In the Beginning, Grace

January 7, 2024

Baptism of the Lord

Pastor Mike

Mark 1:1-11

Mark begins his Gospel with the sudden appearance of John in the Judean wilderness beyond Jerusalem. John’s appearance fulfilled an old prophetic promise, that a voice would cry out in the wilderness and prepare the people of Israel to receive their Messiah. Mark tells us that this John character was rather eccentric: clothed in camel’s hair, getting by eating locusts and honey. John was also, in the tradition of the prophets, anti-institutional. He moved the practice of ritual bathing away from the Holy City and its Temple to the Jordan River, and he transformed it from a ritual that cleansed outward impurities to an act that shifted the whole direction of a person’s heart. Crowds of people flocked to him from city and country. Yet, despite his popularity, John’s message remained unchanged: “One who is more powerful than I is coming after me.”

That one, we know, was Jesus. Jesus responded alongside his countrymen and made a rather lengthy journey south from his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee, a northern province of Israel. Perhaps joining a caravan of other curious and convicted souls, Jesus went to respond to the John’s call. Jesus entered the desert and came to the waters. Unlike the other gospel versions, Mark includes no suggestion that John recognized Jesus as the anticipated Messiah prior to the moment of baptizing him. There’s no effort on John’s part to reverse things beforehand, so that he might be baptized by Jesus. Instead, we are to imagine Jesus wading into the river in obscurity and simple obedience just like everyone else. Then, suddenly, the sky splits apart, and living light flutters down to rest on him, and a voice cuts clear across the water: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Again, this is how Mark starts the story of Jesus – chapter one, verse one. In other words, his version of Jesus’ life and ministry has no Christmas. No miraculous pregnancies. No angelic visitations. No fathers making room in their hearts and homes for unexpected sons. No census or manger or “Glory to God in the highest heaven” ringing out through the night sky. No foreign kings bearing gifts. No star. All the stories that we’ve read and pondered and responded to in faith these past six weeks have come from other storytellers. With Mark, the beginnings of Jesus and John, their origin stories, go untold. They remain secret and hidden.

Which raises an obvious historical question: Did Mark know? Did he know about Zechariah and Elizbeth? Did he know about Bethlehem? We’re so familiar with the events of Christmas, we hold them so close, that it’s easy to assume everyone must’ve known. But actually that wasn’t the case at all – at least not at first. There is a curious passage in the seventh chapter of John’s Gospel that captures a moment of Jesus ministry when the people closest to him reveal that they are even unsure of his origins. It goes like this:

When they heard these words, some in the crowd said, “This is really the prophet.” Others said, “This is the Messiah.” But some asked, “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” So there was a division in the crowd because of him. (John 7:40-43)

There’s a division because they don’t know that this Nazarene man was once a Bethlehem baby. Strange. Jesus must not have brought up his birth in his teachings. He wasn’t like me, going around boasting about being from New Jersey. And if we look at the sermons preached by the apostles in the book of Acts, which are the earliest summaries of what people thought was important to say about Jesus, his birth is completely eclipsed by his death and resurrection.

It seems that the Christmas stories were some of the last stories about Jesus that got told. Only after his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven; only after the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost and the church was born and then scattered into the world by persecution; only after the spoken tales started to get written down so that they could be passed from the first generation of believers to the second; only after all this were those first stories, the ones long treasured in the heart of Mary, revealed.

As Jesus’ power to transform lives reached farther into the world and deeper into the heart, people wanted to know: Where did he come from? How did he get here? This man who began his public ministry at the age of thirty, was there anything deep in his story to suggest that he would one day become the Savior of the world? Slowly, the Christmas stories surfaced, and Matthew and Luke and, in a very different way, John, wove them into their own gospels.

Whether Mark didn’t know or did know but chose not to tell, the fact remains that his Gospel keeps the origins of John and Jesus a mystery. That silence reveals a truth for us to meditate on.

In one sense, until we have met God personally and been claimed as God’s beloved, our lives have not yet begun. We must be born again, Jesus tells us, through grace and faith. We must start fresh in the power of the Holy Spirit. Baptism testifies to that rebirth, so why not start the story at the baptism? It’s a perfectly valid choice.

