The Spirit moves over the waters

Genesis 1.1-5 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Acts 19.1-7 They were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus

Mark 1.4-11 ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’.

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

+

‘In the beginning…’

These words opened our Christmas gospel, as St John unfolded the mystery of the Incarnation and asserted that, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is the fullness of the presence of God, the Creator of all that is.

These words also open the very Bible itself, the Book of Genesis, which we heard in our first reading.

The phrase ‘in the beginning’ is the golden thread that links the Gospel to the Creation: after all, the Gospel unfolds the New Creation in Christ.

‘In the beginning’, as related by Genesis, the primordial waters of the Creation swirl and swell: ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep’. (Genesis 1.2a)

In scripture such waters speak of chaos and danger.

The Hebrew word is ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’ (תהו ובהו)

Lashing rain, the present flooding, the storms along our coastline, and such like, remind us that water unleashed is not benign, but is, as in the flood of Noah, powerful and destructive.

The Great Flood ends with the dove over the waters, with an olive branch in its beak and a rainbow in the sky: hence the prayer that God would ‘drown sin in the waters of judgement’.

And recall, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descended on Jesus in the waters of the Jordan: connect that with Genesis, ‘the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters’. (Genesis 1.2b)

The Creator God, in Christ, steps into the chaos and danger, into situations of darkness, turmoil and doubt and the Creator Spirit descends to bring purpose, creativity, beauty and life.

The Spirit brings order to the chaos so that the Creation unfolds with purpose.

So we can say God’s Creation is not a meaningless soup of random happenings, not a ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’, but a gift of life, in which is revealed the face of God: the formless void is given form and is filled by the Creator Spirit.

In the spiritual life - our life committed to Christ - we should invoke the Holy Spirit to guide us through the turbulent waters of life, as we whisper in prayer: ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire…’

This takes us, then, to the River Jordan.

In that river John had been baptising and using its waters to wash away sin for those who came to repent, those who wished to redirect mind, body and spirit away from the formless void of life without God, and find their lives healed, forgiven and restored.

Into that water steps the creator and true redeemer.

Jesus Christ plunges into the waters, signifying the New Creation to be inaugurated in human lives when joined with the life of the Holy Trinity.

This is the root of our forgiveness; the depths of his love.

As the Spirit moved over the face of the waters so the same Spirit descends upon Christ in the Jordan and the Father speaks - again.

In the beginning he spoke the words ‘let there be light’ now he declares to Jesus, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

The Baptism of the Lord inaugurates the New Creation.

And we are drawn into this New Creation through Christ, in the power of the Spirit.

By our own baptism we are plunged into the destructive-creative waters: waters that destroy sin and grant life.

So baptism is a gift and challenge.

It is open to all, yet it is also disruptive and purging.

It is a free gift, but not to be treated cheaply;.

This is the warning to us of what we heard from the Acts of the Apostles: don’t cheapen your baptism, but inhabit it, fulfil it, embrace it.

If we think baptism is a splash in some water and a nice symbol - as clearly some concluded, even from the baptism of John - then we find that the Holy Spirit of God demands more of us, drives us and confirms us in our faith.

When we leave the Holy Spirit out of our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ we make a mockery of the faith entrusted to us by the saints and we are destined to be tossed around in the ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’, the dark, swirling waters.

The Baptism of the Lord tells us that our own baptism is at the confluence of two mighty rivers: of repentance and of the strengthening Spirit.

It is where the nature of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity is revealed - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and where we are incorporated into God’s life.

To be a Christian is to overcome, with Christ, the swirling waters of the ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’: anticipated by Jonah whose three days in the belly of the great fish prefigure Christ’s resurrection; like the disciples when the storm is stilled (Mark 4.39); like Peter who is commanded to ‘put out into the deep and let down your nets’ (Luke 5.4) so that the waters of creation are not a terror but fill the nets of our lives like the nets teeming with fish; revealed by Christ himself who walks on the waters and is not consumed by them (Matthew 14.25).

Let us pray, as we seek to be faithful to the implications of our own baptism, that the Holy Spirit would descend on us as we struggle in the swirling waters of life with our fragile grasp of faith, so that in the Name of Jesus we may hear the call of the Father, as did the Sinless One at Jordan’s River.