Mark 1:9-10
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.
Take note: the heavens don’t simply part in this scene. No, they are torn apart, actually ripped asunder. Why? Because God isn’t simply helping out, tinkering with the way things have always been. God isn’t merely shouting encouragement from the heavens or sending a divine first lieutenant to rally the troops. No, God is getting involved personally, intimately, fully.
Truth be told, this has been troubling to more than a few great thinkers over the centuries. The eighteenth century philosopher and father of the Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, for instance, was so firmly confident of the inviolate rules that govern nature that he couldn’t imagine that God could, or for that matter would, interfere with them. This ruled out for Kant – as well as, quite famously, for Thomas Jefferson – the possibility of anything miraculous, including Jesus’ resurrection. For such would disrupt and undermine the regularity and universality of nature’s rules and principles.
Yet I think Kant had things backwards. When God gets involved in the affairs of humans in such a personal and passionate way, it’s not that the character of the universe is changed but God’s own character. God is creator of all and cannot, I believe, be separated from God’s own good creation. Every atom and molecule of the universe pulses with the presence of its creator. And so when God comes in Jesus it is a return to God’s own, not a disruption of what God (as Jefferson believed) once set in motion and then retreated from.
But think of what must have happened in and to God – the immortal becomes mortal, the eternal is now garbed in the temporal, the divine has become human, and so life itself consigns itself to eventual death. Perhaps the tear in the heavens represents the altering of God’s own experience and nature as God commits God’s own self once again and fully to the human enterprise by affirming that this mortal man Jesus, born of Mary, also bears the full and eternal presence of God.
For centuries God’s people had cried for such an intervention. Perhaps nowhere more clearly than when the prophet Isaiah cries out
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence –
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil –
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence! (64:1-2)
In Jesus, God answers this prayer with not just intervention but incarnation, coming to take on our lot and our life, embracing even our death, so that we would not have to face it alone. So God tears open the heavens and comes down at last. But, as this drama will show, it is not to strike fear into the hearts of God’s people but to draw them back, woo them, even seduce them with love, mercy, and grace. And so God comes down, and we have a hint already at what it will cost God to do so as the heavens themselves are torn asunder as the weight of divine glory and purpose take the shape of a dove and descends on Jesus of Nazareth.
Prayer: Dear God, let us see in Jesus the evidence of your love, as you pour your very self in Jesus and experience in him and through him all that it means to be human. Let us look to Jesus, dear God, and wonder at your love. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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