Monday, June 8, 2009

The Spirit and Baptism

While I was pleased (at least doctrinally) with my sermon on Jesus' baptism yesterday, there was one exegetical point that really stood out to me that I was unable to capture.
Eugene Boring (a greater name for a biblical scholar I have yet to hear) points out that the Spirit comes to Jesus as he stands in the shallows of the Jordan just as the Spirit came to hover over the waters of creation. Boring (and Bruner) see in Christ the beginning of God's new creation. Whereas God had threatened extinction in the flood and wrought something somewhat new (or at least reclaimed) in the family of Noah and later the family of Abraham, in Jesus God was truly doing something new. In Jesus, the Son of God made flesh, God was creating a people with and by the Holy Spirit.
Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, states, "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new!" (5:17 NRSV). In Christ Jesus God inaugurated this new creation and through faith in Jesus, we are made new. Oh, we have fits and starts as the Holy Spirit works in us, but in God's eyes (and this is the most important perspective) we are already new.
Let us all live in the new way, the way of Jesus Christ as revealed in sacred Scripture.