St.
John’s
Mark 1, 1-11
Mark 1, 1-11
This
is the beginning of the new word from the realm of the angels, sounding forth
through Jesus Christ. Fulfilled is the word of the prophet Isaiah:
Behold, I send my angel before your face.
He is to prepare your way.
Hear the voice of one calling in the loneliness of
the human soul
Prepare the way for the Lord within the soul,
Make his paths straight, so that he may find
entrance into Man’s innermost being!
Thus
did John the Baptist appear in the loneliness of the desert. He proclaimed
Baptism, the way of a change of heart and mind, for the acknowledgement of sin.
And they went out to him from all of Judea and Jerusalem and received baptism
from him in the river Jordan and recognized and confessed their failings.
John
wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist. Fruits and
wild honey were his food. And he proclaimed:
‘After
me comes one who is mightier than I. I am not even worthy to bend down befpre
Him and to undo the straps of His sandals. I have baptized you with water, but
He will baptize you with the fire of the Holy [healing] Spirit.’
In
those days it happened: Jesus of Nazareth came to Galilee, and was baptized in
the Jordan by John.
And
at the same time as he rose up again out of the water, he beheld how the
spheres of the heavens were torn open, and the spirit of God descended upon him
like a dove.
And
a voice sounded from the world of the spirit:
‘You
are my son, the beloved —in you is my revelation.’ [‘Today I have conceived
(begotten) you.’ Luke
3:22]
As we grow older, our awareness expands. Imagine going
back in time to visit our younger self. Imagine what we would want to say to that
younger self out of our years of experience since our youth. Imagine how
possibly painful our older self-awareness would be in the face of our former
innocent intentions. And imagine how terrified our younger self would be to
encounter this someone from the future who is so strangely familiar, who so
intimately knows us.
St. Johnstide
June 24, 30, 2013
Mark 1: 1-11
As we grow older, our awareness expands. Imagine going
back in time to visit our younger self. Imagine what we would want to say to that
younger self out of our years of experience since our youth. Imagine how
possibly painful our older self-awareness would be in the face of our former
innocent intentions. And imagine how terrified our younger self would be to
encounter this someone from the future who is so strangely familiar, who so
intimately knows us.
John the Baptist is humankind’s older self. He is the
older self who has gone ahead of us. He has something he wants to say to us. He
is acutely aware of his own and humankind’s failings. Out of his broader
awareness, he encourages us to change our way of thinking, to undergo a change
of heart. This is all in preparation for an encounter with Christ Jesus, the
innocent younger self of humankind.
John encounters the innocence of Jesus, and the enormity
of the spirit of God that descends upon Jesus like a dove. The result for this
older self of John is a deepening of humility. ‘I am not worthy’, he says. I am
doing my best to serve what God has as intention for humankind. But HE is the
embodiment of the pure and grand intentions of the Godhead. He is the true
prototype. And thus He is even older
than I. He is my own younger self as God intended me to be.
Painful self-awareness of our shortcomings, our failures
to be what both God and we intended to be; and at the same time, this is a deep
experience of God’s love for us, His willingness to sacrifice Himself for us,
so that we can start over, begin again to be what we, and He intended to be. We
shy away from such encounters; such painful self-awareness terrifies us; and to
be so intimately known can be devastating. But it is a necessary step on the
way to experiencing the mildness, the acceptance, the calm radiant forgiveness of
the One who is our ideal future self. Such self-awareness is a necessary
passage into the forgiveness that allows us to start over, to begin at the
beginning again. It is the experience of what the poet speaks of when he says:
I am not I.
I
am this one walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I
forget;
The one who remains silent when
I talk
The one who forgives, sweet,
when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I
am not.
The one who will remain standing
when I die.[1]
[1]
“I Am Not I”, by Juan Ramón Jiménez, in Risking Everything,
ed. By Roger Housden, p. 19. Picture: Baptism in the Jordan, by Jacob de Wit.
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