Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Baptism of Christ 2024

The Baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan is one of the most important stories in the New Testament. It was regarded by the early Church as a Feast Day of absolutely central importance, alongside Easter and Christmas. In the Gospel account we heard this morning (Mark 1: 4–11), the Father’s voice acclaims Jesus as the Beloved Son, and Christ—the anointed one—sees the heavens torn apart and the Holy Spirit like a dove descend on him. It is the first revelation of God the Holy Trinity recorded in the New Testament.

This morning we are called to reflect on the significance of this divine revelation (or epiphany)—both for Jesus himself and for all who have been baptized and incorporated into Christ’s risen body as limbs and members of the Church. For Jesus, baptism at the hands of John was a moment of profound self-awareness: awareness of himself as the object of God’s overwhelming love. He was filled with a sense of God’s sheer delight in his very existence. ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

This heavenly voice echoes the opening words of the Book of Genesis we heard in this morning’s first reading (Genesis 1: 1–5). On the first day of creation God declares, ‘Let there be light.’ And, immediately, God sees the light he declares that it is good.

Belovedness and goodness mark the beginning of God’s work of creation and herald the proclamation of Jesus as the Lord’s anointed. In the waters of baptism Jesus encounters God’s delight, God’s pleasure, God’s joy. There is no hint of duty or command here. There are no oughts, no shoulds, no musts—just: I love you. I delight in you. You are my joy. From the moment of his baptism an overwhelming sense of belovedness was the ground of Jesus’ life and the guiding force of his public ministry.

Baptism is about being loved. ‘As I am loved by the Father,’ Jesus says to his disciples in the Gospel of John, ‘so have I loved you.’ Jesus’ capacity to love is the consequence of being loved. ‘We love because God first loved us,’ we are told in the First Letter of John. Jesus loves because God first loved him. Baptism is about being loved: profligately, passionately. It is the Church’s ritual act through which God says to all the baptized: You are my Beloved, I delight in you; I rejoice in you.

The American psychologist Karl Menninger was once asked what he thought was the primary cause of mental illness. After some thought he answered that in his opinion the primary cause of mental illness was the inability of people to forgive themselves for being imperfect. Unable to forgive ourselves, we are unable to forgive others, and so we become weighed down by a great burden of judgment directed against ourselves and those around us whose imperfections and personal vagaries occasion in us a kind of dark pleasure in thinking that we are not quite as imperfect as they are.

Messinger’s insight into mental health and well-being has huge implications. A religion based on duty and obligation with clear standards we can seldom meet; a religion which invites us to continual judgment of ourselves; a religion which provokes us to judge others—such a religion is much more comfortable for many of us than a faith grounded in liberating love which overrules judgment in favour of compassion.

Julian of Norwich, writing in the 15^th century, understood this only too well. Out of a series of intense visions of God’s ruthless and unbounded love she wrote of what she had been shown. Her insights continue to inform and are a source of enormous encouragement to the baptized. Fundamental to her thought is the uncompromising belief that anger and wrath are utterly foreign to God. She wrote: ‘I saw full surely that wherever our Lord appears peace reigns and anger has no place. For I saw no whit of anger in God—in short or in long term.’ Not only is anger completely absent from God but ‘the love that God most high has for our soul is so great that it surpasses understanding.’

Because of our limited and conditioned notions of love, we cannot begin to imagine what limitless love, which is God’s love for each of us, might be like. What we have, along with what the poet T. S. Eliot describes as ‘hints and guesses’, is Christ himself and the example provided by women and men across the ages in whom the love of God has run free.

Mother Julian goes on to describe the imprisoning and debilitating effects of self-accusation and declares that it is not God’s will that ‘we should despise ourselves. But God wills that we should quickly turn to him.’ She points out the discrepancy between God’s way of seeing us and our own: ‘In God’s sight we do not fall; in our sight we do not stand. As I see it, both are true. But the deeper insight belongs to God.’

This deeper insight so eludes us that we can easily become entrapped in patterns of judgment that pass for authentic Christianity when, in fact, they are profound denials of the love that makes us all limbs and organs of the same body, held together and growing to maturity through the unceasing force and pressure of Christ’s deathless and death-defying love.

Growing up in all ways into Christ is not an easy process. It involves continual discernment and a testing of spirits. We become aware of the dangers of zeal in the name of righteousness devoid of mercy and compassion. We become aware of visions of an “unblemished” Church built upon judgment rather than love.

Baptism is the Church’s fundamental sacrament. It binds the baptized together in what Rowan Williams describes as “solidarities not of our own choosing.” I did not choose you, nor did you choose me, yet each of us—given our different life experiences and ways of appropriating the gospel—are indispensable limbs of Christ’s risen body, the Church. We are called to encounter in one another—painful and unsettling as it will be on occasions—larger and deeper insights revealed by God; his creative and redeeming love at work in the Church that gives us the courage and the desire to risk that encounter, that theophany, that fuller engagement with God.

Belovedness is not given without cost. “As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring suffering by our very contact with one another. Because of this, love is a resetting of broken bones,” observed the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In baptism he saw the power of love re-setting a body of broken bones, re-membering a vast cosmic body of which Christ is the head and we are the limbs and members. This vast body, animated by love, is not restricted to those who have been formally baptized, but includes the whole human race which has been embraced and declared beloved by God from the very beginning.

At the beginning of this new year, we reaffirm the power and force of God’s love at work not only in the baptized but in the whole cosmic order. By his grace we lay ourselves open to the embodiment of that love within ourselves in order that broken bones may be reset, and the whole body of humanity may be made one again in Christ.