusive table fellowship with anybody who would dine with him. (Recall the strict social taboos under which Middle Eastern people lived with regard to dining. One only ate with one’s family or with one’s intimates. Jesus would eat with anybody.) In addition, at just about every one of the meals that He attended, invariably some social taboo would be broken, either by Jesus or the disciples or one of the attendees, invited or uninvited. 3) Jesus used the oriental technique of parables, koans, stories disorienting for a few moments and forcing people to re-examine their givens and views. 4) He proclaimed that this something new that was happening was happening in Him. He called it the Coming of the Kingdom of God. (Since then, many individuals and nations and cultures have co-opted the term” New World Order” or “New Age” or “Born Again.”) Jesus used them first in a different context. The response to be made to Jesus’ message was the Aramaic word “Suv”, snap out of it, turn around, get a new life. Suv?? “Snap out of what” remains the question? In essence, Jesus offers an alternative view of reality, subversive of the Systems, viz., the powers that be. Does He still do so?
The tektonos (artisan??) Jesus of Nazareth joined in solidarity with His own people by trekking from Nazareth to join the ranks of sinful Israel in John’s baptism. However, Pope Benedict (citing today’s Gospel) sees the baptism of Jesus as the proclamation and anointing of Jesus as the New David. The coronation of the new King of Israel was His enthronement on the cross, where He is mocked by a crown of thorns and the inscription over His Head that He is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (INRI). Does He reign over me? Do I believe in Jesus? Do I believe Jesus? Pope Benedict says that they are not the same question. Whom do we trust? 010911AD jfq
