So What?
What is the etymological opposite of
‘metanoia?’ It is not stubborness nor is it pride (hubris). It
is not staying the same (stasis). The opposite of ‘metanoia’ is
‘paranoia.’ They both share a ‘thinking with’, the
question is a thinking with whom or what? You can tell a religion’s
baseline or fundamental ground by whether it is ‘metanoic’ in
character or ‘paranoic.’ Have you noticed the palpable fear of
much modern Christianity? The fear of losing this doctrine or that dogma?
The fear of leaving this tradition or that theology? The fear of others who
are not like us? Have you noticed this? Have you noticed that far too many
TV preachers capitalize on people’s fears? Or how far too many so-called
‘gospel’ messages nurture fear, particularly fear of the other,
fear of God, fear of death, fear of hell?
Is Christianity paranoid or repentant?
This is our key question for today. When we submit to baptism we are not given
a spirit of fear but the Spirit of One who cries loudly in our hearts, “Abba,
daddy.” When we are full of this Spirit we recognize all life as sacred,
all creation as alive, for God is not a God of the dead but of the Living,
God is the God of Life! So what were we baptized into, metanoia or paranoia?
Anthropological Reading
John the Baptist came fulfilling the
prophetic witness, he was ‘one in the wilderness.’ He came bringing
ritual, a baptism of repentance. We have previously noted the implicit, if
not explicit challenge John’s baptism is to the ingrained sacrificial
system (Temple) and its ideology (sacrifice). For with John’s baptism,
apart from Temple and sacrifice, one could turn to God and be accepted. The
only requisite was that one ‘change one’s way of thinking’
and submit to the waters.
In each of the four gospels Jesus’
baptism stands at the head of his story. Why? Why is Jesus baptized and what
makes this baptism so important? Was this not a baptism of repentance? From
what did Jesus need to repent? Wasn’t Jesus sinless? Right from the
get go in all four gospels we are faced with a major stumbling block.
The author of Matthew’s gospel
felt this problem too. His additions and subtractions from the Markan narrative
are indicators of this. For Matthew, Jesus is baptized ‘to fulfill all
righteousness (dikaiosune)’. Righteousness is a key word in Matthew’s
gospel as much as it is in Paul’s writings. Righteousness in Matthew
has fundamentally to do with obedience to the will of God, the doing of what
is right before God. ‘To fulfill all righteousness’ is Matthew’s
way of saying that what Jesus is doing here in submitting to the waters is
that which is right before God.
From the early church to the most contemporary
scholars, the two part movement of Jesus’ baptism has been noted. He
goes under the water and when he comes up the Spirit of Holiness descends
upon him. This two part movement is so fundamental it carries right through
into the Christian ritual of baptism as can be seen in the epistolary literature
of the New Testament. At the beginning of all things new there is a going
under and a coming up, or as Paul would say, “a dying and a rising.”
Something dies in baptism. That something
is not just ‘us’ in the abstract, it is how we think and perceive
of God, ourselves, others and the creation. It is the ‘noia’ part
of ‘metanoia.’ It is the death of ‘deathly thinking’,
death dealing thinking, the thought processes of the logic of sacrifice. In
baptism, the primordial waters of chaos swallow up our chaos, our chaotic
ways of conceptualizing and from those waters we rise, new, cleansed, whole,
with an entirely new vision of God: God present to us as our Daddy. In short,
baptism doesn’t cleanse us from sins in some abstract mechanical manner,
it washes away the filth and infection of our distorted theologies and the
justifications of all we deem honorable and right and true. The waters of
baptism are the end of sacrificial thinking and action and the beginning of
a new way of relating, as a child to a nurturing parent.
So Jesus submits to this baptism of John’s
pointing the way, his way out of the sacrificial process. It is in these waters
that Jesus will drop any last vestige of his perception of God as one who
authorizes force, violence, power to dominate. It is from these waters that
the filial commendation is made and the right of sonship/daughtership is established.
In these waters, the old passes away and the new comes. Some in the ancient
church thus could refer to baptism as ‘the tomb and the womb’,
the death of death and the birth of life.
In these waters, part of John’s
theology will also die. John still seeks an ancient deliverer full of power
and might, riding a powerful steed, coming with wrath and vengeance. We know
this from the articulation of the apocalyptic side of John’s message
and later from his puzzlement: was Jesus the One who was to come or should
John pin his hopes on another? So from John’s side too, there is a clear
death, the death of his vision, his way of seeing things, his way of perceiving
how God acts. And later what is Jesus message? That his Daddy heals, binds
up wounds, sets captives free and opens the eyes of the blind, yes, even the
spiritually blind. This is the Daddy of the baptism, the lover of the beloved
(ho agapetos), and this carries through the entirety of Matthew’s gospel.
Note again that this is a ‘baptism
of repentance.’ It is a ‘metanoia’ not a ‘metapoesis.’
It is not a baptism for a change in the way we behave first, it is first of
all a change in our way of thinking. Why is this so? Because as Einstein reminded
us ‘everything has changed but our way of thinking.’ If we think
of baptism as the forgiveness of our individual sins we prove to ourselves
that we are still mired in the Cartesian ego, the self-centered self, or as
Luther would say, ‘the cor curvum in se’ (the heart turned in
on itself). If we think this way about baptism we have not yet discerned with
the Liberation theologians that sin is structural and that sin structures
our thinking and our theologies. As long as we take refuge in the delusion
of the autonomous self, as long as we think of salvation and baptism as primarily
individual, as long as we continue to concern ourselves with how ‘I
shall get to heaven’, we have yet to undergo the baptism that Jesus
underwent.
