Today’s Gospel places us at the Jordan River. Jesus is before us in the muddy waters, John standing with him, reluctantly. We hear them exchange words, the wind in our ears, and see John nod. Then we watch as he pushes Jesus down into the flux.
Matthew tells us that as Jesus arises from the water the heavens are torn apart. He tells us John (if no one else) sees the Spirit descending to alight on Jesus (his head? his hand?), which makes us think of Noah’s dove that alighted on the renewed creation after the flood. At that very moment, a heavenly voice speaks (to whom? for whose sake?): “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We’re left to ask who heard the Voice. Do we? Did we?
All told, Matthew’s Gospel gives us five voices.
The opening scenes unfirl almost entirely in the dark, in silence. That silence is broken suddenly, and the darkness deepened, by a chorus of anguish— mothers crushed by the loss of their sons:
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
Mt 2.18
Years and years pass, mostly unremarked, before another voice is heard. It, the second voice, speaks out of the depths of the deep dark: ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mt. 3.3). Shortly, the light at last breaks—with the sounding of that Voice that spoke over Jesus in the muddy Jordan: “And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3.17). Later, at the Transfiguration, the moment that foreshadows the cross, that light deepens to an impossible brilliance so bright it cannot but be experienced as darkness: “…suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Mt. 17.5).
Notice what the fourth voice says. Listen to him. Listen to him.
Earlier, near the middle of the Gospel, after Jesus has worked wonders and the crowds have flooded to him, provoking some of the Pharisees to conspire against him, he makes a momentary escape, ordering those he has cured not to breathe a word about him and his agenda. Matthew interjects that it is in this way that Jesus is fulfilling an ancient prophecy:
Here is my servant, whom I have chosen,
my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smouldering wick
until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the Gentiles will hope.
Mt. 12.18-21
These, then, are Matthew’s voices. The voice of Rachel, a mother’s voice, sounding Israel’s cries of lamentation against the violence of the powers, and the voice of John, a prophet’s voice, sounding the call for Israel’s repentance. The voice of the opened heavens, sounding the Father’s adoration of Jesus, the Son. The voice of the overshadowing cloud of light, sounding again the Father’s delight, and calling the apostles—and us—to attend to Jesus’ words. Two human voices, a woman’s, a man’s. And the divine voice, heard twice. Jesus, of course, speaks both humanly and divinely. Speaks the divine humanly and the human divinely. One voice leads us to the next. The last cannot be heard without the first. The voice of Rachel calls for the voice of John. The voice of John attunes us to the voice of the opened heaven. The voice of the opened heaven prepares us for the voice of the cloud. The voice of the cloud demands us give our ear to the voice of Jesus. But Matthew requires us to remember this: Jesus’ voice cannot be heard in the streets. Where, then, is he to be heard? And how?
Matthew shows JEsus to us as a new Moses, a figure whose wisdom cannot be resisted. And yet—only once in the Gospel is Jesus heard in his own voice. And that comes right at the end, in Jesus’ last breaths:
And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Mt. 27.46
Jesus speaks often in the Gospel, of course. He teaches often in the streets, as well as off them. In fact, Matthew gives us five “discourses”—huge blocks of dense teachings, thematically arranged. But again only once is Jesus said to be heard in his own voice. On the cross, that moment foreseen in the light of the Transfiguration, as he is dying, he takes up Israel’s lamentation, makes it his own. He cries out his last breaths in a burst of intercessory grief. God’s voice, spoken in a fully human way, sounds at first like Rachel’s wailing.
This, I believe, is the truth of how God “saves” us. As we learn to hear God in Jesus’ voice, as we learn to listen to him, we are righted, enlivened, delivered to ourselves. But in God’s mercy that deliverance depends upon the turning of our hearts and our bodies to the cries of the poor, the wronged, the desperate. So, if we want to hear Jesus, if we want to learn the sound of his voice, it is because we have let ourselves be shepherded by compassion toward those whose lives are breaking or broken. Then, only then, do we have ears to hear the voice of the Father, the voice of the opened heaven, the voice of the unapproachable light, telling us that we, too, are desired, cherished, delighted in—exactly as Jesus is, exactly as the poor are.
Thanks to what has happened to Jesus, baptism is for us a sacrament of rapture. To enter into his baptism is to be enraptured with him into the Father’s joy, swept up into the light of our own loveliness and belovedness. But that rapture begins, experientially, in rupture.
Now, for many of us, raised in Christian societies, baptism seems to make little to no difference at all. But if indeed it is a mystery, a sign that does what it signals, because it is something God is doing with creatures given and received in their fullest, then to be baptized is to be made to share Jesus’ existence. (As Rahner says in one of his prayers, “When we were baptized, a new chapter in Your life began; our baptismal certificate is a page from the history of Your life.”) And given that that is true, it should not surprise us in the least that as we come more and more aware of what God has done in Christ, we’ll find that the future is opening to us in ways that dramatically rework our shared and separate pasts into a new present, one that alters our presence and alerts us to the presence of others—especially those who’re easiest to overlook.
Finally, then, this is what it means to hear Jesus speak in his own voice. It is to listen closely enough and long enough to him to learn from him how unbearably lovely we all are—every one of us, along with any and every thing we have offered in thanks.
Chris, what piercing insight and what a full picture of baptism as the place our voice, all our weeping l, tears, pain, anger, and idle word go down into the depths of themselves only to hear the greater voice in the water. Baptism then, if I’m hearing you correctly, is the place God in Christ takes our “Rachel” voice and assumes it so that now when we go under the water our voice of pain and sorrow becomes a song. Baptism, like the cross, is the meeting of heaven and earth, where Christ speaks our words back for God to heal us and then gives us His own Spirit so that we may now life up our voice and call His Father our own. Bless you!
Thank you for this .... studying the voice of the Lord vs the white noise of sounds that try to drown out his utterances. Yet I feel so wooed by His voice that is calling us... Deep calls us to the deep... Baptism has always held a great significance.... this speaks volumes