Sunday, January 11, 2009

Baptism of the Lord - Year B

Fresco depicting John the Baptist baptising Jesus amongst a crowd of onlookers

The Lectionary reading for the Baptism of the Lord is:
Today's reading is the second lectionary reading of Epiphany, somewhat jarringly to me, it is the first this lectionary year which deals with Jesus as an adult. It's like, Boom! Tuesday he was this baby getting gifts from the 3 Kings, today he's a an adult getting baptised. Speaking of adults getting baptised. I think there is a lot to be said for waiting to be baptised until you are at least old enough to understand what's going on and remember it. Certainly this was the case with Jesus. His parents took him to the temple to be redeemed as a baby, but as we see in theMark reading, it wasn't until he was an adult that he decided he should be baptised.

I recently read an interesting comment on Genesis 1 in a book by Jim Seybert. He points out that God didn't start by thinking about something, planning something, or discussing something, he created something and sometimes that's just what we need to do - create something.

With all the recent readings from and this week about Paul, I'd like to point out an interesting blog post I found about Paul - Declaring War on Saint Paul. Interestingly, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago where I told him (in response to him telling me that he had major problems with Christianity because of Paul) that I thought that most of what Paul had to say needs to be filtered by the fact that he pretty obvously had some serious zeal of the convert stuff going on (particularly with regard to perfectionism) that had he lived longer he probably would have moderated. Then this weekend I've seen several references similar to what I told my friend. It's funny what you find when you start looking for it.
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