St Peter’s, Petersfield – Baptism of Christ 2008

Mt 3:13-end

If you go to Guildford and walk to the top of the High Street, you will find yourself face to face with Holy Trinity Church. I was Rector there for nine years before the move to Portsmouth. Lots of things happened during that time, as is usual with busy, town-centre parishes, and I know that Petersfield is no exception. One of the projects we took on was the re-furbishing and re-ordering of the inside of the Church, starting with a heating-system that worked, a sound-system that functioned properly, and seating that was comfortable. Then there was the font – a large alabaster affair tucked away in an unused porch. We decided to move it into the nave, and place against the south wall – so that everyone could see it. But the walls of the inside of the Church were full of elaborate memorials to local worthies, some of whom dwarfed the font. A bit like the tail wagging the dog, as they say.

So we decided to take the bold step of commissioning a large icon, painted by Brother Anselm, of Alton Abbey. The result you can see for yourself – and I have brought a few picture post cards of it with me this morning. Jesus is in the centre, with John the Baptist to his right, in a River Jordan deliberately shaped like a womb – to show that baptism is not just about cleansing, but about rebirth, to a new life. And all around are onlookers of various kinds, including children – not usually painted in icons, but we insisted that they should be there. I have a miniature version of the icon on the wall outside my chapel at Bishopsgrove, Fareham, and it is a real treasure.

The Baptism of Christ is like an icon. It draws people into its activity, and with the gold background, makes the onlooker sense that they are part of something different, transforming, challenging. Every year, on this first Sunday of Epiphany, we read the narratives of Christ’s baptism in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, each one in turn. Each one tells in its own way of how Jesus joined the crowds of people going out into the wilderness in search of something new in their lives. They were leaving behind conventional religion, established ideas. Among the answers on offer was the rough-clad figure called John, who offered them a ritual washing, to cleanse them. In a hot, sultry climate, this was not unusual – different religious groups had their own ways of baptising at the time, and it could be done more than once in some cases. So for Jesus himself to opt for this baptism was something of a risk. What is it supposed to mean? How does it function like an icon, and involve us as well? How are we drawn into its action, its rich gold colours?

Each gospel-writer has his own particular way of telling the story, and Matthew is no exception. He adds two special twists which are worth pondering for a moment. The first is in the little conversation John and Jesus have before Jesus steps into the water. John feels unable to carry it out. But Jesus insists that it goes ahead. And what is the result? John’s baptism transformed into our Christian baptism, now to be performed once and once only, as the beginning of our life in him. Oh yes, people are baptised at different ages, and that will always be the case. Baptise them as infants, but make sure there’s follow-up teaching, and regular experience of worship. Baptise them as adults, as I frequently do at Confirmations, and enjoy the newly-found commitment of the occasion. Baptise them when they are seriously ill, and the healing power of God is powerfully known. Therefore, in today’s gospel, John steps aside, having provided the raw materials for a new and everlasting baptism for Jesus to bring to all of us. We’re back to the icon again – which involves us as onlookers, worshippers.

Then there is the other special twist to Matthew’s version, which is that instead of God addressing Jesus, ‘you are my Son’, as we read in Mark’s Gospel, we have God speaking to all of us, the onlookers, the worshippers: ‘This is my Son.’ Jesus’ baptism is very public, engaging, wondrous, and it is for all of us to see. I wish people didn’t see baptism as something you do to people, and it’s all over. Remember, Jesus was baptised at the start of his ministry, so it was a beginning, an equipping, something that motivated him onwards and upwards.

But, you may well ask, what has an icon up the A3 in Guildford, and an ancient account in a Gospel, got to do with me? A gilded painting and an old, old story alongside it, can be dismissed as too foreign from the lives we lead, with the daily trudge of problems, trying to make sense of what life brings us, as well as the things that just don’t seem to go away. The answer to this ongoing dilemma is to find God in all this. And if we start with the scene of Christ’s baptism, where Jesus takes ordinary human life as it is and changes it, then we cannot go far wrong. For here is the basic element of water with all that it expresses, about washing, refreshing, and being formed in the womb. Here is water, undisguised, easily recognisable, taken by God and given a new significance. Here are our lives, with all their contradictions and difficulties, taken by God and given a new significance.

It is this sense of God’s presence in the ordinary that has inspired preachers to see the Trinity in that baptism icon, that baptism story. ‘Here we have the Trinity presented in a clear way’, said St. Augustine as a newly ordained priest in the closing years of the fourth century in North Africa; ‘the Father iu the voice, the Son in the man, the Holy Spirit in the dove.’ (Sermon 2.1, c. 391) And more directly from Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, preaching to King James I in the opening years of the seventeenth century, who puts it this way: ‘ the Father in the voice, the Son in the flood, the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove’ (Whitsun 1612). Here is God, speaking and acting and sending out in the power of the Spirit not only his Son, but each one of us. The secret of this scene is not something that is cleverly novel and different. It is about the basic element of water, dripping relentlessly into our lives, and breaking into a tired old earth with a message of irrepressible hope, of another world, made new in Him.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth