ADVENT 2—Today’s Gospel reading is from Luke 3: 1-6
Simply, John the Baptist arrives on the scene—administering a baptism in the Jordan calling people to repent—to turn from their current path to faithfulness to God. John grew up with Jesus and thus had a firm idea of what Jesus’ prophetic ministry was about.
Now water cleansing for the forgiveness of sins had its roots in the OT and a long tradition with the people of Israel—but the word baptism came to us from the Greek in the NT baptizo, to dip and described the physical act not the underlying spirituality.
For Jesus, God was immanent, present, now in our midst. The term that might describe this is ***Godness***, where we find the presence of God.
This was an adult rite, a believer’s baptism, a tradition carried on in many Christian communities. Most of us and our children were baptized as infants (a topic for another day). One thought I had was that there is no evidence in the NT of a repeated act of repentance such as one might find in the church’s practice of weekly and or daily confession of sins (also a topic for another day).
The Gospel is the Good News brought by Jesus and that Good News is that the presence of God is at hand, or in language from the OT the Kingdom of God is at hand.
That is the Good News taught and practised by Jesus that God is with us and that loving neighbour is loving God. We need to take care that we listen to and follow the faith of Jesus; what did Jesus say and do? and what did he teach about God?
Unfortunately Christianity has been and continues to be more focussed on belief in Jesus and interpreting his death as a substitution for the sins of humanity, developing doctrine and liturgy with that sole focus and losing sight of that Gospel. Or presenting the Good News only as Jesus death and resurrection.
The Gospel or Good News is about the presence of God in our everyday lives, this is what Jesus taught and lived.
So where is God? When we think of war, poverty, oppression and injustice, we call on God but it is my firm belief that God will not selectively intervene in the laws of nature or the free will of humanity. Up until Jesus taught that the presence of God is in our midst, scripture described a transcendent God, a God coming from up there or out there and many people still think about God as separate and above.
For Jesus, God was immanent, present, now in our midst. The term that might describe this is Godness, where we find the presence of God.
God, that presence, is in the earth, the sky, and the sea, and in all living things. All things, the earth, the sky, the planets, the cosmos are made of God. They flow from God and this means they are made of God, not our familiar ‘made by God’.
We, humans, are not separate creations but part of the continuum of God creating we are items of Godness just as the earth, sea, sky, and all living things. Thus somewhere in our heart/brain/soul is the creative spark of divine life. All the great religions of the world, Hebrew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist given credence to humanity’s quest to be open to oneness with divine life.
Much of humanity might live in blindness about that divine spark, about who we are and where we are going, how we can find hope, peace, and justice when the powers of evil and death rage about us.
The task or challenge for us during this season of waiting and hoping is to find that spark, nurture it, and share it, in our quest to follow the Way of Jesus.