1 Epiphany, 1/8/25
We are back on the trail of weekly posts on Luke and Year C. Tuesday began the season of Epiphany (see this piece on Epiphany under Empire). The first Sunday (1/12) is traditionally celebrated as the Feast of Jesus Baptism. Here are some (edited) notes from Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy:
“Luke 3:3 portrays John the Baptist in the wilderness at the Jordan River calling for a ritual of repentance (drawing on Mark’s narrative; Lk 3:2b–4, 7 // Mk 1:2–5). John invites his people into sacred waters of renewal far from the domesticated ritual baths of city and village—and from the attention of urban-based elites. Let’s reflect on that space.
The Jordan was, and remains, the spine of the land of Israel, the only truly perennial stream in Palestine. It runs some 156 miles north to south, from Mount Hermon in southern Lebanon into the Sea of Galilee, then on down the rift valley, eventually emptying into the Dead Sea. Its name (nehar hayarden in Hebrew) means “descender,” as it plummets from mountainous heights to four hundred meters below sea level. The river features
both dramatic gorges and rapids as well as meandering bends and quiet pools, ranging from trickles in dry season to floods in wet. It only averages ninety feet in width and three to ten feet in depth, and certainly wasn’t navigable, though was often uncrossable during the rainy season (there were some sixty fords along its length in antiquity). Yet archaeological evidence suggests human habitation along the Jordan for more than a hundred thousand years.
It was and is a deep ancestral place. While the Jordan may not have been “deep and wide,” as the old spiritual imagined, it represents the watery soul of that arid land. For John the Baptist, it offered a holy immersion into the origin stories of his people. Mentioned 180 times in the Hebrew Bible, the Jordan coursed through the heart of Israel’s narrative, including:
- Jacob’s wrestling match with an angel (Gen 32:22–32; Hos 12:3–5);
- Joshua’s ceremonial crossing into the Promised Land (replete with the symbolism of twelve sacred stones, Josh 3–4);
- Elijah’s fiery departure (2 Kg 2:1–15);
- Elisha’s healing bath for an enemy general (2 Kg 5, to which Jesus will allude in Luke 4:27)…
John’s prophetic renewal movement commences in this primal space, proclaiming Isaiah’s “way in the wilderness” (3:4). This trope refers back to the Exodus way of liberation (Ex 13:17–18), and anticipates Jesus’s way of discipleship (Lk 9:3).
John anticipates a successor who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (3:16b, see 12:49). For Luke, this will be realized at Pentecost (Acts 2:2-3), where a “storm” of wind and fire “baptizes the community, empowering it onto the hostile streets of Jerusalem. Deploying an agrarian image from Q that echoes the apocalyptic tenor of 3:9, John says of the Coming One: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (3:17). He is drawing on the prophetic imaginary of harvest as metaphor for judgment (see, e.g., Isa 18:5; Jer 12:13, 51:33; Joel 3:13; Hos 6:11).
The baptism story itself is full of mystical symbols. The Voice speaks over Jesus, above a magical bird who hovers over the river (3:21), and prefiguring another numinous moment on the mountain of Transfiguration during Jesus’ consultation with Moses and Elijah (9:28–29). Just as Israel’s liberation identity commenced with YHWH mysteriously exclaiming from a burning bush “I will bring My people out of Egypt” (Exod 3:10), so too in the Gospel, Jesus’s distinctive vocation is confirmed at baptism: “You are My child, the Beloved” (Lk 3:22)…
The deep wilderness spirituality of this river place and ritual beckons us to un-domesticate and re-contextualize our baptismal practices. See here for a summary of my experimental renarration of this moment in the context of the Ventura River Watershed and its Indigenous culture (find a longer version in a chapter entitled “A Shaman Appeared in Ventura: Jesus’ Baptism in Ventura River Watershed, Mark 1,” in Steve Heinrichs, ed, Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization,pp. 190-94). This inspired a 2019 tryptich by Catholic Worker artists Dimitri Kadiev, which we have often used at our conferences:
Finally, Jesus’ adult baptism prompts me to mention that 2025 is the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement (Elaine’s ecclesial tradition that I joined two decades ago). Learn more about this commemoration here and here.
Note: For the rest of Epiphany our weekly FB & blog posts will be primarily video. On Nov 20, cover artist Ted Lyddon Hatten and I had a wide-ranging interview with Dr. Marcia McFee and Rev. Ben David Hensley of www.worshipdesignstudio.com. It was a rollicking conversation about Healing Affluenza and the RCL gospel texts for the 2nd to 7th Sundays in Epiphany. So we’ll be sharing 6-15 min. clips beginning next week until Ash Wednesday; watch for them! A 25 minute introduction is here.
