Friday, Part 2: On Jordan's Cruddy Banks I Stand

Mark "Chopper" Read has achieved legendary outlaw status in a land of outlaws. He spent his criminal career operating out of Melbourne, Australia as a "headhunter," a robber who preyed on other robbers. His enemies knew him for tactics like torturing rivals with a blowtorch.  He went inside for a while and ruled Tasmania's Risdon Prison as a personal fief. But he denies the nineteen murders that myth attributes to him: He's killed around four people, maybe seven, tops.

Now he's dying of liver cancer. When New York Times reporter Matt Siegel asked Chopper how he felt about standing before God, he replied, "I think if anything, I'm owed an apology."

This is on my mind because yesterday I stood on the banks of the Jordan River somewhere very near the spot, give or take, where John baptized Jesus. John, oddly enough, didn't think God owed anyone an apology. In fact, he figured it was the other way around. According to Luke 3.3, the Baptizer "came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." He called his congregation vipers, likened them to deadwood fit for nothing but a bonfire. He made them confess their sins and told them in very specific terms the positive behaviors they needed to begin.

There was no mention of God apologizing.

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?" (2 K 5.12) I had a certain sympathy for Naaman the Syrian as I saw - and smelt - the turgid stream that cuts its winding channel between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The viscous brown color and oozy odor bore witness to a slow current and a muddy bottom. It made me glad I've already been baptized. "Roll Jordan, Roll!" Ernest Hemingway's hero, Robert Jordan, chuckles to himself while blowing a bridge in "For Whom the Bell Tolls. "They used to yell that at football when you lugged the ball. Do you know the damned Jordan is really not much bigger than that creek down there below." And it really is pretty small.

John didn't seem to care about anybody's preferences any more than Elisha cared about Naaman's. This was the place and this was the deal: Rebuke, confession, and a duck in a dirty creek.

I wonder, as I look back on that half-hour or so by the Jordan: How many times, if I'm honest about it, have I secretly thought God owed me an apology? I think of all the times I did all the right things, followed the dotted lines my Sunday school teachers laid out for me, obeyed every tenet of Baptist orthodoxy, sang my didn't and danced my did - only to have it all go wrong. Of course I'd never be as bold as Chopper; never say it outright.

God doesn't owe me any apologies. And God has no obligation to customize the path by which God takes me down into self-death and up into the Christ-life. If it means I lose all sight of the light as I sink into the murky circumstances that engulf me; if it means my nostrils recoil at the blunt stench of the decay of my carefully crafted self; if it means shedding my snake's skin and feeling the axe bite into the root of my soul; God owes me no apologies. I owe God an apology; the theological term is repentance.

Of course, the thing to remember is that Jesus doesn't send me into that baptism: He leads me into it. Thus it became him to fulfill all righteousness. And thus he did.