In Jesus’s time, the act of baptism was not what we think of today as a rite that is performed by the priest. In those times, the person immersed themselves in water, performing their own baptism as an act signifying their repentence. The Greek word is metanoia, which means changing one’s mind, in the sense of a change of perspective, a fundamental shift in perspective.
When I think of a shift of perspective, I think of suddenly getting a concept in mathematics as a young student, such as the first time I understood long division or plane geometry. Such a shift comes with an “aha” moment of clearer perception, incite and relaxation of powers of hard work to grasp something that seemed beyond our reach.
Because I was a pre-pharmacy student at Illinois Wesleyan, I had to study a lot of chemistry, which was okay until I got to physical chemistry. Think of quantum physics applied to chemical compounds, with lots of calculus to describe the movement of molecules--that’s physical chemistry. Many days I left the classroom shaking my head as if I understood but whenever the test came around, I found I had been fooling myself. Needless to say, my worst grades were in this subject.
But take Shakespeare, my best class. It was taught by a really exciting professor who loved words, who made the strange cadence and language of Elizabethan English come alive, so that I finally got what the characters were really saying. It was an epiphany, an opening up of Shakespeare to me that gave me a new perspective on the language, helped me learn how to read Shakespeare to really get what the play was all about.
Most of have had experiences of the thing that eludes us entirely, like my physical chemistry, and the thing that we grasp and learn to love because we now understand what it means to us, like my experience with the class in Shakespeare. The first experience may make us feel lost, out of the loop, or even dumb, because we just don’t get it, can’t see the connections or grasp the importance of major pieces of the puzzle. Not only do our minds remain closed or unable to be opened, but our hearts can’t engage because we don’t understand the meaning of what we are experiencing.
The second experience of understanding lightens us up. It is not only our minds that are changed, but our very hearts. What was once a blank, dark space becomes enlightened, bright with meaning and connected to us in a new way. This opening up happens not only in our mind but in our hearts as well, and we may even come to love the thing we now understand.
The same can also be true of people. A person we didn’t know or understand, who we spend a little time getting to know can suddenly come closer to us, be opened to us and then we open to them. Our hearts were not engaged but now they are.
These are all experiences of metanoia, of changing not only our minds but our very hearts, as we engage more deeply with things we now understand. You can’t embrace what you don’t know, and the metanoia that we experience with Christ is just that. Understanding Christ does not mean studying him, but entering into his life in order to make meaning of his coming among us in the manger, his ministry and his death and resurrection. What does this mean to you that Christ came into a body like ours, lived a life like ours, and suffered a death like ours so that we can enter a resurrection like his? Christ is not meant to be studied but to be loved, in a turning around of our life from focus on things that pass away to things that last.
Baptism is the basic symbol we Christians have chosen to mark this new understanding, this change in our hearts and minds to the things eternal. That Christ himself baptizes himself at the invitation of John the baptizer shows us that baptism means entering into the world of God and God’s will for us. Baptism means rinsing off all our former selves to take on a new self. In Christ’s baptism, God descends in the spirit and declares Jesus to be the beloved Son. God acknowledges the new life in Christ, and in a sense anoints Christ at his baptism for ministry, and ultimately for resurrection.
It is said that some of us are sprinkled with water and that’s all that happens, but others are baptized into new life. It depends on what we take from our baptism that makes the difference. For those of us baptized as children, our parents helped to make the difference for us in whether we merely got wet or got transformed into new life. Whether it was some water poured on us or the Holy Spirit poured out for us.
Like Jesus in his time participating in his own baptism, we too participate in our own baptism. Are you merely getting wet or are you being transformed?
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