Some thoughts on the Baptism of Our Lord

I know a car dealer in Hudson, New York. He used to work for Buick and then Buick-Pontiac, but he’s since gone independent. He spends a lot of time collecting jokes on the internet, and sends every one of them to me. You have to understand that he has a thing about blondes, maybe because his wife and daughter are blondes, and so he has lots of blonde jokes. This is one of them (of course, feel free to change “blonde” to anything you want):

This blonde wanted to go ice fishing. She'd seen many books on the subject, and finally getting all the necessary tools together, she made for the ice. After positioning her stool, she started to make a circular cut in the ice. Suddenly, from the sky, a voice boomed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." Startled, she moved further down the ice and began to cut yet another hole. Again from the heavens the voice bellowed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." Now worried, she moved away, clear down to the opposite end of the ice. She set up her stool once more and tried again to cut her hole. The voice came once more, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." She stopped, looked skyward, and said, "IS THAT YOU, LORD?" The voice replied: "THIS IS THE HOCKEY RINK MANAGER. PLEASE LEAVE THE BUILDING!"

We have a voice in the Gospel reading, but it’s not the hockey rink manager. Supposedly, it’s a voice that “came down from heaven,” as if from the sky.

Jesus has come to his cousin John to be baptized in the Jordan River, because, as he is quoted as saying in the gospel of Matthew, it is appropriate to do this in order to “fulfill all righteousness.” In other words, he’s going to do things right and above board from the start, beginning with a baptism. So he has his cousin baptize him just as John has baptized many others.

At one of the spots where John baptized in the Jordan the water is very shallow, about knee deep. You could literally walk across the Jordan at that point and barely get wet. John would have had people come out into the water and keel in it, and then would have scooped up the water with his hands or with some small vessel of clay and poured it over the person.

It’s too bad we don’t know more about the baptismal practices of the Jews back then; we could fill in a lot of the gaps in the story of this particular baptism. It appears John was not baptizing converts to Judaism. The people he baptized were already Jews. They already believed in God. They didn’t need to be converted. But John offered them something they weren’t easily getting from the official temple religion: repentance and the forgiveness of sins. That’s exactly what Jesus offered people. It makes some sense that he would join those particular people in that particular baptism, so he could be one with them, and to do it openly in public, so that people would see it and would know that he was right there with them from the very beginning, right where they were, and sympathized with them and would claim them as his brothers and sisters.

Having had water poured over them by John, those baptized would have stood up in the river and at that point something would have been said; we know that much. We know that a few decades later in Christian baptisms the baptized would stand after having water poured over them and they would shout out to the sky! One can still find pictures from the first century down in the catacombs of Rome that show these baptismal scenes. Occasionally you can come across these pictures in various books about early Christianity. There you’d see that sometimes the baptized person is just standing in a knee-high tub of shallow water but still looks dripping wet. And always the baptized is standing there with arms outstretched and looking upward with mouth wide as if shouting out. There is evidence to indicate that they called out to the sky they said only one word: Abba, Father.

Perhaps the baptism of Jesus was like that. Perhaps Jesus stood after having the water poured on him, stretched out his arms and looked upward, and shouted out just one word: Abba, Father. It was, after all, what he taught his disciples to call God.

And then in response there came a voice.

I am convinced that John said something to each person he baptized. I don’t know what he said, but I’m sure he said something to each person in the tradition of the rabbis. One can easily imagine John saying something reaffirming and empowering like, “You are a son, … you are a daughter of God. With you God is well pleased.”

But when Jesus came up from the water we are told there was a voice, said to be a voice from heaven, that said, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

I doubt it was the hockey rink manager.

The modern day Christian is confused about what to do with this text. Voices, as a rule, just do not come down from the sky. It doesn’t happen. Not in the real world. So one ends up either thinking one’s own religion is just nuts and either stops taking one’s own church seriously or worse, just walks away from it, been there and done that myself back in the ‘80’s; or -

one flies off to the other extreme, discards one’s brain at the church door and insists that audible disembodied voices really do come out of the clouds, and usually along with that one will insist that if you do not believe this way then God has a very hot place reserved for you when you die. And that, too, is just nuts. And that's exactly the reason I walked away from my former denomination back in '82, but that's another story.

