Baptism Redux:  First Sunday in Lent

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

The season of Lent in Year B progresses from Purification to Promise to Wisdom to Salvation to the New Covenant.  This is not a bad journey to take on the metaphoric road from Galilee to Jerusalem in the five weeks leading to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter – the heart of the Christian religion.  Through the common lectionary readings, doctrinal Christianity illustrates the evolution of a life devoted to faith in Christ Jesus.  But for reasons that are neither readily apparent nor explained, the Elves abandon the journey laid out by the writer of Mark’s Gospel except for specifically chosen verses from the middle and end.  We will not get back on Mark’s path until two weeks after Pentecost.

The detour might seem to be justified, given the constraints of the Christian liturgical year.  The time from Epiphany to Easter can vary by several weeks, depending upon when the first Sunday after the First Full Moon after the Spring Equinox appears.  Counting the requisite 40 days back from that, Lent can begin as early as mid-February and as late as mid-March.  Mark’s comparatively leisurely stroll through Jesus’s miracles, teachings, and parables on his way to death and resurrection just can’t be dealt with in five weekly sermons.  The other gospels are also abandoned for the season in their respective years.  Perhaps this is because it is far more important for doctrinal reasons to present the theological and scriptural arguments about the Christian claim that Jesus is indeed the Messiah long looked-for by the Jewish people.

Before we begin our laps around the track that lead to Easter Sunday, a yellow caution flag must be raised: Beware of anti-Semitism that is easily missed in the race to the finish line.

To avoid supercessionism and maintain the logic of the argument for Jesus’s messiahship, the readings for this First Sunday in Lent should start with 1 Peter.  Even though the letter is not a liturgy for baptism, that is the subject emphasized by the Elves.  The writer of 1 Peter says that the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood in Genesis “prefigures” the idea that baptism is the ritual that saves believers now that Jesus has been “made alive in the spirit.”  “Eight persons were saved through water,” claims the writer, and baptism now “saves you . . . as an appeal to God” because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Sure enough, in the reading from Genesis God says, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood . . . I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”  To solidify the point, we revisit Mark’s vignette of Jesus’s baptism and God’s declaration that “you are my favored son.”

Immediately afterwards, Mark says, “the sprit drives [Jesus] out into the wilderness, where he remained for forty days, being put to the test by Satan.  While he was living there among the wild animals, the heavenly messengers looked after him.”  The “temptation of Jesus” is apparently not nearly as important to Mark and Mark’s community as it was to Matthew and Luke and their later Jewish and gentile Christian communities.  The “test” proposed by Mark amounts to a pop-quiz in comparison to the other two gospel writers.

Both Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 embellish Mark’s story by adding that Jesus was called by the spirit to be “tempted by the devil,” and that he “fasted 40 days and 40 nights, and afterwards he was famished.”  The second “controversy” presented in Mark after the forgiveness of the paralytic’s sins  is the question about fasting (2:18-20).  This controversy is skipped altogether in Years A and C (Matthew 9:15a, Luke 5:34); and is only listed for the 8th Sunday in Epiphany for Year B.  Because the number of Sundays occurring in Epiphany is totally dependent on when the Moon triggers the beginning of Lent, the idea that Jesus’s followers did not fast can be easily overlooked in the midst of the Church’s demand for fasting and “repentance” during that time.

In consecutive years of readings for the first Sunday in Lent the stories in both Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus’s temptation after extended fasting.  Perhaps that is the reason the Elves chose to repeat the sacrament of Baptism on the first Sunday in Lent in the Year of Mark.  But baptism for 1 Lent has a much different focus from the first Sunday in Epiphany.   In the context of Epiphany, the “Baptism of the Lord” is about consecration, initiation, and empowerment for Jesus’s work.  The readings for the First Sunday in Lent suggest that Baptism is about cleansing the consciousness so that God will accept us, since, according to the 1st Letter attributed to Peter, “Christ also suffered and died for sins once for all . . . in order to bring you to God.”

We have a theological conundrum here.  Did Jesus need to be cleansed in order to be acceptable to God?  This question is asked and answered only in Matthew (3:13-15).  In the Year of Mark, it is easily glossed over by nimble sermonizing given the doctrinal progression of the readings from Genesis to Mark to 1 Peter.  The question does not occur to the writer of Luke-Acts.  In the Year of Luke (Year C), the Elves simply pair Luke’s version of Jesus’s baptism with the laying-on-of hands by the Apostle Peter and John in Samaria (Luke 3:21-22; Acts 8:14-17).  Unfortunately for unwary preachers using the Gospel of Luke, the implication is that simple Baptism – even in the name of Jesus – was not enough to bring down the Holy Spirit upon the sinners in Samaria.

When Doctrinal Christianity treats the Gospels as “history remembered,” the differences among the stories told by Mark, Matthew, and Luke are trivial.  However, the gospels are not “history remembered.”  They were written for specific communities of people during vastly different times in the first and second centuries of the Common Era.  The only “history” is the “history” of the development of early Christianity.  The writer of Mark tosses off Jesus’s baptism and spiritual trial in the wilderness as introductory events, with the purpose of establishing Jesus’s credentials among traumatized Jews, cut off from the familiar rules governing daily life and Temple worship.  Mark is far more interested in the miracles, and in convincing his exiled community of the legitimacy of Jesus’s new Way.  Matthew, writing some 20 years later to an established group of Jewish Christians (possibly in Palestine), is much more concerned with explaining why Jesus needed to be baptized by John.  Luke – the gentile Greek – 40 to 60 years after Mark – finds it all irrelevant.

Mark is far more interested in Jesus’s authority to exorcise demons, forgive sins, and heal people.  The Elves seem to agree.  After a nod to a prayer for protection (Psalm 25), Baptism is the first order of business before beginning the 40-day Lenten fast, just as Baptism was the first order of business after the “Visit of the Wise Men” at Epiphany.

The problem is that when the readings are considered as a coherent group (which the Elves  imply), God’s original Covenant pledged to the survivors of the Great Flood is replaced with salvation as redemption paid by the risen Christ.  Once again, foundational myth, sacred to the Jewish religion, is overthrown and misused to show Christian supremacy.  But actually, if historic scholarship is correct, the writer of 1st Peter was unknowingly also corrupting Jesus’s message.  Instead of encouraging the Christian communities in radical rejection of the unjust systems of Empire, this writer insists that people comply.  The following excerpts are from the series for the Easter Season, Year A, which studies 1 Peter for seven Sundays:

    The people in this particular late 1st Century Christian community . . . were very likely under some pressure to conform to the society around them.  The letter acknowledges that they may have to suffer “various trials,” but their faith (belief) in the promise of heaven gives them the strength to resist. What do they resist? . . . they are not resisting the injustice of empire.  Quite the opposite:  “For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. . . . As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil.  Honor everyone.  Love the family of believers.  Fear God.  Honor the emperor.”  1st Peter 2:13-17.

Worse,

    1st Peter implies that if we allow [unjust systems] to not only exist, but to proliferate, “if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval.”  1st Peter repudiates Isaiah’s suffering servant, negates the meaning of Jesus’s own death, and cheapens the courage of self-less martyrs to justice in all times and circumstances.  

When baptism is believed to be “prefigured by the flood” in order to save believers “as a pledge to God” to live by society’s normal rules, the radical abandonment of self- interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion is washed away, along with Mark’s quiz.

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