Christmas Weekday
On the heels of Christmas day and the celebration of God made flesh, the authors of this week's scripture readings have been doing all in their power to get us to see the truth of the gospel. Like us today, they knew that it was not an easy thing to believe that God had become man. Even if a person accepted that idea, it was a tough pill to swallow to learn that this God-man had died a humiliating death on the cross. Or further still, that when believers suggested this God-man had risen from the dead, this was no mere ghost, but the actual man himself.
Sometimes we forget, I think, that ours is not the first age when people have had doubts about the life of faith. But the authors of today's readings both know that people have doubts, and they also hope that by reflecting (hard) on those doubts, we will come to believe even more in Christ. So the readings today (and this week) are focused on witnesses - real people, real events, real testimony, that helps us see that Jesus' life, death and resurrection is no mere mirage, nor is it some kind of massive hoax or 500-person hallucination.
So those are precisely some of the questions the author of the First Letter to John deals with (1 John 5:5-13). He is responding to those who doubt that Jesus is the savior of the world. In his response, he mentions water, blood and the Spirit, which have several meanings all related to appeasing peoples' doubts.
For instance, many Christians reading this passage interpret water and Spirit in relation to Jesus' baptism, and Blood as referring to Jesus' death on the cross. The relationship between these three things and our own baptism is direct and important. We, too, are baptized in water and the Spirit, and when we are baptized, we are baptized in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We die to our old lives and rise again to new life in Christ. This reading is enhanced by today's gospel reading (Mark 1:7-11), which depicts John the Baptist speaking about baptism and about one coming after him who is far mightier than he is.
Readers of this letter might then turn to reflect on the many, many, many people who have been baptized through the ages, and who have risked even their lives to be baptized. They did not risk persecution or death (or in our day, perhaps ridicule and looking foolish) for something that wasn't real. So the fact that so many people have seen Jesus' life, death and resurrection as real events might lead others to believe.
Yet it is not only other peoples' witness that the author identifies. He says that God himself gives witness to the truth of Jesus by water, blood and the Spirit. God the Father speaks from the heavens at Jesus' baptism; the Spirit is also there. Jesus, as God, dies on a cross. So the author admonishes people: you do not want to call God a liar, do you? As we look forward to the Church's celebration of Jesus's baptism this Monday, this is an important reading.
But we are also still in the season of Christmas and these scriptures give us yet another opportunity to reflect on the crazy but wonderful and amazing Incarnation of God. Another way to understand water, blood, and Spirit is to remember that all of those three things are present at Jesus's birth. We are confronted, once again, with what it means that God himself is born through water and blood, by the Holy Spirit.
Yes, it seems crazy. The author of 1 John knows this well. But what he is also getting at is that the whole idea - the whole entire story - is just crazy enough that no human being could possibly have conceived of it. What human would have the idea of having God come as a human being, only to have that God killed on a cross? In these last days of Christmas, the question we are invited to answer is whether we, too, want to testify that Jesus is the Son of God?
- Jana M. Bennett