A Homily for the Baptism of the Lord
Readings: Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 Acts 10:34-38 Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
Ludwig Wittgenstein, that giant of 20th-century philosophy, suggested that a picture can hold us captive. He meant that how you picture something molds your understanding of it.
Here are two corollaries, one negative and another positive. What is difficult to picture is hard to imagine, much less to understand. On the other hand, the right picture suddenly activates the light of intelligence.
The imaginative pictures available to us explain why Christian doctrines that were once culturally discarded are re-entering popular imagination, albeit newly baptized into a secular age.
Take, for example, original sin. Many people understood the doctrine to assert that God punishes everyone because of the sin of one person. That seems downright spiteful. But their rejection of the teaching is rooted in their operative picture of human nature, that each of us is a monad, distinct and disconnected from everyone else. But science itself has rejected that picture. Each year brings new discoveries revealing that we are much more linked to one another than we had previously imagined.
A new and more adequate picture of human nature might be computers connected to the World Wide Web. Productivity and knowledge flow through it, but so do ignorance and viruses. Using this picture of what it means to be human, it is not so hard to understand the doctrine of original sin. We are fundamentally impaired, even infected, by others, and in a manner unsalvageable, at least without assistance from another.
Another example: the idea that we are not alone, that there are intelligences we cannot see or adequately imagine. This seems farcical to some when we speak of angels, but almost self-evident when we use the term aliens. Again, aliens in outer space provide a novel and helpful picture. If alien intelligences can exist in the deep reaches of space, why cannot nonmaterial intelligences share space with us?
In the fifth century, when Pope St. Leo the Great said that the very life of the Savior had passed over into the church’s sacraments (Quod itaque Redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit in sacramenta transivit, Sermon 74, 2), Christians knew that he was voicing their constant conviction, but they could not have easily pictured, and hence deeply understood, the nature of that transference. How does one picture the process whereby Christ, who once walked among us, is now present to us in the sacraments?
Fortunately, a new picture has entered our consciousness. Some now eagerly await the advent of mind-uploading, of human consciousness achieving immortality by transferring itself onto a digital platform. With money already being invested in such a process, is it so hard to believe that divine intelligence can inhabit a human person, one always located in a particular time and space, and then freely choose to expand itself into a system of ritual that spans time and space? If rich Uncle Wally will be able to upload his consciousness onto the web, why can’t Christ promise to be present to his church until the end of time? As Wittgenstein insisted, what the mind can picture leads to understanding.
Of course, there are those who insist upon a separation of the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith. They say that one really lived; the other was an invention of the church. They go on to say: Do not worry if you have problems with organized religion. Jesus did, too. In other words, the Jesus of history makes no demands upon you; only the invented Christ of faith does.
But today the Jesus of history enters the waters of the Jordan, a fact no serious scholar would reject. If the early church struggled with those who insisted that the Baptizer might have been the Messiah, the church could have had only one reason to admit that its savior had been baptized by John. Because that is what happened.
So Jesus himself chooses to enter human ritual. And what is ritual but a communal system of words and gestures that transmits meaning? John preaches a baptism of conversion, of radical readiness for God, and at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus chooses to be baptized. He enters our rituals.
In the same way, at the end of that ministry, Jesus radically transforms the ancient Passover ritual of his people, declaring that it would henceforth be the very receptacle of his own person. St. Paul, our first witness to this new presence of Christ, insisted that he did no more than preach what he had been taught. Put into our new parlance: The consciousness of Christ now dwells in the sacraments.
Brothers and sisters:
I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,
that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over,
took bread, and, after he had given thanks,
broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes (1 Cor 11:23-26).
Facebook is filled with memes that say something like this: “If Catholics only knew what takes place at every Mass, they would be there every Sunday.” The statement is true enough, but it lacks a picture the imagination can employ for comprehension.
Does picturing a transferred consciousness help? Until the end of time, Jesus has been uploaded into this community, into its duly established and maintained rituals. And this is not by fiat of Christ’s followers. No, it was the very will of Jesus Christ during his ministry among us.
The transfer began with our Lord’s ritual descent into the Jordan. It was completed, as he promised the night before, when he descended into death and then arose in spirit, in pure consciousness, to imbue the church with his very life.
Divine consciousness imbues the world, as it must. This is true whether we can adequately note or fully understand it. Likewise, Christic consciousness has chosen to dwell within the assembly we call the church. This is also more than we can take in, but is it still so hard to picture?
