INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

Year B - First Sunday After Epiphany - The Baptism of Jesus

GENESIS 1:1-5. The first words of the Bible define the true nature of creation as spiritual. The Spirit of God breathes over the waters, shaping and moving them with creative energy. This is a statement of religious faith, not a scientific hypothesis. Written in the 6th century BCE, this majestic hymn describes the divine victory over chaos, a basic element of myths of creation found in most Near Eastern cultures.

PSALM 29. A hymn of praise celebrates God's powerful presence in all of nature. Again victory over chaos begins the process of creation according to God's command.

ACTS 19:1-7. The early church regarded baptism in the name of Jesus as a symbol of new creation. The gift of the Spirit confirmed this spiritual experience. In this passage Paul helped the disciples of Ephesus, baptized according to John the Baptist's practice, learn the full meaning of Christian baptism. Most of the people who were baptized in the earliest days of the church were adult believers. When whole families and households were baptized, children were included. The practice of infant baptism did not become the norm until a few centuries later.

MARK 1:4-11. The early church believed that the teaching and the work John the Baptist fulfilled prophecies found in Exodus 23:20 and Isaiah 40:3. A dramatic if controversial figure, John preached repentance and baptism in the Jordan River as the way for Jews of his time to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. Then Jesus joined the crowds that thronged to hear John's message and experience. The vision of the Spirit as a dove descending on Jesus after he had been baptized confirmed John's conviction that the Messiah would bring the gift of the Spirit to all believers.

A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS.

We now know that all cultures had their myths of creation. A basic element of these myths found in most Near Eastern cultures consisted of the victory of the deity over chaos, often represented by another mythical deity. The winner of this conflict then became the established monarch whom the human sovereign represented. Some Psalms in particular show that this concept was familiar in Israel also. (Cf. Pss. 74:12-17; 89:9-13.) The immediate source of this myth in Israel was probably the Canaanites among whom the Israelites had settled in the 13^th to 11th centuries BCE.

Written in the 6th century BCE, this majestic hymn also describes the divine victory over chaos, but with a significant difference. Under the influence of its great prophets of the 8th to the 6^th centuries, Israel had developed a transcendent and monotheistic concept of Yahweh. Furthermore, with idolatry banished from their tradition, the Israelites developed a spiritual concept of the divine nature. This creation hymn, while drawing on earlier mythology, presents a spiritual view of how the world came into being through the direct command and action of this spiritual being, Yahweh.

Note that the NSRV text does not use the specific phrase “the Spirit of God” as does the KJV and the RSV. Instead, it uses the metaphor “a wind from God.” The Hebrew word for “wind” and “spirit” are the same - ruach. While this may be technically accurate, it appears to remove the action from God. On the other hand, the divine command, "Let there be light" and the resultant creation of light, makes sure that direct action is intended. Creation occurred, according to the Israelite theology, solely as the result of the will of Yahweh.

The separation of light and darkness has been a powerful metaphor in religious art and literature. Behind this is the simple reality that all life is dependent on the light of the sun, a fact as well-known in ancient times as today. Indian, Greek, Phoenician and Babylonian myths of creation also represented light as the first creation. Nor can we neglect the fact that until the invention of electrical lighting, the dawning of each day brought a new separation of light from darkness and a new beginning for living in the world.

Repeated emphasis on divine approval of the first and all subsequent acts of creation also carries considerable significance. The view of a brutal, savage and evil creation which must be subdued by human effort only developed in recent centuries, particularly on the frontiers of European exploration and economic exploitation. The American legend of Moby Dick, popularized in 1851 in Herman Melville's novel about Captain Ahab's pursuit of a malevolent white whale, may well be the epitome of this view of a universe that is evil and must be overcome by human opposition. Much technological development that has mesmerized so many of us in the past century and a half has been driven by a similar motif. The failure of Ahab, like the failure of so many human technological experiments, reminds us that from the religious point of view, the universe rests on spiritual foundations and must be so regarded as we strive

to make use of its gifts.

PSALM 29. Have you ever stood in a safe place to watch the beautiful violence of a thunderstorm? Such an experience like that lay behind this early hymn of praise celebrating God's powerful presence in nature. Many elements drawn from the common, primitive cosmology of the Near East have found their way into this song. Divine victory over chaos determines the natural processes of creation according to Yahweh's command and provides for human security. Yahweh's glory visible in the storm forms the central theme of the psalm. Some OT scholars have suggested that Yahweh was first known to the Israelites as a storm god.

The psalm opens with a summons to "heavenly beings" to offer their praise and worship to Yahweh. The realm where Yahweh reigns was conceived as a temple with heavenly beings robed like ministering priests. Later, they came under the general category of angels.

As the storm develops, the psalmist hears thunder rolling across the sky as the powerful yet majestic voice of Yahweh (vss. 3-4). A violent wind sweeping down from the Lebanon mountains breaks great cedar trees as they roil and skip. These too he sees as the direct action of Yahweh (vss.5-6). Lightning becomes another expression of Yahweh's voice (vs. 7) and the thunder which follows rolls across the whole length and breadth of the country as far as the wilderness of Kadesh in the Negeb desert (vs.8). All of these details form a vivid description of how Yahweh controlled the chaotic forces of nature.

