Pre-COVID, I was a prolific traveler. I hit the road whenever possible, usually taking parish groups with me. I hope to do such travel again before too long, and perhaps we can go together. I have been blessed to visit the Holy Land, Malta, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Cuba. Each place I’ve been, I’ve been stopped in my tracks by things special, beautiful, and rare.
Over the course of a decade and a half of such trips, however, I have noticed a subtle but important shift in the way I experience these places. The change was concurrent with the proliferation of the smartphone. Here’s the change: As our pilgrim group would approach a site either serene or sublime, I would immediately pull out my phone and rush to take photos, scores of them. As a result, rather than witnessing God’s creation in a glorious place to which I was very likely never to return, I instead encountered a mere facsimile of that creation through a two-by-five screen. That borders on the absurd. What’s even more absurd is that, upon returning home and viewing my photo collection again, in many photos I’d find, right in front of me, some important element (what the kids today call an “Easter egg”)—a person, a treasure, a wondrous gift from God—that in person I’d missed it entirely—not seen it at all—because I was so caught up in the much smaller world of that pixelated phone. There had been a miracle right before my eyes, and I’d missed it.
Today is the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, and if you were at church last week you may be experiencing déjà vu. Last week was the feast known as the Baptism of Our Lord, and we read Matthew’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan. But here, today, we find another version (John’s) of that same story. Why does the lectionary give us this story twice in a row? Do scholars think we’re so dense as to need a repeated hearing? Well, perhaps it’s not our ears that miss things the first time; perhaps it’s our eyes…
Jesus’ baptism is one of the very few accounts that appears in all four Gospels. And yet, each evangelist describes the tale a bit differently. In Matthew’s account, which we read last week, Jesus is baptized, and the people around Jesus witness the miraculous interrupt the mundane, as the heavens open, a dove descends, and the voice of God speaks. Yet, in John’s account today, it seems that only John the Baptist sees the heavenly scene that occurs at Jesus’ baptism. And if we were to read Mark’s and Luke’s versions of the story, only Jesus himself sees the dove and hears God’s voice.
What are we to take from this? Well, we know that a crowd is gathered around John, listening to his preaching and themselves being baptized by him, as Jesus approaches and is himself then baptized. That is, in and of itself, a very earthy, human, mundane thing. It involves a hot a dusty people, a road weary man who has traveled from Galilee, a muddy riverbank, a splash of water. Everyone sees all that. But what happens next—the wonder, the miracle, the thing that renders this day unlike any other—many if not most miss. Not everyone sees the same thing. Jesus hears the voice of God; John sees the heavenly dove; but most, though looking at what’s right in front of them, somehow miss it all.
How might this be? I suspect most of the gathered people are caught up in their own little worlds, with whatever they bring with them in heart and mind to the riverbank. And I don’t mean to disregard those worlds. Each person gathered at the River Jordan brings concerns of the day, large and small. Someone is sick; someone else is hungry; someone else is preoccupied with conflict at home; and many, undoubtedly, are merely daydreaming either grand dreams or mundane thoughts. Even though they’ve each traveled through the wilderness for the express purpose of being in this most special place, they fail to be fully present, and so they miss it when God does a unique and remarkable thing. No doubt, many leave the River Jordan disappointed, thinking that they’ve been boondoggled once again by some religious charlatan or else castigating themselves for expecting anything out of the ordinary to have happened. When, in fact, it did happen. God did show up; they just didn’t have eyes to see.
I shake my head at the though of myself, privileged as I have been to visit sacred places across God’s good world, yet obsessed in those places with my smartphone’s screen instead of scanning the horizon for the appearance of God’s holy dove. Then I realize that those lost opportunities don’t just happen on pilgrimage. They happen every day. And not just to me. We, each and every one of us, miss epiphanies of God.
A great challenge of our modern world is preoccupation, large and small. One of the biggest preoccupations is, of course, our electronic devices, but beyond these we are preoccupied generally and with all things. We obsess about the past we cannot affect, and we are distractedly anxious about the future that has not yet arrived. In ways large and small, our preoccupation prevents us from being present what is right in front of us, and as a result, we, like the crowd gathered at the River Jordan, risk missing the epiphany of God.
Of the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism, John’s (which we read today) is my favorite, because in John’s version of the story, Jesus departs his baptism along with the other people gathered around the Jordan. Rather than leaving them to meander away, not ever realizing what they’ve missed and wandering blind through God’s miraculous creation, Jesus goes with them and moves through them. When this time the one who will become Andrew the Apostles does finally, vaguely notice something different about Jesus and inquires of him, Jesus says to Andrew, “Come and see!”
Catch that: Jesus does not leave us blind by the riverbank. If we miss the grand epiphanies—if in our daydreaming and distraction, if in our preoccupation with the unimportant, we miss the disclosure of God in our midst—Jesus will nevertheless stay with us and walk alongside us, coaxing us to open our eyes and follow him step-by-step, until we do see. Eucharistic Prayer C, which we will be praying at 10:30 a.m. for the remainder of this Epiphany season, includes the plea, “Lord God of our Fathers: God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us.” That is what this Epiphany season is all about. In our lives, there will be sublime moments, when God parts the heavens and miraculously appears. There will be subtle moments, when Jesus brushes lightly past as we go about our daily business. Will we lose our preoccupations, look up from our smartphones, open our eyes to God at work in the world about us? Will we come and see? If we do, we will gasp in wonder that we are surrounded with grace and blessing, as we discover that God reveals Godself to us all the time.