The Baptism of the Lord

The Gospel Reading for this coming Sunday, the Sunday we call the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, tells the story of an adult baptism, the baptism of Jesus as he is about to begin his public ministry. This, and not an infancy narrative like those in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, is the first scene in Mark's gospel story.

Fundamentalists have raised the belief in Jesus' Virgin Birth to the level of an essential, core belief--and yet half of our four Gospels never mention the idea, and are able to tell the good news of Jesus Christ without reference to his conception and birth. Since very shortly after my confirmation, while I was still a High School student attending the small rural Methodist church where I was baptized, I found it difficult to recite with the congregation that part of the Apostle's Creed that states "he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary." Just a few years later, while I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, I discovered that the folks who first recited these words from the Creed may have had more difficulty believing that Jesus was born (i.e. that God actually took on real, human flesh) than that someone was born of a virgin. That changed my outlook, and I stopped having any difficulty reciting the Apostle's creed.

Mark's story gives us the same message that Luke and Matthew do in their infancy narrative. Luke and Matthew push the beginning of Jesus' Messiahship back to his conception, but Mark begins with the descent of the dove at Jesus' baptism in adulthood. The Gospel of John has another starting point--the beginning of creation! What all four gospels agree on is a God who is involved in our world--involved to the extent of entering into human reality. Later the Greek orthodox theologians would describe this as the divine becoming human in order for humanity to be led to the divine.

Riding home from the Christmas Eve service at University United Methodist Church in Madison, Jim told me, "I never could accept this Virgin Birth idea." I forget now what my response to Jim was, but what I thought was, "this is another example of how insistence on so-called 'fundamentals' results in people just plain missing the real point of the Gospel."