If you don’t know, there is a new sauna company opening on the Hancock side of the canal in the next week or so here. When I found out about this, I was so excited. I promise this isn’t a business plug of some kind, but there is just something about a sauna near a lake that really excites me. It is nostalgic for me, who grew up doing saunas at summer camp, or jumping in the snow in our backyard after a sauna at home, or my favorite and a memory I still have an actually visceral experience of—jumping in a hole in the ice post sauna. I think I strangely loved that last version because you couldn’t totally see what was happening. I remember the feeling of my wool socks sticking to the ice as I ran out from the sauna, the inability to totally see what was under all the ice, just the feeling of shocking, refreshing, cold. The deep breaths I would take of cold, almost sharp air. But those post dip-breaths were always so much more fulfilling, deeper, clearer, like I was suddenly using the air in a more invigorating way. And somehow they would make me want to do that whole crazy cycle again.
Last week, the Gospel passage ended with the familiar phrase, “The first will be last and the last shall be first…” And if we want a reminder of just how much the disciples (and if we’re honest us as well) really just don’t get the lessons Jesus offers… James and John here are our reminder.
“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”
Jesus’ kind, perhaps unbelievably patient response is, “What is it you want me to do for you?” They go on to say that they want, they almost demand, a place directly next to him in the age to come. One on his right, one on his left, a reserved spot to co-mingle with Jesus in his glory.
Jesus responds with, “I don’t think you know what you’re asking.”
An important piece of this narrative, something that our lectionary leaves out between last week’s Gospel and this week’s Gospel, is that in between these two lessons and just before the sons of Zebedee ask Jesus for this thing, Jesus—traveling with his followers on the way to Jerusalem— has for the third time told his followers what will be waiting in Jerusalem when they arrive. He says:
“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”
Oof. It is directly after this statement that James and John demand their places next to him.
I don’t think you know what you are asking.
Jesus then asks if they are able to drink the cup that he will drink, be baptized with the baptism he will be baptized with. They, confidently? Maybe eagerly? Say yes. They’re able to do that.
Now, we may recognize the imagery of drinking the cup, the symbol of the Eucharist that we now celebrate. The events we hold in our memory, of Christ giving of his body and blood for our sake.
But you may wonder what imagery of his baptism is doing here. Jesus refers to the suffering he will experience as a kind of baptism—“a kind of immersion in something, being drowned or swamped in something”. And in his question to James and John, that his followers will experience this kind of immersion, too.
In the episcopal church, much of our experiences of baptism have become rather tidy— a beautiful font or a bowl, where we pour enough water to be able to then scoop or sprinkle a delicate enough amount on an adult, or child or baby’s head so that they aren’t kind of drenched for the festivies following the service.
But originally, and often in other traditions or Episcopal churches who have returned to this, baptism was a full immersion experience. John the Baptist baptized in the Jordan River. Historically, people have experienced full immersion in rivers, lakes, streams, oceans. Baptism connects us to the beginning of creation, the womb, the watery chaos—being hovered over by the Holy Spirit. I’m not sure if any of you here were baptized in an immersion style baptism, but the story that it tells is one of holy risk:
To be plunged into water, is to be plunged into the depths. Without air, surrounded by a substance in which we do not have the ability to breathe. In the Jordan River, or in other outdoor varieties of this, the movement of our body might kick up mud or muck, making it cloudy or gritty. A watery, messy, chaos.
This is the depths to which Jesus knows he will have to go: to be condemned to a chaotic, messy death. To the depths of being mocked, spit upon, killed. To the depths of human hurt, grief, and pain.
One of my favorite theologians, Rowan Williams, in his writings on baptism, asks the question “Where might you expect to find the baptized?” And gives the response, “in the neighborhood of chaos. […] in the neighborhood of Jesus—but Jesus is found in the neighborhood of human confusion and suffering, defenselessly alongside those in need.”
So when James and John come to him, after just hearing their version of the neighborhood where the Son of Man is bound to go and what it is he is bound to go through, and ask for a place that is set apart, this is why Jesus names that they don’t get it. They are seeking power, they are seeking recognition, seats of honor, and an ability to rule or at least live from on high. Jesus is trying to get them and the other disciples and us to understand that to follow Jesus is to resist the myth of power and independence; to not push to be more powerful than the waters of baptism, more powerful than the arms that push us under and pull us up. He is offering us with the imagery of baptism, a choice of holy surrender: to God and one another, releasing our desire or demands to be greater than our neighbor or closer to our God. He calls for James, John, the disciples, you, me, to follow him not to the high places of glory and recognition, but to be willing to go into the watery, mucky, grief-filled, messy, chaos. A place we can go because one, we know that God, in Jesus, has been there too, and two because we remember the last part of that prediction: after three days he will rise again.
Rowan Williams also writes: “ Baptism means being with Jesus in the depths, in the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need-but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.”
We emerge from the watery, messy, chaos, recreated and refreshed by God. Probably with a gasping breath of new life, with the words of the Spirit “this is my beloved” echoing through us. Those breaths remind me of how I feel post hole-in-the-ice-dips. They are filled with something holy, something bigger, something that that allows us to choose to go to those depths with God again, and again, and again. Amen.
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