Lectionary Commentaries for January 7, 2024
Baptism of Our Lord (Year B)
from WorkingPreacher.org
Gospel
Commentary on Mark 1:4-11
Alicia Vargas
First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 1:1-5
Cameron B.R. Howard
In recent decades scholarly opinion on how to translate the opening words of Genesis—bereshit bara—has moved away from “In the beginning God created” and has instead coalesced around the phrase “When God began to create …” The Common English Bible (CEB) and the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSVue) use this latter option, as does Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible, among others.1
While the shift opens up interesting theological conversations around the idea of creatio ex nihilo, or “creation out of nothing,” I am more drawn to the softness this option brings to the start of Genesis. Rather than a sudden, hard, starkly drawn beginning—to Genesis, to the Bible, to creation itself—it is as if a moment of newness has been plucked from the grand swath of time, like scooping out a cup of water from a stream. In our shared story this becomes the moment where life as we know it begins, the moment God began to do something with us: a distinct moment, and yet a moment immersed in all that God was and is and did and does before and after us.
In addition to the headline-grabbing, revenue-generating spectacle of the New Year’s celebrations that move us from December 31 of one year to January 1 of the next, there are actually many different moments we regularly use to mark the passing of time. Each different calendrical arrangement has a different beginning point.
The church year begins with Advent, and so in that way we are already just over a month into the “new year.” For educators and students, the school year can be the most meaningful way to mark time, with each year beginning afresh in August or September. I know someone who wishes her friends “Happy New Year” on their birthdays: another “trip around the sun,” as the saying goes. We regularly pluck new beginnings for ourselves from the swath of time given to us.
Sometimes the beginnings we choose have to be chosen and rechosen again every day, every minute: to stay sober, to choose patience over anger, to live full of hope in the face of despair. Sometimes new beginnings are chosen for us: by hardship or tragedy or opportunity, by luck or by Providence—who knows? And as many poets and philosophers and meme-creators have noted, beginnings and endings always go together, a matched pair.
All of this is to say that the beginning is a more ephemeral, ongoing idea than it might seem at first glance, something our practices of beginnings bear out. And so, when the Gospel of John declares that “in the beginning was the Word,” we can remember that the Word was with God and was God at that beginning, but also was and is at all the other beginnings we experience in the hard work of living day to day, and in the beginnings we don’t even know about, the ones crackling in the cosmos beyond us.
The lectionary readings for the first Sunday of the new year invite preachers to reflect on many different beginnings: the turn of the calendar page, the opening sentences of the Bible, the advent of creation, and new life in Christ through baptism. Many of our beginnings are marked with great hope, though some are tinged with dread. We could say the same about the beginning of Genesis. We see the cosmic hope of new life, but we know what happens later, even in the first eleven chapters: fear, death, confusion, destruction.
Jesus’ baptism as told by Mark similarly holds together hope and dread. The Spirit settles on Jesus, a voice from heaven announces his belovedness, and then, probably while water still drips from his hair, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” (Mark 1:12–13). In Jesus, cosmic blessedness meets the terrors of incarnation.
The Christmas song “I Wonder as I Wander,” perhaps still ringing in our ears, captures some of that same dread: “I wonder as I wander out under the sky, how Jesus our Savior did come for to die.” The beginning looks to the end, but the end—Jesus’ death—is also a beginning of resurrection and new life, for Jesus and for us. It is a mystery worthy of our wonder.
Preaching these five brief verses from Genesis 1 can lift up the messiness and ambiguity of beginnings. In Genesis 1, God’s creation of the world is not marked by a bell or a buzzer. God just wades into the chaos of tohu wabohu—“formless void” (New Revised Standard Version), or “complete chaos” (New Revised Standard Version, Update Edition), or “welter and waste” (Alter)—and starts talking.
New beginnings can happen at any moment, but they are not always apparent in the moment. Telling a story imagines the luxury of a narrative framework: looking back and slotting our experiences into a beginning, a middle, and an end. We love stories, and stories help us define ourselves and our communities. When we are knee-deep in those experiences, though, we do not always see the story. We do not always know when something has begun!
But God is always hovering over our tohu wabohu, as God’s wind swept over the face of the waters at creation. The hope of Genesis is that God is continually scooping up a cupful of the river of time and creating something good out of our chaos—even beginnings we cannot yet discern.
