If you are God's son

 

The division of the New Testament into chapters and verses helps identify a quotation or find a text.  But it is has only done so for less than half the New Testament’s life so far.  The division into chapters is attributed to Stephen Langton, the Lincolnshire born Archbishop of Canterbury who pressed King John to grant the Magna Carta in 1215.  The division into verses waited until the introduction of printing and was the work of a bookseller in Paris. 

Each modern version often also includes section headings.  However helpful these prompts by individual publishers might be, they have also never been part of the text.  And each modern ‘lectionary’ also portions up the specific passages for reading at particular services, which means navigating around to find it isn’t always necessary anyway. 

So this Sunday’s reading from the Gospels can be listed as ‘Matthew 3.13-17’, easy to locate by that numbering, even easier to locate if the passage is placed under a heading ‘Baptism of Jesus’ or set out on its own as ‘the Gospel for the feast of the Baptism of Jesus’. 

After it, most Bibles have a short gap, a new chapter number, and often a fresh subheading – making a very firm demarcation from the next story.  It is what will be ‘the Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent’ – which is in six weeks time.  Matthew 3.13-17 is placed at some distance on the page and in time from Matthew 4.1-11.

But, just for a moment, consider the final forty-six words of the first of these passages and the first forty-six words of the second as one continuous text, which is how it was written.

… Jesus immediately

coming up from the water

and behold the heavens were opened

and he saw the spirit of God

coming down on him like a dove

and behold a voice out of the heavens

saying this is my son

the beloved in whom I delight.

Then Jesus was led by the spirit

into the wilderness

to be tempted by the devil,

and having fasted forty days and nights

afterwards he hungered,

and the tempter came near

saying to him if you are God’s son

say that these stones will become bread…

We see at once it is a single story, one poem. 

We see that Jesus’ encounter with the spirit of God is both about God’s delight in him and his being led to the devil almost as one connected act. 

We see the voice from heaven’s ‘this is my son’ quickly paralleled by the tempter’s close by ‘if you are God’s son’.

It is about Jesus and the spirit of God.  The journey begun at Jesus’ baptism is one which lead him to the cross.

But it feels as if it also hints that God’s delight in us is can be intimately, almost necessarily, linked not with a comfort blanket but with exposure to life, to danger? 

It feels as if it hints that the danger might often begin with an ‘if this is true?’?

The human Jesus, the 'problem of suffering', and questions about the nature of Christ all woven inextricably into the text from the very beginning.  And our journey alongside.

The picture is from Bishop Wordswoth’s grave at Riseholme.