Elizabeth S.
Sunday
We’re in Epiphany season, a special time to focus on those moments when the secular world glimpses the numinous. Which is to say, when it experiences an epiphany.
One of those moments is when Jesus, while being baptized by John, grasps in a new way that God dwells within. Think of the dove as his inner realization. Here’s the account that Luke gives of the moment, which comes right after John the Baptist announces, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”:
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22).
Milton provides a version of the story in the opening book of Paradise Regained. The “Great Proclaimer” is John:
Now had the great Proclaimer, with a voice
More awful than the sound of trumpet, cried
Repentance, and Heaven’s kingdom nigh at hand
To all baptized. To his great baptism flocked
With awe the regions round, and with them came
From Nazareth the son of Joseph deemed
To the flood Jordan—came as then obscure,
Unmarked, unknown. But him the Baptist soon
Descried, divinely warned, and witness bore
As to his worthier, and would have resigned
To him his heavenly office. Nor was long
His witness unconfirmed: on him baptized
Heaven opened, and in likeness of a Dove
The Spirit descended, while the Father’s voice
From Heaven pronounced him his beloved Son.
And now to the incomparable Malcolm Guite, who as always has a sonnet about the occasion:
The Baptism of Christ
Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Spirit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’
In that swift light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river,
To die and rise and live and love forever.
Jesus recognizes that the voice that made the universe delights in all his creatures and accepts it has his mission to communicate the truth that each of us is God’s beloved child. The voice that made the universe is calling out for us all to have this epiphanic breakthrough.