Unfortunately those are pretty much the two options the average Christian ends up with if one makes the mistake of reading the text "literally" with no awareness, or worse, with contempt of Jewish tradition. So, if you don’t want to believe your church is nuts or you do not want to believe that you’re nuts, then there is hope for you, because there is still another option.

If you were Jewish and you read this text then you just might say, “Oh, yeah! No problem! I know what that voice is! That’s the bat kol! Happens all the time in Jewish tradition. Don’t you Christians know anything? Let’s go discuss it over a bagel…”

Well, maybe it doesn’t happen all the time in the Jewish experience, but it happens enough. "Bat kol" are the Hebrew words that mean, literally, “daughter of a voice.” NOT to be confused with the Holy Spirit, which is "Ruach ha-Kodesh" in Hebrew. Say that one nine times fast. I dare you.

The daughter of a voice happens a lot in Hebrew experience. You find it in the Old Testament – for example, the still, small voice in the night that Samuel heard calling his name was bat kol and Elijah seems to have experienced the bat kol on Mt. Horeb. You find it in the Talmud, that collection of the teachings of the Rabbis from the time of Jesus and the early church. Sometimes it is said to be quiet and whisper. Sometimes it is said to sound like a little girl, after all, it is a "daughter." Sometimes it is said to shout out and sound like thunder. And it is not uncommon to find it said that it was a voice that came down from heaven into the midst of a gathering of rabbis and Pharisees and announced that God is well pleased with one or another of them. Sound a little bit familiar?

But this is not the time to start teaching Talmud to you, even though Rabbi Dan kept telling me I really needed to become a rabbi. Actually he gave me two choices, two paths I could follow in life. He said I should either become a rabbi, or that I needed to become bishop of the Upstate New York Synod. Now, how he came to this conclusion I have no idea; sometimes rabbis say the most amazing things. Anyway, I said I’d never make a good rabbi because I would never really be kosher, and anyone who really wanted to be bishop of the Upstate NY Synod had to be certifiably nuts - and that I do not need or want. So, thanks, but no thanks.

With all due respect to my friend the rabbi, our central concern as Christian disciples is Jesus, who heard the classic daughter of a voice itself at his baptism. For my money, the voice that came from heaven was part of a spiritual experience that Jesus had at the moment of his own baptism in which he, and perhaps no one else at that time, heard a voice say, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” It may have been whispered. It may have sounded like a little girl. Or it may have sounded like thunder to Jesus. But however it was heard it expressed the will of God and it identifies for us the one who is the Son of God in whose name we baptize today.

I think our world is in need of such a voice today. I’ve seen it said in some Jewish discussion on the internet including rabbis and lay people that the bat kol, the daughter of a voice, is still speaking today, but that many people aren’t listening, and so we have all the troubles that we have in the world today. There may be something to that.

In this very troubled world we need to listen for God speaking to us. We need to be quiet for once, stop all our incessant chatter and all our frenetic activity, calm ourselves, slow down, and start listening. There’s even an entire ancient mode of Christian prayer based on just being still and quiet and listening for God. It’s called contemplative prayer. Another thing we got from the ancient Jews, by the way.

Today we have a great need as a society and a great need as individuals to be quiet for once, to put our egos on hold, look to the sky and, with our ancient brothers and sisters in Christ shout “Abba!” and then ... listen.

This Epiphany season let us listen for God’s direction, perhaps as a still, small voice, a quiet whisper; listen for God’s guidance, perhaps as a child’s voice; listen for words that are reaffirming and empowering, perhaps resounding like thunder; listen for a voice from heaven that might be spoken through the mouth of another, the Good News of God that tells us that we, too, are a son or daughter of God, redeemed by Jesus, who once was baptized in the Jordan and died on a cross for one and all; Jesus, with whom God is well pleased.

Thanks be to God.

Pr. J