By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
People will often tell you that there is no birth narrative in the Gospel of Mark. No journey to Bethlehem, no angels heard on high, no shepherds hurrying to the manger on a silent, starry night. You can see for yourself what transpires in these first 11 verses of Mark instead. First Mark introduces itself as a Gospel, a telling of good news, about the person of Jesus Christ, identified immediately as the son of God. Then there is a quick orienting text from the prophet Isaiah, a few verses about John the Baptizer, and suddenly, just like that, Jesus is immersed in the River Jordan and the heavens break open, sending forth a divine voice and a celestial dove to claim Jesus as the beloved child of God.
In other words, quite a lot happens in these first eleven verses, but not any of the things that we usually associate with the birth of our Savior or that show up in a typical Christmas pageant.
Don’t let that fool you, though. This is, in its way, a birth narrative. We tend to talk about baptism as a ceremony of rebirth, but the Baptism of Jesus is more than that. It is the birth of a new world, a new moment in history, a new ordering of reality.
We see this most clearly when we compare the beginning of this Gospel to the opening lines of the book of Genesis. The parallels can’t be coincidental. They both begin at the beginning, as it were. The beginning that Genesis describes is the creation of the world itself, which starts with God moving over the face of the waters, troubling their surface. Our usual Sunday morning translation presents this moment as “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” while other translations speak of God’s breath or God’s spirit.
What these translations are getting at is essentially the same thing: God’s spirit, God’s breath, is as powerful as any wind that has ever swept over the sea. Surely most of us been on a boat in the Bay, or on a cliff’s edge overlooking the Pacific, as a wind rips over and through you and you feel the overwhelming force of just a tiny fraction of that power. This is almost certainly the connection we are meant to make in Psalm 29, when the Lord’s voice is imagined as having the force of a raging storm with lashing gales that shake the wilderness and strip the forests bare.
And then there’s the water—the roiling, windswept, God-impregnated water. The Psalm reminds us again that God has control over even this most powerful element. “The Lord was enthroned at the flood and is enthroned as the king for all time.” Robert Alter’s commentary asserts that we should hear in this that God has “supreme dominion over the forces of nature”—and not only over normal, everyday natural forces, but elemental powers and supernatural forces as well.
In the ancient world, water was a stand-in for all those mysterious powers that lurked beyond human understanding and control. To turn again to Alter, in commenting on the line “The Lord’s voice is over the waters,” he notes the allusion to “old Canaanite myths, in which creation is effected by the conquest of a primordial sea monster by the god who rules the land.” Both Genesis and the Psalm make clear that the God we worship is beyond time and space, and yet shows his mighty power in acts of creation and acts of destruction, taming the forces of chaos, setting the stars in their courses, but also willing and able to mow down mighty trees with a seeming flick of the wrist.
With all of this context in mind, the truly earth-shattering meaning of the Baptism of Jesus as portrayed in Mark should now be clear. This is not the story of an individual nicely submitting to a purification ritual so that he can be just like everyone else. This is the moment when the cosmos is reborn.
The heavens are torn open. Mark says it so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, that it’s easy to miss the drama. The heavens are torn open, spilling forth cosmic power. This is not a reversal of the creation story, exactly, but it is a re-ordering of that creation, a rupture in the order of the universe, a singular moment in all of history.
In the Baptism of Jesus, God disrupts the natural created order by bringing the powers of heaven and earth under the sway of this one man at this one particular point in history at this one actual geographic location. Jesus does not hover over the water like the Spirit did at the beginning but rather plunges into them and is immersed by them. The usual division between things earthly and things divine no longer applies—this is indeed a new creation and through it all things are being made new.
Make no mistake, this has massive implications for our lives today. We are washed in those same waters of Baptism. In the words of one Anglican writer, “Baptism is a ‘solidarity plunge’—it immerses us in the affairs of our neighborhood, our nation, and the world. It marks us for ministry in the name of Christ’s love, with justice and peace for all.” (The Rt. Rev. Fred Hiltz, Primate Emeritus of the Anglican Church of Canada)
This week, many of us felt like we were seeing the world turned upside down in a very different way. People who proclaimed themselves patriots desecrated the temple of our democracy, violating the core principles of our country and the rule of law. People died, including a Capitol police officer, while our elected representatives were forced into hiding by an armed and violent mob, temporarily stopping the electoral process in its tracks.
Our own Presiding Bishop called this a coup attempt. Whatever you call it, the forces of violent white nationalism that have been looming over our country were unleashed in a way not seen on these shores for a very, very long time. Everyone I have talked to in the last few days is reeling from horror and shock. Most are angry and heartsick. Many are afraid.
What I see in today’s readings is the very reminder I need right now, a reminder that no force on earth is more powerful than God. It doesn’t always look that way, I know. At moments it feels to me like the forces of violence, authoritarianism, and white supremacy are winning. But then I realize that Mark gives no indication that the crowds gathered in the River Jordan even noticed when the heavens were torn open and voice from on high proclaimed Jesus as the Beloved One. They did not even know that God was literally in the midst of them, that they were witnesses to a new world order, a remaking of creation.
But we know. We know that God has joined in an unbreakable, eternal solidarity with us, and that God’s claim on us through Baptism demands that we extend that same solidarity to others, especially the oppressed and the vulnerable. We know that God has come among us to set all people free and that we are part of that plan of redemption and emancipation. We know that the winds that swept over the waters of Creation and stirred up the River Jordan are sweeping through the world still. We know that when God troubles the waters, we are all in for trouble—good trouble, liberating trouble, life-giving trouble. We know, and so we must not give up hope, must not give up faith, but must work together in love. Amen.
