The Selfie

According to Matthew, the  crowd sees and hears John the Baptist thundering words of warning and doom – the one who comes has his winnowing fork in hand, and will clear his threshing floor – and then Jesus is there, in the midst of them, coming to be baptized, and John says – to Jesus privately – “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” – and Jesus says, clearly also privately,  Let it be so now.  This hurried exchange of muttered comments is missed by those who are pushing ahead to the river, or hanging back, still not sure, and talking to friends about it, all of them concerned about the dire warnings and the feel of the times.

And so, Jesus was baptized in the river, one in the midst of many, and when he came up from the water, according to Matthew, the heavens opened to him.  To him.  To no one else.  Not even to John.  According to Matthew, Jesus saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.  And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

And that’s it, according to Matthew.  Gosh, in Luke, the whole huge crowd was wowed by the sight of the dove and the voice and the blessing words, My Beloved Son.  This was epic, an epiphany for the record books. According to Luke.  But according to Matthew, it was a Selfie.  It was a snapshot moment Jesus kept, and pulled out to help him through the forty days of struggle and temptation in the wilderness, and maybe even the hours on the cross.  My Beloved Son.  It was something to remember.

According to the online dictionaries, Selfie, which was just chosen as the word of the year for 2013, is a snapshot you take of yourself in a moment when no one else is there to take it for you, and then later you share it with friends.  In it, you show your self.

Hmmm.  Epiphanies are supposed to be glory showings.  And Matthew has quite a number of those, starting with the visit of the Three Kings. The entire town must have been craning their necks to take a gander at the foreign guys, the gifts, the glory, the God-born Child.  But Matthew doesn’t tell the story of the baptism this way (though Luke does).

In all four gospels, Jesus’ baptism is a halcyon moment.  Every year it  comes up in the season of epiphanies.  It is the only answer to the question, How did he get to be the Messiah anyway?, on which all four gospels agree.  But according to Matthew, it’s a Selfie.  If you really want the winnowing fork, and the frenzied clearing of the threshing floor by the Big Man, you will not like the idea that, at least in Matthew, Jesus’ baptism is a Selfie.  But in none of the gospels are the words of blessing any different.  In none does the voice of God say anything about winnowing or threshing, nor are any weapons wielded as part of the baptismal experience.  My Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, that is the image made with water, light, and love.

Perhaps the essence of every baptism is the Selfie that gets filed in the interior page called Who I Am, and then published as a Status update to those around us.

At several critical junctures, this Selfie made it possible for Harry Potter to survive being hated, and being in despair.  In the film, Philomena, a biographical account, a woman travels across an ocean to say to a child she bore fifty years ago, that he is her beloved child.  And the miracle of her own pyschic survival, after horrible shame and mistreatment, is rooted in her deep sense of herself as Beloved by God.  In Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup clenches that name to himself through years of hell.  Pope Francis presses that name with his lips onto every broken body he kisses in St. Peter’s Square.

We understand baptism as a sacrament of the community, yet perhaps the mystery and holiness of it are in the Selfie, in the image that moves into the heart and mind of each of us, when an expected – or unexpected – act of baptism occurs.  What makes the baptismal name, Beloved, powerful for us, is how and when we share it and what struggles it gets us through.  It  is an Epiphany begun in a moment, yet made real over years of time in other moments, as we reveal it to other people and continue to embed it in ourselves, till it becomes so much a part of us that everyone says Amen.

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Illustrations:

1.  John Baptizing Jesus.  Notke, Bernt.  1483. Sankt Annen Museum Lubek, Germany.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

2.  Baptism Icon.  Mid 12th century.  Cappella di Palatina, Palermo, Italy.  vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

3.  Philomena movie poster.

4.  Twelve Years a Slave.  Poster.  Google Images.