As in the Genesis passage, primitive religious concepts cast the victor in this struggle over chaos as a reigning monarch. So Yahweh "sits enthroned over the flood ... as a king forever" (vs. 10). After a violent storm like this all the wadis gush with raging floods as the water is carried away for several more days. Few as such violent storms may be in the relatively benign climate of Palestine, storms do occur in winter. One such storm wrecked havoc in parts of Israel and Jordan in February 1998. Yet the rainfall from such storms is essential to the growth of crops, just as winter snow on the Canadian prairies is a godsend for next year's grain. The psalmist saw this storm as a blessing which would yield welcome security for the people. Nature had spoken of Yahweh's strength and greatness, the infinite source of spiritual blessings.

ACTS 19:1-7. The early church regarded baptism in the name of Jesus as a symbol of new creation. The gift of the Spirit confirmed this spiritual experience and enabled the newly baptized to live the full implications of their life in Christ. In this passage Paul helped the disciples of Ephesus, baptized by Apollos according to John the Baptist's practice, learn the full meaning of Christian baptism.

Apollos may have been one of John's disciples. An Alexandrian Jew of great eloquence (Acts 18:24), he is named half a dozen times in the NT, almost entirely in connection with the Corinthian church except for one reference in Titus 3:13 without geographic identification. Knowledgeable in the Hebrew scriptures, especially with reference to the Messiah, he had been a catechumen and had become a teacher of "the Way of the Lord." This infers that his instruction had been limited to a message of repentance similar to John's. We might speak of this as an ability to raise his hearers' consciousness of sin without giving them the power to change their ways. It was a message of moral improvement, not of salvation by faith through grace.

The church in Ephesus had encouraged him to proceed to Corinth and there greatly helped those who through grace had become believers(18:27). Just what the distinction between this teaching and that of Paul is not entirely clear. It has been assumed that he knew the whole story about Jesus and some of Jesus' teaching, but had not fully accepted Jesus' soteriological function as the Messiah/Christ which was so important to Paul. Martin Luther conjectured that Apollos had written the Letter to the Hebrews. While unproven, the consistency of his teaching with that letter does make the suggestion attractive (18:28).

It would appear that the purpose of this pericope was to clarify the difference between the ministry John the Baptist and Jesus in much the same way that Mark did in Mark 1:7-8. The key was the presence and power of the Spirit. It also appears that the apostles were mediators of the Spirit, which Apollos had been unable to do, apparently because he had not himself received the gift of the Spirit.

MARK 1:4-11. The early church believed that the teaching and work of John the Baptist fulfilled prophecies found in Exodus 23:20 and Isaiah 40:3. These had been given a messianic interpretation. A dramatic if controversial figure, John preached repentance and baptism as the way for Jews of his time to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. Then Jesus joined the crowds that thronged to hear John's message and accept baptism. The vision of the Spirit as a dove descending on Jesus after he had been baptized confirmed John's conviction that this was indeed the Messiah who would bring the gift of the Spirit to all believers.

It is always important to remember that the gospels were written long after Pentecost when the Spirit had come upon the assembled apostles as they struggled to understand the true meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We are dealing here with how the early church, possibly forty years later, perceived the distinction between the Jewish and the Christian traditions. As we also saw in the reading from Acts 19 above, the crucial aspect of the Christian tradition as presented here is the presence and power of the Spirit. The saving work of God in Christ is effected by the Spirit. That is the symbolic meaning of the Spirit descending as a dove (vs. 10) and the words of divine approval (vs. 11). Mark intended us to believe that this saving work of God in Christ is continuing. The mighty acts of Jesus, the Christ, which Mark describes in the rest of this gospel bear witness to the reader that Jesus himself is God's saving act for the redemption of humanity.

This introductory passage also points to the continuity of Jesus' ministry with his heritage as a Jew. There appears to have been an extensive baptismal movement prior to the baptism of Jesus and the later, post-Pentecost practice of the early church (Mark 11:32; Acts 10:37). Jesus came to the Jordan where John was preaching and baptizing to identify himself with the people of God. Like most prophetic voices before him, John sought to recall Israel to its historic covenant. His baptism had some similarity with the purification rites required of all Jews under the law and also the baptism which proselytes were required to perform after circumcision as the sign of their inclusion in the covenant.

There can be no question, however, that Mark also regarded Jesus as entirely unique. This is the obvious meaning of the quotation from Psalm 2:7, an ancient hymn usually sung at a royal accession or coronation. Here it is used with an obvious Christian messianic connotation and linked with another messianic interpretation of Isaiah 42:1.

We can never know what the experience of baptism meant to Jesus. The Docetic heresy of the 2nd century CE misinterpreted it, as have some modern interpreters, as the dawning of his messianic consciousness. That was not Mark's intention. Indeed, by linking the psalm and the Isaiah passages, he was making a statement of faith as to who Jesus is. In so doing, he was speaking for the apostolic church of his time, circa 65-70 CE. Like all other apostolic witnesses, he viewed the ministry of John and Jesus from the inside and cast both of them in the framework of Jewish eschatology then being realized in the early apostolic church. The difference between them was not in the respective behavior of the two contemporaries and cousins, though that did receive considerable emphasis in the gospel record. The chief distinction lay in the faith that what John had anticipated, Jesus was now equipped as "Beloved Son" to accomplish. As Mark quotes John in vs. 15, "The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.""

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