The Gospel story is the account of Jesus’s Transfiguration, Luke 9:28–36. For brevity, the material in brackets was not read during the sermon.
This morning Adriana and Robert Shore have returned to Emmanuel from New York for the baptism of their baby, Ryan Jacob, born last February. Lucky baby: he will grow up with two great legacies, because his mother is Christian and his father is Jewish. His baptism is not only a rich gift for him, but also a timely gift to Emmanuel Parish, perhaps more than his parents may realize.
As most of you know, we have welcomed a Jewish congregation to share our space for some months. They and their rabbi teach us about the bonds that unite and distinguish us. So Ryan Jacob’s visit is part of that great historical healing in our generation that has begun between Christians and Jews and found a home even here.
For that reason, I set aside the usual Gospel and read a different one this morning. In the passage we just heard, God’s blindingly radiant light surrounds Jesus while he converses with Moses, the bringer of the Jewish Law, and Elijah, the first of the Hebrew prophets. And at a key moment, God speaks — no, God repeats — the same words God spoke in an earlier story when Jesus himself was baptized: “This is my well loved Son. Pay attention to him.”
The story is rich with resonance for the healing of Christian and Jewish relations . . . but only if we get the point when Jesus’s glory is revealed, he is not alone. Why is he in God’s light? Why does God speak of his special Sonship? Because he is in continuity with the Jewish law and the Jewish prophets. Because he is “in communion” with Moses and Elijah. Jesus’s relationship with them validates His mission from the Father. Apart from his Jewish roots, Jesus’s Sonship might be suspect. He can embody God’s Word to us non-Jewish Gentiles because, among other reasons, he carries over God’s Word spoken already to God’s first love, the Jews.
The visual point of the Transfiguration may be clearer if I tell a different story. In my childhood, I had a picture of President Eisenhower set in an oval between two ovals of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This setting made the point that our good President legitimately linked us to our founder Washington and our liberator Lincoln — the givers, if you will, of law and of prophecy. In other words, our President derived his mission and purpose from his continuity with his two greatest forebears.
And that is the point — at least part of the point — of the Transfiguration. What Jesus was to become for his followers, Jewish and Gentile, came from his Jewish heritage. So, then, far from baptism turning Christians away from our Jewish heritage, it makes us face and embrace it.
Indeed, baptismal washing, like many of our Christian rituals, was a Jewish ritual before Jesus’s followers adapted it. A Jew baptized Jesus himself. [Likewise, Christians adapted many things first found in Jewish worship — our communion service, our daily psalms, and our great feasts of Easter and Pentecost. Conversely, when Jewish survival was at risk around the year 100, the Jewish leaders abandoned certain things that had grown popular with Christians. Why, even the notion that God might become incarnate had been a matter for earlier speculation among some Jews!]
[This is not to say that Christianity is just Judaism-lite. This is not to deny that there are hard corners to turn in our history.] So Ryan Jacob’s baptism and this Gospel story point us toward beautiful shared truths.
The first, of course, is that God sticks to God’s promises. The promise God made to God’s chosen people, the Jews, is never revoked or superseded. It cannot be, because God said it was an eternal covenant — and God uses that unbroken promise as the model for another promise to another people in Christ.
Ryan is luckier than most anyone here, because Ryan inherits both the first covenant made for the Jews, and the second covenant reaching from the Jewish Jesus to all who call upon his name.
There are two more things which baptism gives, things God promised to the Jews and through the Jews. One is the quest for justice and compassion. Jesus’s gospel of compassion and justice comes to us from the Jewish prophets. When Christians speak truth without fear, when we preach peace to the dogs of war, when we prefer protection for the poor over profit for the powerful, we are following Jesus who learned these things from Micah and Zechariah, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Yes, that locks us into a legacy of suffering. Yes, in fact, that’s what Jesus discussed with Moses and Elijah: the suffering that follows the cause of justice, a suffering the prophets knew all too well. The struggle that the prophets saw sealed in their peoples’ blood, Jesus also sealed in his. The Jewish artist Marc Chagall captured this brilliantly in his painting “The White Crucifixion” that shows Jesus on the cross, his loincloth a Jewish prayer shawl, surrounded by images of Jews fleeing their various persecutors down through history. Yes, written into the history of Jews and Christians alike is the knowledge that God abides with those who suffer . . . and that human suffering may be part of God’s own cosmic suffering.
Finally, Christ gives us in baptism what God gives Jews by other means: the assurance that we are not alone. Remember, baptism means you are part of a community forever. You may leave Christ and the church, but they will never leave you. Just the same way, ask any Jew if they can really stop being a Jew. No. It is the same in baptism: read what we say at the end of the ritual, “you are marked as Christ’s own forever.”
Why does baptism save you from sin? Why does Torah arm you against your enemies? Not because sin and enemies disappear, but because you face them with a power not your own, a power multiplied in the community of faith. In a world where sin and death abound, you have an existential home. It may be a curious home, like something out of the Christian Flannery O’Connor or the Jewish Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yet the craziness is laced with grace, and at least you’re not alone.
Do differences remain? Yes, they always will. Are all truths resolved as one? No, nor may they ever be. Torah belongs uniquely to the Jews. Jesus will never mean to his family of origin what he means to the family he gathered.
Yet the baptism of a Jewish and Christian child lets an old light shine anew: the light surrounding Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; the light of justice and compassion in the Name of a God who is faithful to us all. That’s why the same flame feeds the different lights of Chanukah and Christmas. That’s why the deliverance of Passover and the new life of Easter kindle hope that hovers over both our histories.
Little Ryan, you excite so much hope in us! May the God of Moses and Elijah be with you! May our Lord Jesus Christ be in you! May you teach your parents and us what God wants for our two great traditions. As a member of Christ’s body, as a member of God’s Chosen People, show us the Gracious One whom Jews and Christians alike call Emmanuel, God with us.