Baptism of Christ/Plough Sunday

 

Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

 

Today is the day in the Church’s calendar when we remember the Baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan, the first time he’s publicly acclaimed as the Messiah.  But it’s also traditionally known as Plough Sunday, the day before Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany. Plough Monday was the day when agricultural labourers were expected to go back to work after the twelve days of Christmas. It was the beginning of the farming year when they would start ploughing the ground ready for seed sowing. It was a hungry and uncertain time for many, with food supplies dwindling. Many people were casual labourers, relying on finding work day by day. Bad weather could mean there was no work, and families could easily be plunged into destitution. They were all hoping and praying that the year would start well, that there would be work and food in these coming, harsh months. So on Plough Sunday they brought their ploughs to church to be blessed, and sometimes dragged them around their villages too, hoping to be hired but also begging for money to tide them over when there was no work. Some parishes had their own plough, kept in the church, to lend to those too poor to buy their own. Philip and I have occasionally come across a few of these parish ploughs still on display in country churches, though I doubt whether they are used!

 

My guess is that most of us won’t be doing much ploughing in the days to come, but that “return to work” feeling is still very real at this time of year. This coming week is the first full working week of the New Year – no more bank holidays until Easter. Children are back at school, and those tasks we have been putting off until “after Christmas” are now getting harder to ignore. January and February can often feel grim , even if we don’t have to work outside. It’s grey, cold, damp, with not much to look forward to. Even in the best of years, we can feel like we’ve come down to earth with a bump – and, let’s face it, this year is not likely to be the best of years. Covid cases are still very high, food and energy prices are rising, many jobs and businesses are increasingly insecure, and many people are just exhausted. The tough times seem to grind on and on, with no promise they will end any time soon.  

 

But today’s Gospel story of the Baptism of Christ, might offer a bit of help. As I said earlier, this moment - Jesus’ baptism - marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. We know very little of his early life, apart from one story of him staying behind in the Temple in Jerusalem, much to Mary and Joseph’s alarm, when he was twelve years old. We assume that he was simply growing up, like any other child, learning Joseph’s trade, working alongside him. But now here he is, among the mass of people who have come to John for baptism.

There’s nothing that obviously singles him out. But John somehow knows who he is, and this is the moment when Jesus steps out of the crowd, identified by the dove and the voice from heaven. Nothing will ever be the same again. It all starts here – this is his Plough Monday moment – when he steps out into the work God has called him to do. And for all that there will be joy and love and blessing in his ministry, there will also be hard work, challenge, pain and fear. Whether he likes it or not, there is no going back. 

 

In one sense, Jesus doesn’t need to be baptised at all. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, washing away sin. Christian faith has always proclaimed that Jesus had no sin to wash away, so his baptism, one of the few stories recorded in all four gospels, is a theological puzzle. But for Jesus, this baptism seems to be essential – in some of the Gospels, John tries to refuse, saying that Jesus should be baptising him, and that is implied in what he says here too, but Jesus is determined. Being baptised is his way of showing that he is with us, fully part of this world, one with us in his birth, his death and resurrection, but also in the mundane ordinariness of daily life, prepared to get messy, prepared to get washed. So John baptises Jesus, and as he rises from the water, a dove descends on him, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, and a voice from heaven says “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased”.

 

Most of us when we start a new job or take on a new role suffer a bit from “imposter syndrome”, wondering how we came to be there, waiting for people to discover that we don’t know what we’re doing. We need affirmation. Reading the Gospels, it’s clear that Jesus was sometimes daunted, afraid, exhausted by the challenges he faced too, as we are, but this voice from heaven is the ultimate endorsement, a sign to him and to those around him that God is with him, working through him, however unlikely that might look or feel. We often find him listening for that voice as his ministry unfolds. We hear of him withdrawing to pray, but it wasn’t just in those quiet, private moments that he sought his Father’s presence. He also looked for it in the people he met. You might be a tax-collector, a Samaritan woman at a well, a leper, a grieving widow, a grubby child. Everyone else might write you off, but Jesus looked for – and found - God in you. He told his followers that if they couldn’t find God at work “in the least of these, my brothers and sisters” they wouldn’t be able to find him anywhere. He approached life as if every person, every place, every moment, was a gateway to heaven, and so it was.

 

I don’t know what the coming week will bring for you, what furrow you will be ploughing on your own Plough Monday tomorrow. You might be at work. You might be at home caring for others. You might be retired, and feeling at a loose end, or so busy you wonder how you ever had time to work. You might be living with long term disability or sickness; it might take all your time and energy just to get by. I hope there are some bits of your daily reality, whatever it is, that you enjoy, but there are bound also to be people we don’t get along with so well, tasks we’re bored by or wish we didn’t have to do, things that make our hearts sink rather than sing.  What would happen, I wonder, if whenever one of those “heart-sink” moments loomed,  we wondered to ourselves “where might God be in this?” How might it change those tough times if we believed that every person, every place, every moment might be a gateway to heaven for us, somewhere we could find the light of Christ, the glory of God, hidden beneath the drabness and the difficulty. It’s worth a thought, worth a try. It can’t do any harm, and it just might transform our lives.

 

Ploughing our own furrows matters, whatever sort of furrows they are. Sowing the seed matters. Turning up for work matters. Caring for those who we have responsibilities towards matters. Engaging with our communities matters. Our daily reality matters. Our day to day callings may be different from one another but in his baptism, Jesus reminds us that whatever we go through, he goes through with us, showing us heaven right here on earth. God speed the plough. Amen