But in another sense, one of the joys of beginning a relationship with God or experience a moment or season of profound transformation is that we get to turn around and ask ourselves, “How did I get here? Surely, this hasn’t come out of nowhere! No there was something, someone, at work in me before this, though I did not recognize it.”

How often do we not understand the meaning of events, the reasons we went through this or that, the gifts hidden along the way, until some later time down the road when we can look back with renewed eyes as God’s beloved and consider our stories with faith

Mark’s silence on Christmas reveals that the Church had to make a choice about how it would speak of Jesus’ beginning, just as we have a choice about how we will tell our own stories. After all, John was born to elderly parents, and instead of bearing his father’s name or taking up his family’s vocation as a traditional priest, he went into the desert to eat bugs and wear weird clothes and confront institutional religion’s sins. And, for his part, Jesus was conceived out of wedlock and born in a backwater town; his arrival as a King went almost completely unnoticed and he spent the first three decades of his life in the obscurity of a carpentry shop. At first glance, these are not great origin stories. What would those first Christians do? Keep the stories secret? Tell them with apologetic embarrassment? Exalt John and Jesus as self-made men who overcame the odds against them?

No, they made a different choice. They told the stories with confidence and gratitude and joy. Parents – some too old and others too young – were there to receive them and trust in what was said about them. Angels were there to announce them. The manger was there to hold Jesus. The shepherds were there to witness him. The Magi were there to worship him. Simeon was there to embrace him and bless him. Egypt was there to protect him. Make no mistake, a way was prepared for John and for Jesus – that’s what the stories have to say. Back there at the beginning, when they were but fetuses and newborns, the Spirit was already carving out space for two boys to come into the world and be nurtured in love and kept safe until the appointed time for their ministries to begin. God’s grace was in the beginning.

As John and Jesus grew up, they were not embarrassed by unconventional parentage, not ashamed of backwater beginnings, not under the impression that they did it all themselves. Mark let’s us imagine John and Jesus entering those waters and sharing together a knowing smile. They knew in that moment that those beginnings which remained for a time hidden in their hearts and memories were about to be proven good and true and full of grace.

We all crash land into life. Our beginnings are never without difficulty of one sort or another. Our stories are messy. The meanings of the things we go through are not obvious as we go through them. The damage may come from our family of origin, or the limitations or prejudices of the community we grew up in. Perhaps from the travails of adolescence, or early experiences of abuse or addiction, illness or death. Perhaps we were over-protected. For those of us who come to Christ later in life, there may be a whole series of false starts and missteps along the way, things we brought upon ourselves.

But once the light and love of God have enveloped us, once the word ‘Beloved’ has been spoken over us, we are able to look back with self-compassion and faith, and see how God was with us all along. God was making a way, and all the moments, all the interactions, all the inner and outer events, all the pain and joy, all the questions, and the long, slow plodding along – it’s all full of grace.

God’s love doesn’t rewrite our past or change our past or make it better, but it does redeem it. God’s love turns our stories into testimonies. And the more of God’s love we experience, the more of our story we will be able to embrace. Sometimes, our beginnings are the last thing to surface, the things buried deep in the past take time to bring into the light. Thanks be to God that with Christ there is no embarrassment, no shame, no need to prove ourselves worthy. There is only grace.

John and Jesus were not mess-ups. They were not self-made men. They were miracles.

Every one of you has a story. And you have a choice about how you will tell your story. I pray that God’s great love for you, God’s gentle but persistent healing, will give you a grateful and discerning heart, so that you will come to know yourself as a miracle, no matter what you’ve been through.

I pray, too, that you will never underestimate the importance of being involved in someone else’s story, especially the messy parts and the hidden beginning. For we never know if, perhaps much later, that person will look back on their lives through the eyes of faith to behold us with gratitude for the part that we played in guiding them toward God. Just as God makes a way for us, so God might use us to make a way for others.

The scripture says that “our lives are hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). All that we’ve been through, and all that we offer, shall be gathered up into God’s gracious purposes.

Thanks be to God. Amen.