Baptism of Our Lord

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

¹⁵ As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶ John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

  ²¹ Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²² and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

. . .

The Ingathering of The Remnants

Grace to you, beloved of God, and peace from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Spirit, the wind, the moving air, the voice of the Lord, sends the Apostles to Samaria to proclaim the good news and catch a few more people fish. 

When the Word became flesh and walked among us in first-century Palestine, full of grace and truth, I am not sure many could wear the label of remnants as much as the Samaritans did. 

According to the biblical account (1 Kings 16:24), the city of Samaria was built to become the new capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel when Omri rose to the throne in the 9th century B.C.E. Later, as the settlement expanded, Samaria became known as a whole region corresponding to what once were Ephraim and Manasseh, two of the original twelve tribes that settled in Canaan after the Exodus. 

In the eighth century B.C.E., approximately 721 years before Christ’s birth, the Assyrian armies invaded the Northern Kindom. The city of Samaria was almost completely destroyed, and many were taken into exile. The Old Testament narrative blames the general population of Samaria for breaking the covenant and worshiping other Gods under the wicked rule of Hoshea, who became a vassal king and was later imprisoned by the Assyrians (2 Kings 17). 

A little over 130 years later, after the Babylonians took over the Assyrians, it was time for the Southern Kingdom of Judah to fall prey to foreign armies and to have Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon destroyed. Regardless of the Judeans’ own iniquities, the people of Samaria were forever demonized for the fall of God’s People, Israel. 

The Samaritans still exist as a religious community today, even if in minuscule numbers. Less than a thousand still gather, most of them in what is today the West Bank. They trace themselves back to the Samaritans of the New Testament and further to a pious sect that survived the Assyrian invasion. They claim the name Samaritan comes from the Hebrew samerin, which means keepers of the Torah. They managed to escape the exile and continued worshiping God and observing the teachings of the Pentateuch in their original land. A true remnant. Their books are a little different from the ones of the Jewish Bible, but they had enough authority to be used by the early church to translate the Old Testament into Latin.

Their origin account, part of their self-identity as people, was denied by the Jewish mainstream and the annals of history, mostly because of the account in the book of Kings (17:25-28) – you are not who you say you are! There, it says that the Samaritans were colonists brought from elsewhere during the Assyrian occupation period.  They ended up being attacked by lions for worshiping their gods, and as a consequence, the Assyrians sent back an exiled Jewish priest to teach them to “worship God.” 

Either way, after the exiled Israelites returned to Palestine and rebuilt the temple, the inhabitants of the region of Samaria remained agents of the Persian interests and later to the Greeks under Alexander the Great, mostly in exchange for keeping the right to worship God in Samaria and not Jerusalem. I suspect that only served to drive the wedge between them and the Jews even further, even if some tolerance for the Samaritans may have developed once they turned against the Greeks. 

In Palestine at the time of Jesus and later the Apostles, we find the Samaritans disinherited, stigmatized, and therefore marginalized by the status quo, yet still keepers of the Torah, still bound to the words of God, still listening to the voice of the Lord.

Not forgotten, though, not by God the Father, not by God the Holy Spirit, and certainly not by Jesus Christ. They, too, were heirs to promise, either originals or by adoption; it doesn’t matter. Everyone who is claimed belongs. Everyone who remains faithful belongs to the promise of salvation, for the voice announced the child born in the manger and wrapped in bands of cloth, a sign of good news of joy for all the people.

The voice of the Lord is a powerful voice. The voice has declared the child a beloved Son. The voice has moved us through the waters. The voice has walked us through fire unharmed. The voice has transformed the landscape. The voice has deposed the proud and self-righteous. The voice of the Lord still gathers the scattered from far away, every daughter and every son, every remnant still precious in God’s sight, to become one flock. He is our God, and we are the beloved children. 

May the LORD give strength to his people!

May the LORD bless his people with peace!