Muddy Water Men

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, end every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God has not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.  But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.  And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.  And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.  And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And  a river went out of Eden to water the garden . . . .  And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, saying. Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.  And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone . . . .  --Genesis 2:4-18a, KJV

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.  Then went out to him Jerusalem, and Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.  But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, "We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.   And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.  I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire . . . .  --Matthew 3:1-11

The parallels of imagery between the creation of Adam and the appearance of John, once seen, can scarcely be denied.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (Before every plant of the field . . . was in the earth, end every herb of the field before it grew.)

This is (in the gospel application) the river Jordan, in the midst of the desert, and as far as the imagery of watered the whole face of the ground, the gospels stretch the imagery into a horizon of irrigatable plains, with Luke even adding, "Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low."

The Jordan valley--eastward of Jerusalem--though dry and forbidding in Jesus' day, is the parallel of the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And in Matthew,

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

And of course in both accounts we have fruit and snakes and subterfuge and law-breaking and well-deserved wrath--and a muddy-water man who is his generation's mortal "Crown of Creation" (to lift a phrase) shown at once to be an awful majesty of God's handiwork and an awful expression of depravity.  There is Adam, the man of thorns and thistles and the first great sinner, and John the Baptist, the man of locusts and wild honey and of which it is said, "he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."

Recognizing the parallel imagery of the Creation of Adam and the Baptism of John is only of value, however, if the "genesis" of Adam's sinfulness is recognized.  This is the Adam of "It is not good that the man should be alone"--the Adam unable to embrace communion with God, much as John--awestruck though he is by Jesus' majesty--hesitates to embrace Jesus.  This is not so much a recapitulation of "The Fall," as much as it is a recollection of Adam's first estrangement from God--the "It is not good that the man should be alone" moment.  And now we have John the Baptist's turn in the gospels, his--as it were--"Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" moment.

And of course we cannot forget John's "I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham" moment.  From the first family on down, Adam's inability to commune with God his Father has been compounded by our species' foul fascination with earthly lineage.  We are supposed to be God's children, and to be siblings with our first sibling Jesus, and to be bound together by the Spirit of truth.  In this reality reside all the elements of the Trinity, as expressed in the teachings of Jesus.

And so the reality playing itself out in the gospels does not begin with Jesus exulting--as we might imagine--in his baptism by John, but rather with Jesus rising up "straightway out of the water" and into a true Baptism--symbolized by the form of a dove and solemnized by the heavenly voice, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."  This is the baptism truly associated with Jesus, who, as the Baptist says, "shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire."

As Jesus, in this episode of John's ministry, blasts past the ancestral-religion fixation of the populace, one is reminded of the Transfiguration, in which the appearances of ancestral figures are blasted away, leaving the onlookers with God's unadorned pronouncement, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him."

This is why water-baptism is such a misdirected ritual.  Considered carefully, water-baptism makes as much sense as a practice of Jesus' followers as babbling about "we brought no bread" makes sense when Jesus warns his followers about the yeast of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.  The true baptism of Jesus makes sense only in terms of the necessity of his followers refraining, first, from turning their reverence for God into reverence for their own supposed abilities to understand God.  We can understand God no more fully as adults than we can as children--we just learn as we get older to dress our misunderstandings in greater and greater sophistication.

In truth, God is our Father, and this simple realization (independent as it is of the age or sophistication of the believer) must be held to even as we are tempted to find parenthood in our fellow mortals.  This is the second thing from which we must refrain--finding our "family" among our own species, no matter how closely (or whether) they are our blood-relations.  We are of God's family, and imagining otherwise is the greatest of falsehoods.

We are the sons and daughters of God, and we are the siblings of the Son of God, and we are bound by truth above all else.  This reality--this undeniable element of truth--is not made manifest to us by some esoteric teaching, nor has it been hidden from the religions of the world.  At any moment, we can be the effectual children of the merest of babes and the effectual parents of the most aged souls; at any moment, we can be the closest of relations and neighbors to those farthest from us and those most distant--by any criterion--from us.  All of this is held together by the divine.

This teaching is true baptism.  This is what Jesus means when he exhorts his followers,

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.