April 22nd, 2020
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Wednesday Words 4 – 22 – 2020
Gospel reading Matthew 3: 13 – 17 BCP page 961 top
St. Matthew moves from the telling of the return of Joseph, Mary and young Jesus from Egypt right into the baptizing of Jesus by John the Baptist. No mention of the trip to Jerusalem when Jesus stayed behind to debate with the temple leaders and his parents thought He was lost. Jesus’s childhood is lost to legend and speculation, much to my unsatisfied imagination.
Baptism was not a foreign ritual to Jews of this time. John did not have to create it from whole cloth and then sell it to an unsuspecting public. Baptism rituals for bodily cleansing were part of the Jewish rituals when someone was declared cured of an illness or in the cleaning of certain vessels for worship.
John the Baptist took this understood ritual as his illustration of what happens in our repentance. We understand that we have sinned against God and our neighbors, we step into the water of God’s grace and God washes our sins away from us. We understand this as part of the “churchy” language that we use in declaring our belief in Jesus as the Son of God and our Savior.
Too many of us do not finish that story. We understand that God forgives – washes away – our sins, but we keep waiting for the sons to swim right back to us, even upstream! God’s forgiveness is total – as far as the east is from the west Scripture tells us. God did not create us and then offer Jesus to redeem us so that God could have a vast sin accounting racket. When we are forgiven, we are clean. There is no scar, no stain, no remnant of that sin left to mark us in any way. Our Eucharist says that Jesus enables us to “stand before God,” not cower and grovel. We are truly forgiven.
Our sins, however, do have consequences even if they cannot swim. When we sin, we are acting counter to the love and mercy of God, and in that we create trouble for ourselves and others. We hurt, we damage, we demean and we break. The difficult part of repentance is making right what we have broken. Saying we are sorry, even if we mean it to the bottom of our hearts, is not repentance until we change what needs to be changed to repair what needs to be repaired. In that repair work, we truly see God’s mercy and grace at work in us and in others.
There is little value in our “forgive and forget” cliché. We grow only through forgive and repair, forgive and behave differently, forgive and accept new life in God.
