Baptism of the Lord
January 2008
Our Church teaches us that, since the Gospels reflect the post-Easter faith and concerns of various Christian communities, they can be used only indirectly to reconstruct the life and teaching of Jesus.
This means that the Resurrection of Jesus was the catalyst, the inspiration and the foundation of the faith of the Early Christians. It was in the light of their faith in the Resurrection of Jesus that the Apostles and their followers began to look back on what they remembered Jesus to have said and done.
Early Christian communities had varying understanding of, and insights into, what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus meant.
Another way of putting it is that the various Gospels and other books of the new testament give us a variety of understandings or theologies of what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus meant.
This means that the New Testament is not an historical or chronological or accurate account of what Jesus actually said and did.
The aim of the authors of the various books of the New Testament was to convey what the Christians of a particular Christian Community understood the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to mean. To this end they used or discarded or tailored, various stories, reminiscences and bits and pieces of oral and written tradition about Jesus, in such a way as to best get their message about Jesus across to their readers.
For example the earliest of the Gospels; the Gospel of Mark, was not completed until about forty years after the Resurrection. It reflects the faith of the Christian Community living in Rome. It portrays Jesus as the ‘Suffering Servant’ (as in Isaiah 53) at the total mercy of his enemies, abandoned by the people, by his followers and finally by his God. (‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’)
On the other hand the last of the Gospels; the Gospel of John, was not completed until some seventy years after the Resurrection. It reflects the faith of the Christian Community living in Ephesus (western turkey today). It portrays Jesus as the ’Word made Flesh,’ in complete control of events and living out the plan agreed upon by Him and His Father from the beginning of time.
It is evident that Mark and John pick and choose whatever suits their purpose from the bits and pieces of oral and written tradition about Jesus.
How, where or when an event happened, or whether it happened as described or at all, was of no particular concern to them. Their aim was to explain their own particular understanding of the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
This does not mean that the events described did not actually happen as described or that the words attributed to Jesus were not his actual words. What it does mean is that, by and large, it is impossible for us to know today, with certainty, whether the events described, actually happened as described, or whether the words attributed to Jesus were his actual words.
The exact detail, of events or words, was about as important to them as the length of Jesus’ hair or the size of his ears.
So the account of the baptism of Jesus in today’s Gospel, if described in present day laconic speech, would be ‘Jesus was baptised by John in the Jordan and during this ceremony realised that God was calling him on a special mission.’
All the rest are phrases, images and symbols with deep Old Testament meaning for the early Jewish Christian Communities.