Mark's Epiphany

Sunday after Epiphany, Year B; Mark 1:4-11

The Feast of the Epiphany tends to get lost in a world when only a few feasts—like Christmas Day—can break through the pattern of keeping Church to Sundays at most. With the twelve-day period of the Christmas feast having been weakened by its secular anticipation all through Advent, even many Christians are likely to think the whole thing is over soon after December 25th. Then, when two Sundays later we read of an adult Jesus coming for baptism, it just seems to confirm that we have moved into a different phase of reading and celebration, far from the child of Christmas and without needing any Epiphany.

In fact this Gospel of Jesus’ baptism is an extension of the Epiphany, even if that isn’t immediately obvious. While western Christians think of the Epiphany as commemorating the coming of the Magi, elsewhere it has been observed as a feast of Jesus’ baptism. The link is in the meaning of “Epiphany,” manifestation, appearance, or revelation.

When feasts of the incarnation began (apparently in the late third century), two different dates had appeared as calculations of Jesus’ birth: December 25th in the West and January 6th in the East. After a century or so, a compromise was reached where the feasts were exchanged and shared across the Mediterranean, with different emphases on the two days. Yet while the western version was as just noted, with Luke and manger on Christmas, and Matthew and Magi at Epiphany, in eastern Churches the second date has had quite different connotations.

For many Orthodox Christians, January 6th commemorates Jesus’ baptism, and is called “Theophany”—“the manifestation of God.” The Armenian Church never adopted December 25th at all, and keeps January 6th as the feast both of Jesus’ birth and baptism, seeing the two as deeply linked. The Roman and hence the Revised Common lectionaries have appropriated this tradition up to a point, by placing the story of Jesus’ baptism on this First Sunday after the Epiphany. Roman Catholics refer to the day simply as a feast of “The Baptism of the Lord,” but without deeper understanding this undermines the intended link with Epiphany, and can lead to the assumption that the theme of the day is somehow about baptism itself.

An adult Jesus in the Christmas season—which is what we are talking about, really—is of course curious. Why the baptism story here? Mark’s version, presumably the earliest, provides the clearest answer. Without either infancy narrative or interpretive prologue, this terse beginning has both John and Jesus “appear” or even just “take place” (the same word is used for both in vv. 4 and 9) as the start of the whole Gospel. This is, in effect, how Mark presents something like Christmas (and Epiphany).

The very first statement this Gospel makes about Jesus is this:

It happened that in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

Baptism of Jesus; “Arian” Baptistery, Ravenna; Ввласенко, Wikimedia Commons

What follows provides an equivalent to what the other Synoptics offer in the quite different form of the infancy stories. Jesus sees the heavens “torn open” (a unique idea here in Mark—there is no direct scriptural model or comparison) and the Spirit descending like a dove. Then the voice is heard proclaiming Jesus’ sonship.

Mark has sometimes been seen as providing a sort of “adoptionist” view of Jesus here, wherein the baptism constitutes a kind of shift from human status to divine. This view is too dependent on ideas originating in 18th or 19th century philosophy and theology, that assume the enlightened man Jesus started out like the rest of us but reached or was given a sort of divine status. Mark’s Gospel in particular, without infancy story or Prologue, is then read as the picture of that man Jesus, before Christian theology got well-enough organized to invent and impose ideas like pre-existence. In this view, the divine voice at the Jordan seems to perform a kind of transformation, making Jesus what he was not.

We should not ignore how the baptism scene constitutes a moment from which Jesus’ divine sonship goes forward; it has real significance. The voice may allude not just to Psalms (e.g. Ps 2 where kingship is identified with divine sonship), but with the call of a prophet (see Is 42:1, where the servant of God is given the Spirit).¹

Uniquely among the baptism accounts, Mark’s version presents Jesus with a (fairly rare) moment of subjectivity; it is Jesus (alone) who sees the parted heavens and the dove. Yet more fundamental to Mark, as we shall see while reading this Gospel through the year, is that Jesus’ identity as divine son will not be generally available or understood—at least until the Cross, when he can be seen as “son of God” by others (15:39). So this “private” revelation at the baptism is less related to Jesus’ religious experience than to our own.

And in Mark we have no Jesus before this very moment of the baptism, since it is the very first thing he does; unlike other ancient stories adduced as supposed parallels, where the protagonist receives a divine gift or call (such as a figure like Aesop being given a divine gift that transforms his life and work), there is no back-story in Mark to provide the “before” to which this episode can introduce an “after.” Any Jesus we add “before” this has nothing to do with Mark’s Gospel. And if we did go back the few verses we are able, we would find standing at the top of the page “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

So it is more plausible to read the baptism story as the “manifestation” of Jesus’ identity, even allowing for that subjective element noted, rather than as a radical shift in identity. For Mark, anything Jesus realizes at his baptism is what, and who, he always was.

This is why the baptism story in Mark does amount to an Epiphany or even, very broadly speaking, a Christmas story. Mark accomplishes in these few verses, centered on a divine theophany at the Jordan rather than with Magi, what Matthew and Luke tell via colorful narratives, and what John presents in the mysterious hymn of the logos; that Jesus is the Son of God, who has come into the world to preach good news.

1. Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, 149.