“I think, therefore I am”,
said Descartes. No. The New Testament writers would say, “I think wrongly,
therefore I sin.” To change our way of thinking, to repent, is to return
to the Lord, it is full of ‘shuv’, a return to the pre-chaotic
state of our sinful existence, a return, a coming back to the land, the earth
and thus the maker of heaven and earth. It is a submission to the waters of
creation and recreation. To change our way of thinking as Jesus acknowledged
we must do, it is incumbent upon us to go into these waters ourselves and
to let go of all we hold near and dear in our doctrines, dogmas, rituals and
theologies. If we do this we will find that upon rising from these waters
that the only thing we need we already have, the Love of the Daddy, the maker
of all life, the maker of water.
Historical/Cultural
So much has been written about Jesus’
baptism it is almost useless to try and summarize. So we won’t. There
are no real historical or cultural issues that interest us here today, excepting
perhaps the connections to be found in John’s baptism and the ritual
lustrations of Qumran, on which please see the literature.
Either
this page has not yet been completed, or we have not found any significant textual
issues in the lectionary texts for this Sunday.
What's New: (Hover your mouse over to pause cycling)
Isaiah 42:1-9
Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
I am the LORD, that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to idols.
See, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth,
I tell you of them.
Acts 10:34-43
Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows
no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right
is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel,
preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout
Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God
anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went
about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God
was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the
third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were
chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from
the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is
the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets
testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of
sins through his name."
Matthew 3:13-17
Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John
would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and
do you come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for
it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he
consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water,
suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he 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."
Occasional Articles
As with the Introductory Articles, we
will add other articles as time permits or as our readers request. If you
have a suggestion for anything, please let us know.
Michael Hardin
Is the Apocalypse Inevitable?: Native American Prophecy and the Mimetic Theory presented to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion 2008
Michael's Essay for a Celebration Volume honoring Rene Girard
Michael's Response to Willard Swartley's Covenent of Peace at the November Colloquium and Violence Meeting
Does
Peace Make A Difference? - Michael's essay in response to Rick
Warren's P.E.A.C.E. plan (which somehow never mentions peace).
An Analysis of Rick Warren - Michael's response to "The Purpose Driven Life."
"The
God of Pat Robertson" - a response to Pat Robertson's words
to the people of Dover, PA.
"A
response to Charles Stanley's "A Nation at War"
"Must
God be violent? A Diagnosis and Prescription for Modern Christianity"
The
Scapegoat: Christologies in Conflict - A Study in Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Biblical
Testaments as a Marriage of Convenience: Rene Girard and Biblical Interpretation
Finding
Our Way Home: A Brief Note On The Authority and Interpretation of Scripture
"Does
The Passion of the Christ Preach the Gospel?"
A
sermon for the holiday devoted to Dr. Martin Luther King. (requires
Adobe Acrobat Reader.)
GRASPING
GOD: Philippians 2: 1-11 in the Light of Mimetic Theory
Rene Girard and the Recovery of Early Christian Perspectives (Brethren Life and Thought)
The Dynamics of Violence and the Imitation of Christ in Maximus Confessor (St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly)
"EcoSpirituality"
Or What Happens When You Sit Down With A French Literary Critic
Jeff Krantz
Mighty
One or Crucified Messiah? Competing Christologies and the Chiastic
Structure of Mark's Gospel
There's
No Such Thing as the Rapture - A sermon preached at the Church
of the Advent, Westbury (requires Acrobat Reader)
Holy
Scripture and the Consecration of Gene Robinson - a response
to the request of the Windsor Report for a Scriptural rationale. (requires
Adobe's Acrobat Reader)
Worship - The Redemption of Desire by Jeff Krantz
Myth
and Film - a piece written for the City of Angels Film Festival
The Stations of the Cross - Rewritten by Jeff Krantz
A Dramatic Presentation of the Stations of the Cross for Youth by Barb Fabijan-Waddell
Escaping
the Power of "My" - A NonViolent Approach to Stewardship
Preaching
Peace in Hollywood: The Theologies of Terminator, Lord of the Rings, and the
Matrix
V
for Vendetta - The Name Says It All A review of the movie.
Essays, Sermons and Liturgical Pieces by Friends of Preaching Peace
"Jesus and the Gibeonites: Reading the Bible from the Perspective of the Hidden Victim" by James Warren.
Mark Heim's "No More of This" - A hymn on Nonviolent Atonement
Kate Layzer's "No More of This" - A hymn on Nonviolent Atonement (and inspiration for Mark Heim's hymn!)
Alan Cork, "Transformation" in L'Arche: A Mimetic Account presented to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion 2008
"The Wisdom of God's Peace" a sermon by Jim Amstutz, co-pastor of Michael's church.
Girard's Christology - Per Bjornar Grande
Violence, Anarchy and Scripture: Jacques Ellul and Rene Girard - Matthew Patillo
Comparing
Plato's Understanding of Mimesis to Girard's - Per Bjorner Grande
C. Frank Terhune, an Easter Sermon: "God's Big But" (no kidding!)
Gerald Biesecker-Mast's paper from Theologia Pacis on Pacifist Gospel Epstimology.
An essay by the Rev. John Hill on Mimetic Theory and Catechesis
