SUNDAY 16 JANUARY 2005
Isaiah 49: 1 - 7; John 1: 29 - 42
At a service of baptism
One of the most popular works of fiction at the moment is The Da Vinci Code. I had vaguely heard about it last year, but didn't take much notice until in the middle of the year I was with a group of well-educated, theologically-aware, liberal-thinking people, all of whom had read it and were captivated by it. So I thought I had better find out what it was all about, bought it and read it - not quite in one sitting, but almost. It is the kind of book that is hard to put down because the author has the knack of leaving you on tenterhooks at the end of each chapter.
On the whole, while I enjoyed it as a piece of fictional writing, I got irritated with parts of it because of some basic inaccuracies. But I can see why it is so popular. Based as it is on the legend the Jesus didn't actually die on the cross, that he married Mary Magdalene and they had a child, and from that child there is a bloodline right down to today, it is the stuff of enticing fantasy. Throw in the legend of the holy grail, Leonardo da Vinci's apparent liking for putting symbolic messages into his paintings such as the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and add in the notion that the Catholic hierarchy has suppressed the true story of Jesus for nigh on 2000 years, and you have a sure-to-win recipe. People just love conspiracy theories, and a conspiracy theory based around something as explosive as Jesus not dying on the cross and having a child and religious authorities suppressing all that, is sure to have appeal. The notion that Christianity might be based on a gigantic hoax is particularly appealing to many people!
A key theme of the book is, of course, the challenge of interpreting the codes that da Vinci is alleged to have put into his paintings. Reading the Gospel of John is a similar kind of challenge. John is written not in code as such, but with coded messages, words that can be understood on a number of different levels. It is full of rich symbolic language when it talks about Jesus. One example of this occurred in today's reading when John the Baptist is reported as describing Jesus as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world". On one level, say for first century Jewish people accustomed to the rituals of sacrificing lambs in the temple to get themselves on-side again with God, it was a metaphor to describe Jesus as the one who would put them right with God; and not just them but - and this was the audacious claim - non-Jewish people ("the world") as well. For twenty-first century kiwi people like us, 'Lamb of God' is a term which makes little sense - our main knowledge of lamb is something cooked with gravy and mint sauce. So it becomes a matter of interpreting John's coded language.
Taking into account how its first hearers would have understood it, I believe that John, speaking of Jesus as the "lamb of God" and a bit further on as the "Son of God", was saying that Jesus is the one who opens up once and for all the way to understanding the relationship between God and humankind, between God and each of us. One way of re-expressing that is the wording used in the introduction to the baptism service this morning.
Summarised, it goes something like this: It claims that no matter who we are, what we believe or do not believe, what we have done or not done, God's love is all about us, God values each one of us. Because of that God seeks for us and all people to have lives of love, joy and achievement. It claims that our life comes from God, and that deeper meaning and energy in our lives can come through a personal encounter with God. It claims that we are not ruled by fate, but rather by the desire of God for us to reach our fullest potential, standing tall in life. This is what Jesus came to tell people, and to demonstrate in his own life as a peasant from a poor background who could stand tall and make the best that he could of himself, and to help people find for themselves the way to a life of energy and joy, faith, hope and love.
That is the kind of interpretation I want to put on John's symbolic language of Jesus as 'lamb' of God and 'son' of God. It is an affirmation I wish to make when we think of our small children and all the potential that is within them and ahead of them, and also all that life might offer them or throw at them. It is the kind of interpretation I especially want to stand by when I am faced with needing to interpret - that is, to make sense out of - something as horrendous as the Boxing Day tsunami, when hundreds, thousands of innocent small children the age of the two we baptised this morning lost their lives.
You will always get religious loonies who will interpret natural disasters as a divine punishment or at least a divine warning. No person in their right mind would want to have anything to do with such a capricious and immoral god. So, where can we find God in the tsunami? We find God not in a tidal wave that destroys. We find God in the human tidal wave of compassion and generosity which followed the tsunami.
We live in a world which, like our small children and our older children - indeed like all of us - a world which continues to grow and evolve. Planet earth is still in the process of formation, and a consequence of that is that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and such-like will happen unexpectedly and inconveniently, and sometimes catastrophically. We too are each in the process of formation, of becoming, no matter our age - or perhaps for the older of us it becomes a process of de-formation. Sudden illnesses - appendicitis, for example, or in an adolescent an outbreak of acne - are our own human forms of earthquake or eruption or consequential devastating tsunami. It is not in the destructive event that we find God, but in how we choose to respond, that God is at work; in acts of human courage and human compassion and generosity.
Joshua and Steffi, whom we have baptised today, are being launched into world which is full of mysteries and puzzles like Leonardo da Vinci's allegedly mysterious and coded paintings and destructive mysteries like the Boxing Day tsunami. Shane and Cisca, Rob and Jenny, and all parents and grandparents, godparents and members of congregations, have to be interpreters of the mysteries and puzzles and contradictions of life for our children. A reality we have to live with in this still forming, imperfect world is that there are pains and sorrows from which we cannot be spared. There is at times an inexplicable randomness in what happens to us or to others. One of the most fundamental interpretations to be made and offered to our children - and to ourselves - is whether or not we will trust in the goodness of God and the goodness of human life, despite life's sorrows and pains and contradictions.
Baptism, I would claim, is an affirmation of trust in life as it is and in life as it can be, trust in the present and trust for the future.
It is trust in God who the prophet Isaiah experienced as calling all people into the orbit of God's love; trust in God who the gospel-writer we call John described as being seen in the man Jesus of Nazareth, calling and embracing all without distinction into intimacy with God. It is trust in the essential goodness of God, and in the essential goodness of humanity and of human community.