With Wild Beasts and Angels (Lent 1B)

With the Wild Beasts and Angels

First Sunday of Lent (Year B)
26 February 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13

 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’   And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.  (Mark 9:9-13)

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist is one of the few events told in the Gospels that almost all biblical scholars and historians agree actually happened.  The story shows up in too many varied forms in too many differing early traditions to ignore.  And the various retellings and versions of the story show an acute embarrassment among some early Christians at the story of their sinless Lord and God seeking “baptism of repentance” from another religious teacher.  Such embarrassment makes it unlikely that early Christians made the story up. 

Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation is short and sweet: Jesus comes to John and is baptized.  Coming up from the water, Jesus sees the heavens split apart and the spirit of God descends on him “like a dove.”  Then Jesus hears God’s voice, quoting the Psalms and prophets, “You are my son, this day I have fathered you. I love you, you make me happy.” Immediately, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he remains for forty days, tempted by Satan, living with the wild beasts, though “angels ministered to him.” 

What would receiving baptism from John have meant for Jesus and why would he have immediately thereafter gone to the desert to be alone with God?

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that impurity both ritual and moral could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Torah—usually to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period.

A ritual bath (mikveh) from Khirbet Qumran. 

The Dead Sea Scrolls sect, with its dispute with the Temple leadership, believed that simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough to be part of God’s people.  You had to accept the right beliefs and practice the right rituals. They required a ritual washing in order to enter their exclusive community. Their rulebook says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart to be truly valid.

Khirbet (ruins of) Qumran, center; Wadi Qumran (site of the scrolls caves), foreground; Dead Sea  in distance.

Both John the Baptist and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of the Jerusalem elites.   The desert is where God met with his people. God meets Moses and purifies his people there as they wander for 40 years after they leave Egypt (Exodus 2:11—4:31).  God meets Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).  

John appears preaching what Mark and Luke call a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins,” that is, “a washing showing your change of heart that results in your sins being set aside.” 

Why would a thirty-year old house builder from Nazareth be interested in this?  The Judean wilderness was a long way from Galilee for someone on foot.   Why would Jesus want to go to the Baptist, especially if he were not unduly burdened by a sense of guilt or sinfulness?  As a Jew, he would have been unable to avoid incurring ritual uncleanliness in the course of day-to-day life. But the regular washings prescribed by the Law would satisfy that. Why undergo John’s washing to signify a change of heart?

He was attracted to the Baptist’s message:  the Temple and political leadership are hopelessly corrupt and detached from God.  His baptism is something like what the Qumran covenanters practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect.  Masses of common people flock to Jordan for John’s baptism. 

Matthew and Luke give a fuller telling of the Baptist’s preaching: “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts.  If you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.” 

The Baptist is preaching basic justice.  He is calling people to take God’s love of fairness personally, to make God’s will their own.  This personal involvement with God, this demand for social justice as evidence of our change of hearts--these are all elements that would remain part and parcel of Jesus’ own proclamation that the Kingship of God had arrived in our midst.

What would John the Baptist say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ?  Stop abusing spouses and children?  Looking down on those who differ from us?  Stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods and services based on the exploitation of, or the trafficking in, persons?

Jesus seeks baptism at John’s hand because he takes to heart John’s message of justice, personal responsibility, and relationship with God.   He is himself having a change of heart.  He is moving from one part of his life to another: from his private life with his family and friends, his assisting in the carpentry/house building business, to his public ministry.   

Jesus sees in John’s baptism a call to refocus, to reorient, to redirect his life. For him, the “fruit worthy of a change of heart” would be the living out of the task to which God was calling him. 

Despite the pressures on him in Nazareth to do the conventional, to follow the norm, to settle down, possibly start a family of his own and make something of himself, Jesus makes the long journey to see this Wildman of God in the Judean desert.   His neighbors in Nazareth think he has abandoned his Mother and siblings.  Yet Jesus in baptism hears the voice of God.  The result is clear in Jesus’ public preaching when, alone of the religious voices of the day, he calls God, “Father” and says He is above all a loving Father.    

This is why he must leave for the desert, where must be tested, “live with the wild beasts” and sort out things to find out what his identity revealed in baptism means. 

When Jesus later returns to Nazareth later, his Mother and siblings try to get him to come home and start acting normally again, because they think he has gone insane (Mark 3).  He is no longer the Jesus whom they had known and loved.  He now is clearly a man willing to give up everything for God’s reign to be made more clearly visible, willing to die if necessary. The time in the desert has left its mark.

Contemporary Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole has written of the “‘rebel consciousness’ that is essential to Jesus’ gospel.”  He says, 

Wherever the gospel is preached, we must remember that its good news will make you crazy.  Jesus will put you at odds with the economic and political systems of our world.  This gospel will force you to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make even pious people indignant. 

Friends, we are not what God intended when he created us.  We need all the more to have a change of heart and manifest it in our actions.  We too need to seek in quietness our true baptismal identity, and God willing, have angels minister to us also as we struggle with the wild beasts.  May we, like Jesus, remain undeterred from the mission God sets us to, no matter how crazy this appears to those we love.

In the name of Christ, Amen.