Epiphany I B — George Yandell
The church keeps time differently from the wider culture. The calendar tracks the life of Jesus from his conception, through his birth and the visit of the magi when he was 12 days old. We observed the feast of the Epiphany Last Sunday. And in seven short days, Jesus has gone from being newly born to about 32 years old at his baptism by John.
In today’s gospel, what does this sentence mean? “The heavens were opened to Jesus and he saw the spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him.” It was Jesus’ Epiphany of Spirit. (An epiphany is a manifesting, a showing forth.) Two big things happened for Jesus. He was baptized by John and his worldview, rather his God-view, changed.
The Hebrews, like many other eastern religions, knew heaven to be the canopy of the sky which was stretched across the cosmic ocean to prevent its water from overflowing into the envelope of dry ground we live on. In Akkadian and Arabic languages the word for heaven is the root for the words for “rain.” The Greek word for heavens or heavEen is uronos- that’s where the planet Uranus gets its name.
When leaders of the Hebrews, Moses, Elijah et al wanted to commune with God they went to the highest peaks to do so. And they must have shivered with fear when the heavens did yield their God, because it meant that the seams of reality were near to coming undone, and the floods might wash them away. Listen to the psalm describing God’s voice and authority: “The Lord’s voice is over the waters, The God of glory thunders, the Lord’s voice breaks the cedars, the Lord’s voice hews flames of fire. The Lord’s voice makes the wilderness shake. The Lord was enthroned at the flood and is enthroned as king for all time.”
The psalm imagines God’s power as in a terrific storm, God riding above it all. This was the Hebrew peoples’ dominant view of God, their worldview. Being fearful of God made sense of their world. But there was a minority report, if you will, about God’s nature, and the nature of God’s Spirit throughout Hebrew scripture.
Throughout the Bible, God’s spirit comes in different ways. The spirit of God hovered over the waters in Gen 1:2, summoning images of a dove. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” (Spirit in Hebrew is also the word for wind.) In the flood story, Noah opened the window of the ark and sent out the dove, and it came back with an olive leaf in its bill, telling Noah’s people the waters were drying up and they were safe.
Matthew has Jesus sending out his disciples and telling them to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
This ritual of water-washing gave Jesus a mystical experience of God’s coming down and entering him- it was so simple, so innocent, so quiet, so private- then all of a sudden, the heavens were opened to Jesus. He probably flinched as he thought the end of the world was at hand, that the fissure opening would flood the world- but the flood had already happened in his baptism. Instead, a spirit like a gentle dove fluttered down and rested on him, entering him, and Hisepiphany had begun. And isn’t it interesting- every time he spoke a parable, a form of presentation he himself developed, he would begin, “The kingdom of heaven is like…..”.
The prayer he taught his disciples began, “Our father in heaven….” The prayer asked God to provide bread, to forgive them, and point them toward reconciling love. Jesus, wet with baptism water, began radically re-thinking the place beyond the sky, beyond the “firmament of the heavens,” where a loving God lives and from which gentleness and justice proceed, not torrents of drowning floods which threaten every living thing.
What does this understanding mean for us? In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus, the Bishop of Constantinople, called baptism “the ladle of regeneration”, “the gift of new creation”. (“Oration on Holy Baptism”, parts 3 & 6) He meant that Jesus humbled himself to be baptized as a model for you and me, so that as Jesus experienced God’s Spirit coming to him, so might we. As we recite the Baptismal Covenant in a moment, recall that we all are baptized in the Spirit of Christ. You just might hear the murmur of the dove descending. And if we all are attentive, we might feel the muffled kiss of heavenly wings.