[Propertalk] 1 Epiphany c - 2

[Robert P Morrison]

Part 2:

	 Had Jesus NOT gone to John; had Jesus thought it an unnecessary step
in His vocation; had Jesus not responded to a prompt from God, and NOT
dedicated His life to God in that public way, none of those there
would have recognised Him. I mean REALLY recognised Him.

	 I’m not saying that everyone did back-flip, just as the unborn
John did twenty-some years previously. Whenever there’s some sort of
revelation, there are always those who are looking the other way,
insisting on telling a joke or attracting attention to themselves.
There were – there still are – those who’d do anything and
everything to deflect attention from others and draw it to themselves.
And, still, there are folk who DON’T, who WON’T see the sign, who
don’t hear a word, who won’t quiet down enough to hear something
as gentle as a Dove’s wing beat in the air and cross the scene, who
miss the flash of light that may have illuminated Jesus’ face, even
if only for a moment.

	 But to those who saw, who head, who noticed, however puzzled they
may have been, SOMETHING may have registered. At least they may have
begin to comprehend that Jesus was someone to watch.

	 So if Jesus HADN’T gone to the river; if Jesus hadn’t gone into
the river; if Jesus and John had, somehow, not connected and Jesus
hadn’t affirmed His obedience, then He wouldn’t have been
recognised by the crowd that was there.

	 Or, quite like, by us.

	 There’s an interesting phenomenon about life on this earth. We
lived in a closed system. In other words, what we see, what we
experience through our senses, stays within the system. It may be
transformed in one way or another, to our detriment or our benefit,
but it stays. Water, the basic cushion of our lives, like John’s and
Jesus’ amniotic fluid; water is here in a finite capacity. What
Jesus stepped in, what cascaded over Jesus, as well as everyone else
that day, is intermingled with the water that exists today. Each
molecule has a role to play, and each molecule impacts others, which
impact yet others, and so on, till we discover that all the molecules
of hydrogen oxide which fell on to Evangeline’s forehead on
Christmas morning have a relationship to those which touched Jesus.

	 And so it is with people. Those who listened to John and crowded
around him; those who saw this nondescript affirm as they had; those
who saw a Dove hovering overhead; those who sensed God’s
spectacularly happy approval of what was going on; ALL of those people
interacted with others, who interacted with others, who interacted
with others, who interacted with others, and so on, until we discover
that we have been touched, comforted, healed, corrected, affirmed by
people whose lives are connected directly to Jesus as He stood in the
Jordan.

	 THIS is why Jesus came to John. THIS is why people, or at least some
people, finally recognised Jesus. THIS is why we now have to make it
possible for other people to hear, to see, to feel, to taste and
discover how God loves every last one of us, and calls us to minister
to every other single person – no matter whether they seem to be
always in the midst of a crowd or on the fringes.

	 As John had a role to play in the revelation of Jesus, so we too
have a role to play in the revelation of Jesus – so that our eyes,
our hearts, our minds, our hands can be opened further and further,
until there’s no one we haven’t touched whom we might touch.

	 Mt friend, Louie Clay, relayed what one of his friends experienced
recently in London.

	 “My wife and I were sitting in the second-from-the-front pew (yes,
we are Episcopalians anyway!) at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in London,
the parish church of the Royal Family and the Admiralty. In the row
behind us there was a man who looked and smelled as though his last
bath was at infant Baptism. He made loud unintelligible comments to
the sermon by a recently-ordained woman priest. After he received
Communion he turned in the nave and gave the finger to the priests
(probably had not gotten enough wine). No one seemed to notice. At the
end of the service his hand was shaken like everyone else's. Those are
my kind

	of people!” 1

	 You and I have to extend more than one finger. We have to extend our
whole hand, all of who we are, to even the most strange, or the most
innocuous, or the most indistinguishable person – because Jesus
walked to the river; and stood in the crowd, IN the river; and looked
John in the eye; and said, “Yes” for all who were, and all who
are, and all who will ever be in creation.

	 We can do no less.

	NOTE:

	[1] Lane Brown, via Louie Crew, on Facebook.

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