On a first listen, our readings from James and from Mark’s Gospel might seem hard to reconcile with the baptism of a three month old baby girl! Jesus heals a woman’s daughter who has an unclean spirit and then a man who is deaf and cannot speak well. And James seems to be warning the church he leads in Jerusalem that they shouldn’t be prioritising their ministry to people with power, influence and wealth, but should rather focus their ministry efforts on serving those in need: the hungry, the sick, those who are struggling to survive.
But the link to baptism is in the peculiar appeal James makes to the church: “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.”
When I met with Chuks, Precious and Anu I asked them how they understood baptism. They rightly proclaimed that baptism was about our sins being drowned; our old selves, put to death so that we could receive new life in Jesus through his death and resurrection. As we talked a little more, one of the things that we worked through was that in his mercy, God judges us not for fulfilling the law given to the Israelites, which we are incapable of doing.
Instead, God’s judgment takes the form of molding those who commit to him according to the way Jesus lived in the world with other people. Baptism is not so much about our winning or our achievement. It’s actually about receiving the mercy of God’s love and forgiveness and provision of new life and then of learning to act in this world with other people, and to react to all the circumstances we encounter, from that reality: that we are God’s own. It’s that assurance we mark with the sacrament of baptism, that the creator of all things, the one who brings all things to completion, the God in whom we rest from our birth to our death has us; loves us; desires us; and will not let us go. In that assurance we find hope when things get tough and confusing and painful.
What James is really driving at here is that it is in this freedom of God’s mercy that we have true hope that isn’t contingent on this or that happening, but is assured in Jesus’s death and resurrection; in this hope, in the midst of inevitable uncertainty, we can find the courage to become a vessel or a place or simply, a person, in whom God can do his work of transforming us so that other people can encounter God through our words and actions. This is what it means to speak and act as those receiving and so being judged by God’s gracious law of liberty that sets us free from death; free from the fear that this world is it; sets us free to allow ourselves to know God more deeply and to become a place where he might be known to others.
What we mark in the sacrament of baptism is receiving God’s own life in Jesus Christ. We proclaim or nurture our children to understand that in Jesus, we are no longer slaves to sin, or children of the darkness where we think that this world is all there is; where the things that happen to us in this world so rule our hearts and minds, our words and actions, that we act to protect ourselves by siding with the strong and powerful, the wealthy, the militant; where we accumulate accolades and possessions and where we dwell in our anger, resentment and bitterness, as if these things are natural outcomes to who we truly are. No my friends, in Christ, we are set free from the illusion that this world, that our experiences, that our ways of thinking about things and seeing, that the pains and losses, and frustrations we suffer should cause us to act defensively, or aggressively, or cruelly toward others. God came into this world in Jesus Christ so that in his life, through his death and resurrection, we might not just see, but actually be transformed to start to see the world through God’s own eyes. We might begin to see other people - even those we find difficult or awful - through the same lens of mercy that God does.
The true miracle Jesus performed with the woman’s daughter and the blind man was not to heal them from physical conditions. At some point, we will all suffer from physical conditions that will eventually culminate in our deaths. The real healing is that when Jesus came to them - unworthy in the world’s eyes as a deaf man unable to speak well and a woman approaching a man, unheard of at the time, and a woman from a place of ill repute at the time no less - when Jesus came to them, they embraced him and even sought him, in spite of the world’s judgment of them.
They sought him and embraced him and became witnesses to you and I, of Jesus’s mercy, of his love, of his overturning the world’s ways of giving only to those who have the means to pay. They had nothing to give him. No money. No health. No power. But as God says, “I do not desire your sacrifices, I only desire you.” I desire your heart and mind and soul and body so that you might be someone in whom others who are in desperate need, might encounter the hope of life and love eternal. That, my friends, is the new life that Chidinma begins this day. Are you all willing to help her grow in Christ? AMEN
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