Baptism of the Lord?

(Lectionary for January 8, 2017)

Because I have already addressed Isaiah in many of my posts for Year C of the lectionary, and because the same Isaiah texts come up again over the next few weeks, I have decided to take on some of the psalms assigned instead. In my previous life as the author of the “Opening the Old Testament” lectionary commentary for Patheos I similarly headed off to the realms of the Psalms; I am going to do that again for a time. I realize that not many of you tend to use the psalms as texts for sermons, rather finding in them liturgical sources primarily, yet it is always useful to examine these poems as texts, genuine poetic expressions of ideas, more than simple acts of praise or lament for our worship.

This Sunday is in our Christian calendar designated as the celebration of the baptism of the Lord, a Sunday that begins our journey away from the loud shouts of joy at Jesus’ birth to his maturing life that leads all too quickly to the cross at Easter. Precisely what has Psalm 29 to do with the baptism of Jesus? Well, there is a whole lot of water mentioned! But that seems a highly literal, not to mention trivial, connection with the event. If we probe deeper into what the psalm actually says, I think we may find important ideas that we might embrace as we journey with Jesus toward his fate in Jerusalem. This is not to say, of course, that Ps 29 has nothing to say to the community of Judaism that gave it birth and nurtured its life and use. In fact, careful attention to that particular context in the Hebrew Bible, and even in the far older obviously Canaanite origin of the psalm, will offer to us valuable material for a richer portrayal of the life and meaning of Jesus.

When we read Ps 29 we are reading the very oldest piece of literature in our Bible. We know this to be true because large portions of the poem have been recovered from the writings of the Canaanites, discovered at the mound of Ras Shamra on the Lebanese coast in 1929. These ancient texts, whose date was around the middle of the second millennium BCE, were composed in a language we call Ugaritic, a northwest Semitic dialect little distant from classical Hebrew. We find in that language literally hundreds of words later used by the authors of our Bible. Divine names that we know from the Hebrew Bible, Baal, El, Astarte, among others, appear regularly in the Canaanite texts. Also, the words for “sea,” “land, “sky,” along with numerous cognates occur in these older texts. This should hardly be surprising since the Canaanites had lived in the land later known as Israel for hundreds of years prior to Israel’s appearance on the stage of history, and continued to live among them and near them for hundreds of years after Israel had occupied that land.

Still, even given these very close linguistic connections, Ps 29 is a unique case. Its Hebrew words may nearly be duplicated in a poem from the Canaanites. The only real difference between the two poems is that where the Hebrew reads YHWH in 29:1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,11, the Canaanite poem reads Baal. Baal was the storm god of the Canaanites, and his wild and active control over nature is depicted with the vivid imagery that we now read in our Hebrew Ps 29. It could be said that the Hebrew poet merely borrowed the older poem and adapted it with few changes for a new theological reality.

While the Canaanites imagined that Baal was the creator, sustainer, and actor over nature and people, our poet affirmed that it is YHWH, the God of Israel, who is the real identity of the deity that has acted and will act in the world we know.

Of course, when ancient ideas are adapted by later believers, there are bound to be rough and ready connections between the two, connections that may raise a theological eyebrow or two. For example, in vs. 1 the “ben’ ‘elim” are called upon to “assign (or “ascribe”) to YHWH powerful glory.” And just who, pray tell, are these “children of the gods,” a more literal rendering? In the Canaanite context the answer is simple: they form the Pantheon of gods who surround the high gods El and Baal, and who do various works in the Canaanite world. They are the gods of wind and cloud and rain and harvest, etc. This, of course, will hardly do in the Hebrew construal of things, since it finally was affirmed that YHWH is alone in divine work and has rendered all other constructs of divinity mute. Hence, interpreters of the verse often thought of these “children of the gods” as angels, messengers of YHWH, who rather like the Seraphim of Isaiah 6 spent their divine lives praising the only real God there is. Or, see the KJV’s “translation” of the phrase “O, Ye mighty,” effectively obscuring the fact that these are clearly divine beings in both the Canaanite and Hebrew contexts. But for the 17th century divines who translated the KJV, it would simply not do to name “other” divine beings in relation to the only divine being they were convinced existed.

Perhaps it was finally not troubling to the Hbrew poet to employ the metaphor of “heavenly beings” along with YHWH, since the notion of one God only was not one that appeared over night in their thinking. Many other places in the Hebrew Bible refer to Pantheons of gods, albeit ruled over by the one God YHWH. The very ancient command o “have no other gods in my place” (or “against my face” more literally) found in the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, implies that there are in fact other gods. In the later I Kings 22 (8th century BCE?) the prophet Micaiah ben Imlah has a vision of a heavenly court of gods with YHWH as its head. Even later in Job 1-2 (6th century BCE?), we read of The Satan, a member of YHWH’s heavenly court of gods, whose role it is to wander up and down the land reporting to YHWH the doings of humans. We must never forget that the Hebrew Bible is a product of well over a thousand years of composition; there were bound to be many changes of thought and idea over more than a millennium of reflection.

But the question remains: what has all of this to do with the baptism of Jesus? The answer may come as we observe the natural metaphors of the psalm, including the announcement that whatever gods there are must be in the business of praising the great God YHWH. The poem claims that “the voice (sound) of YHWH is powerful, full of majesty,” capable of “smashing the cedars of Lebanon (the world’s mightiest trees),” even able to “make Lebanon itself skip about like a calf” (earthquake?). That same voice “flashes flames of fire, shakes the wilderness, causes the oaks to whirl (or “deer to calve” depending upon multiple possibilities of a difficult Hebrew text), and strips the forest bare!” Meanwhile, “in God’s temple all cry, ‘Glory!’”

And finally, “YHWH sits over the flood; YHWH sits as eternal king! Let YHWH give strength to God’s people; let YHWH bless God’s people with peace” (Ps 29:11)! “Flood” is a reference to the great flood recounted in Genesis 6-8, which is here hymned as the direct act of the mighty monarch over all nature. But there is more. This same king is also asked by the heavenly beings to offer strength to God’s people, a strength that has its ultimate use as the means for peace, shalom in Hebrew, a word that has its root in words for unity and wholeness. Thus, Ps 29 is a loud cry for all to recognize and announce the glory of YHWH whose work in the world is at the last strength for the purpose of peace among all of God’s people.

It is, as Christians have long believed, the work of Jesus to offer strength to his believers, strength that makes its presence known as a peace that passes all knowing, as the Gospel of John describes it. So, on this day of the baptism of the Lord, we celebrate the one whom we look to for strength, not a strength for the purposes of dominance over others, but a strength that leads to shalom, for wholeness and unity for all. We are called to remember that Jesus’ strength only became apparent in his weakness, his willingness to go to the cross for what he believed to be true about us and about the world. Is it not wonderfully ironic that completely unbeknownst to the old Canaanite poet, his words have echoed now for 3500 years, offering to us insight into the one we call Lord, the hopeful bringer of genuine strength and lasting peace?

Images from Wikipedia Commons