Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Some years ago in communist Poland, Lech Walensa, and a worker in the shipyards at Gdansk started a union. It was outlawed at first, but he took the risk anyway. They named the union – Solidarity.
Solidarity. It is beautiful word and notion. It means to stand as “one”,united. The word suggests great mutuality of intention and action. Standing up for others, and standing with them.
Our lesson from Matthew shows Jesus’ solidarity with us, and more than that, God’s solidarity with the human condition. In accepting baptism, Jesus becomes one with the human reality – our hopes and our aspirations, our limits and our losses.
Israel had long practiced baptism as an initiation rite for non-Jews. If you married into the Jewish faith and wanted to become one with the Jewish people – you took a ritual bath to cleanse your old life from you. You arose from the water, a new person and oftentimes were renamed to signify your rebirth. Your old life, your old sins were left behind too.
St. John the Baptist had added a new meaning to Baptism. He asked even native born Israelites – sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah to be baptized. This baptism had to do exclusively with a cleansing from sin, and a preparing for the new age which the Messiah would bring in. St. John was a radical and was trying to infuse new life in Israel’s old desert religion.
Yet when Jesus presents himself for baptism, John is confused. He says to Jesus – “I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me?” John acknowledges that he had encountered God in Jesus. Only God stands in need of no forgiveness because God alone is without sin.
St. John is perplexed. The sinless do not need to be forgiven. Jesus explains to St. John – you may not understand,but in this way I express my solidarity with you and all flesh.
“I need to drown. I need to die and rise just like those who will be baptized into my name must also die and rise.”
One of my favorite novels is The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. Twain’s story is a classic tale of what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes and understand their reality. Perception is a funny thing – we all tend to believe that everyone sees the world through our eyes. One of the strongest influences in our perceptions is experience. When we have the experience of other people it broadens us, opens us to the reality that other folks know.
The story The Prince and the Pauper is set in Renaissance England. The prince of the realm, the heir to the throne, tires of palace life with all its duties and formalities and longs to play and be carefree and have no responsibilities. As luck would have it, he goes out into the street and meets his double – a boy who looks enough like him and sounds enough like him to be his identical twin.
In a brief moment of insight, the prince suggests that they change places for the day – so that they can truly see how the other half lives. The boy who would be King suddenly finds that there is much more to life in the streets than he imagined. While he has no responsibilities he also has no one to protect him, there is no one to put food on his table, no one to shelter him from the cold and he experiences vulnerability for the first time.
Suddenly he knows first hand what his subjects have known all along – he knows what it means to be afraid, he knows powerlessness, he knows what it means to be a victim to the pleasures of others – he who was once King and subject to no one was now subject to all. After he got over his fears he suddenly has immense compassion for his people. He understood their sorrows, their hurts, their fears, and their vulnerability.
When he became King, England become a different place, a more humane place.
Today is the Sunday of the year when we remember Jesus’ baptism and ours in a special way. Jesus Christ, God, Lord of the Cosmos, becomes vulnerable to the realities of space and time even though he is by nature not vulnerable to them. He does this to have compassion on us and lead us to a higher righteousness. He shows us that he will make things right with us by joining to us and walking our walk. He does not judge us in our sin nor leave us in them but saves us from them by becoming one with us. Jesus intends solidarity with us and makes it a reality.
Our baptismal calling is to do the same. Most of us live pretty good lives. We are secure, we own homes, we have education and skills to earn our income, while our wants always exceed our needs which are normal for all humanity, and we live pretty luxurious lifestyles.
Our baptismal calling calls us to become Jesus to those who need. We are to share love and grace with others.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Who We Are