Notes
- Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
Psalm
Commentary on Psalm 29
Jason Byassee
If there’s one word to describe this psalm, it might be “loud.”1
The God of glory “thunders” (verse 3). That voice breaks the cedars, and not just any cedars, but the mighty ones of Lebanon (verse 5). It’s loud enough to make mountains skip and to shake the wilderness, to cause the oaks to whirl and the people to cry out. This is no quiet, reserved voice. It is a booming, cascading, thundering cry.
Historians trace the psalm’s origins to the north of Israel, with such geographic references as Lebanon, Syria, and Kadesh. It may have had its birth in reference to a Canaanite storm god or a more general religious sense in the Mediterranean that God appears in natural phenomena. These origins are often obscure and debated, but of course biblical texts do not sit still, they move forward and not just back. The god of thunder once had to subdue the gods of rivers and seas—now the Lord simply reigns majestic, without need to conquer his own creation.
The reflections on the “voice” of the Lord are particularly important for Christians, for whom the Word of God is fleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. The stories we have heard over the last few weeks are of a baby born in surprising circumstances to be king of Israel and savior of the world. They include notes of hushed noise, stillness amidst the storm, not even the baby or the animals are crying. Those are appropriate to the ‘loquacious God,’ Luther’s deus loquens, here born without the ability to speak. But before the eternal Word gestated in a Jewish womb, he already was a voice, stripping forests and whirling oaks. This is a powerful word, a crashing voice, temporarily quiet, but soon to preach, to summon forth the dead from their very tombs.
And now a voice thunders over the waters of the Jordan. But that thunder is somewhat ambiguous. In some of the stories of Jesus’ baptism it seems only he hears the voice. In others, everyone seems to. But this voice is subtle, missable, more a mother’s coo than a storm god’s gauntlet splitting the earth’s crest. “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.” The command is direct and strong, yet most of humanity has done anything but listen to him, in that day or since. The baptism of the Lord is impressive for its trinitarian theophany. All three persons are on the stage of salvation history: the Father (voice), the Son (fleshed), and the Spirit (the dove). Yet the enfleshment of God’s own Son has an unassuming way about it. Most folks don’t ever notice. Those that do notice often misinterpret, while those who linger with him still fail, disobey, deny, or abandon the Son. This theophany is unbearably gentle, suggesting that God is unbearably patient.
But not in Psalm 29. The voice strips forests and makes mountains dance. The cedars of Lebanon were known throughout the Bible’s world as giant, load-bearing behemoths, worthy of building into a temple for God. Where I live in British Columbia, we also have enormous red cedars, some nearly 1,000 years old, still smelling sweet and reaching toward heaven. They evoke awe, passion in their defense, money in their clear-cutting, and love from our poets. Nearby in a botanical garden there is a bona fide cedar of Lebanon, planted by Lebanese-Canadians in gratitude for Canada’s welcome of refugees. It is not a great tree yet, only a few decades old. But it is already mighty, dozens of feet high, with branches like a canopy. It will tower—several human lifetimes from now.
The mountains of Lebanon skip like a calf, Sirion like a young wild ox. It is a delight to human beings to watch animals frolic and play, for no other obvious reason than that they like to. Here the image is of enormous and ancient mountains doing the same. Jesus would later promise that faith the size of a mustard seed could make a mountain skip off into the sea. Interpreters have often wondered what he means—ok, if so, why don’t we ever see it? Psalm 29’s answer is clear: the mountains already do skip and dance at the voice of the Lord. Can’t see it? Look again. In Moses’ day, when he climbed the mountain to speak with God, it shook with noise and fire. The psalmist praises the way mountains continue to smoke (Psalm 104:32). God turns what seems solid to liquid and vice versa.
And now God does the same with the water of the Jordan. God is poised above it, as God once was about the waters of chaos in creation, as God was after the flood that cleansed the world (verse 10). Only the words this time are of belovedness. Listening—to a voice rather more subtle than quaking oaks or skipping mountains. The God of unmistakable theophany thunders … in an underwhelming peasant preacher from nowhere important.
Strength and silence: both aspects of God’s self-manifestation are important. The psalm will remind you of the loudest thing you have ever heard (for me, calving glaciers—the sound still rattles in my skull). And the baptism will surprise you by its modesty. James Mays, the great dean of Psalm scholarship in his generation, ties the pieces together this way:
The liturgical setting connects the psalm’s mighty theophany with the quiet epiphany in the waters of the Jordan. The voice of the Lord in the thunderstorm is paired with the voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son.” The storm says “This is my cosmos”; the baptism, “This is my Christ.” The two go inseparably together. The Christology is not adequate unless its setting in cosmology is maintained.2
And, we might add, the setting in cosmology is inadequate unless the Christology is maintained. This is an odd case where the Old Testament cries out fulsomely and the New whispers gently. The tree-smashing, storm-inducing God of thunder is fleshed in an easy-to-reject uneducated itinerant preacher.
One cannot explain these things. One can only marvel at them.
Notes
- Commentary first published on this site on Jan. 12, 2020.
- James Mays. Psalms. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994), 138.
Second Reading
Commentary on Acts 19:1-7
Edward Pillar
The journey to Christian faith
At the heart of this passage is the sacrament of baptism, which is particularly appropriate today as we consider and reflect upon the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. Set in the city of Ephesus, this passage encourages us to learn together about the journey to Christian faith through the involvement of the believing community, understanding discipleship as an ongoing process or journey, the necessity of baptism to transformation, and the hopefulness of a new beginning.
The involvement of the believing community
The passage begins with the apostle Paul arriving in Ephesus and meeting some disciples. Our first question is quite simply, “Where did these disciples come from?” Obviously, disciples do not make themselves, and we should expect and anticipate the involvement of others in the creation of disciples. And for this we need to step back to Paul’s first visit to Ephesus recorded in 18:19–21.
Discussion
When Paul first arrives in Ephesus (18:19), he takes himself off to the synagogue where he engages in discussion with the Jews who are present. We have no record of what was said. But the word used here is instructive because it is about a dialogue—questions, comments, answers, queries—a veritable back-and-forth.
Presence
However, we need to notice that Paul is not alone in Ephesus; he has arrived with Priscilla and Aquila. And we note that they remain in the city when Paul moves on (18:19). The creation of disciples depends not simply on a dialogue, but also on the ongoing presence of those who live out the values and qualities of the Christian life, which we may consider was exemplified by Priscilla and Aquila.
Teaching
We then learn of the arrival in Ephesus (18:24) of Apollos. The role of Apollos is one that apparently fits him well. He is knowledgeable about the Scriptures, and well versed in the “Way of the Lord.” Apollos teaches those in the synagogue—possibly the people who had briefly met Paul, and may have been acquainted with Priscilla and Aquila. Interestingly, Priscilla and Aquila improve Apollos’ knowledge (18:26).
Persuasion
And then when Paul arrives, he finds these disciples. And Paul is able to build on what they have learned already and bring them to a fuller and more complete—although not final—knowledge of the life of Christ. Interestingly, we see what may well be Paul’s own perspective on this in 1 Corinthians 3:5: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.”
Discipleship as an ongoing process
Already we have seen that the discipleship journey involves a number of people and a variety of engagements with the gospel. But it is worth emphasising that discipleship has not finished, it is not yet complete—either for the Ephesian believers or for us.
We need to note that when Paul first visited Ephesus, he dialogued with the Jews in the synagogue. The dialogue was clearly not about an upfront delivery of a series of prepared propositional statements, as can so often be our presentation style today. A dialogue in the discipleship process involves listening, and responding carefully to questions and concerns as they are raised. A simple example of this is presented for us as part of the learning process involved in discipleship. Paul asks them a question: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” The Ephesians respond. Paul asks another question, and they respond again. Paul makes a third comment, which then convinces them of the need to further their faith in Jesus. And in addition, they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Additionally, we should accept the limits of both our process and our communities, understanding that discipleship doesn’t happen in a day, but extends over a lifetime. Recognizing the necessity of the ongoing presence and companionship of different people is a vital aspect that is exposed here.
Baptism as transformation
At the center of this brief narrative account is baptism—two baptisms, in fact. First, there is the baptism of John. This is about repentance and faith. Repentance is about a change of mind or heart, and a considered decision to turn our focus toward the ways and values of Christ. To then “believe in the one who was to come” is a step of faith. This is a decision to not simply look at or focus upon, but to pledge our allegiance to the way of Christ.
Then there is the baptism of Jesus. The opening narrative of Mark’s Gospel clearly expounds the centrality of baptism in the name of Jesus in the proclamation of John, a baptism which includes the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is the empowering life of Christ, enabling the disciple to walk in the way of Christ.
The hopefulness of a new beginning
The final note here concerns the perhaps innocuous reference to the number of disciples present: “altogether there were about twelve of them” (19:7). This may simply be a factual account of how many were present, but it is worth reflecting on the significance of the number 12 in the Hebrew Scriptures.
A straightforward example is 12 as the number of the tribes of Jacob—the basis of the Israelite community, which grew into a nation. There were 12 spies—one from each tribe—who were sent to have first sight of the promises of God in the land which became their home (Deuteronomy 1:23). Twelve stones were taken from the river Jordan to serve as memory or story stones for future generations to remind them of the faithfulness of God (Joshua 4:9). Elijah used 12 stones as the basis for his altar when he faced off against the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:31. And of course, in the Gospels Jesus chooses 12 to be his disciples and witnesses to his resurrection.
All this is the possibility of hopefulness for a new beginning that God forges as his community comes together with whatever they have and whoever they are, to encourage one another and others to make the journey of discipleship, of which baptism is a key aspect.
Welcome to the annual liturgical celebration of the Baptism of Our Lord (First Sunday after Epiphany).
Context
Last summer when I went to pick up my six-year-old granddaughter from what I thought was her soccer game, she explained to me, “No, Nana, it wasn’t a game; we were only practicing skills, like kicking and running. Even soccer players have to practice the basics sometimes.” Amazing.
And it’s true, isn’t it? Sometimes experienced disciples and members of the church have to go back to the beginning and review, practice the basics.
So it is that our pericope for this week falls only three verses after the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. In 1:1, Mark announces to the reader that this is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ; the prophet Isaiah is then quoted and proclaimed; then, that’s it: here we are, with verse 4 and the start of our pericope.
Following Mark 1:11, we come upon the 40 days of Jesus being tested in the wilderness by Satan and receiving care from the angels.
Text
Our pericope can be broken down into three movements: John the baptizer
John baptizes the people
John offers a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (verse 4). As the people receive John’s baptism, they do so “confessing their sins” (verse 5).
The town in which I live has one main boulevard that runs east to west through the entire town. For most of this route of maybe two miles, there are “NO U-TURN” signs posted at each cross street. Having wondered at this, and having visited this town many times prior to my moving there, and having been puzzled by this for a long time, I finally got the explanation from a local who had lived there many years. It is designed to prevent young people from cruising—in other words, driving and circling back and forth up and down the boulevard—so that the road became virtually undrivable for many hours each weekend evening.
Then one day, I had a vision: there were workers taking down all the NO U-TURN signs and getting rid of them. Instead, at each cross street they had posted “U-TURNS OK” signs.
U-turns OK—no, in fact, strongly encouraged.
Making a U-turn in one’s spiritual life is not a bad description of “repentance,” an about-face in your relationship to God and in your working to be and do all that God would have you be and do. Completely turn things around, turn back to God.
And it is forgiveness that empowers the whole dynamic: God’s decision not to hold your past sins against you but to free you from that past in order to enable a future new life with God.
John witnesses to Jesus
Verses 7–8 anticipate verse 10. John explains that whereas he baptizes in/with water, the more powerful one coming after him, namely Jesus, will baptize in/with the Holy Spirit. Then Jesus receives the Holy Spirit in his own baptism. Thus Jesus receives the Spirit which he will later share with others. (Interestingly, no such stories are found in Mark’s Gospel.)
Jesus’ amazing baptism
“Amazingly, Jesus is ‘baptized by John’.”1 Amazing because it is so simply and straightforwardly narrated by Mark as compared to the longer versions in Matthew and Luke. No explanation, rationale, et cetera., is provided.
Amazing that Jesus was baptized: the one who surely needed no such thing, at least as the purpose and meaning of John’s baptism are related in Mark.
Jesus’ amazing baptismal experience
Jesus sees the heavens torn apart (not merely “opened” as in Matthew and Luke) and the Spirit coming down upon him as a dove. And he hears the voice of God declaring that he is the chosen, the beloved Son.
Those present or reading the Gospel are thus assured that Jesus’ presence with them is Spirit-filled and Spirit-led.
Amazing baptismal solidarity
Jesus’ baptism: if not necessary, then why?
“Jesus’ baptism was an act of ‘solidarity with the rest of the community’ in the spirit of John’s transforming mission.”2
A colleague of mine once shared the story of a participant in his Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) group who was herself not preparing for ministry. Rather, since she was requiring the students in the seminary program where she served as director to complete an intense 10-week program of CPE, she herself enrolled in and was taking this demanding program because she did not want to require others to go through something that she herself had not gone through first.
What an amazing commitment to high professional standards. An amazing act of solidarity with her students.
An act of solidarity with the people: Jesus becoming one with the people.
The preacher might fruitfully ponder …
Notes