image: Arian Baptistery in Ravenna When I hear today’s story of the baptism of Jesus, what often comes to my mind is a stained-glass window in the Anglican church of St Luke Toowoomba. It was certainly a handy teaching aid over the years I presided at baptisms there. After all, there is much truth in the well-known saying that a picture can paint a thousand words. That is certainly a strength of churches like St Luke Toowoomba, which also has a number of other even more significant stained-glass windows, accompanying its Gothic Revival architectural features. Not all those windows are also reflections of other ages on another continent. The great western window above the baptistery is a particularly beautiful contemporary stained-glass window. This, with its mandala-resonant patterns, highlights a wide range of Australian animal, cosmic, and other natural features, and resembles a kind of dot-painting as a whole. The church is thus in some ways a veritable picture book, as well as a key city centre space for worship, music and other artistic and festival events. In a similar manner, our current liturgical season of Epiphany is also like a picture book. It too contains various images to encourage and challenge us: significant stories which are icons of God’s love. Let us therefore reflect today on the baptism of Jesus, which is a particularly powerful icon of God’s love, and of our beloved place within it. Indeed, in some Orthodox traditions, it is much more important than the birth narratives of Jesus. After all, they are an amalgam of different stories in only two Gospels, whereas the baptism of Jesus appears as a vital narrative in all four Gospels. Crucially, for example, in the Synoptic Gospels it is found immediately before the stories of Jesus’ temptations. Its central declaration of the beloved-ness of Christ, and our associated beloved-ness, is therefore the vital antidote to the threats and traumas of our world. Let us then look at three particular features of today’s iconic story, with the aid of three significant contemporary painters of the scene, and, thereby, encourage us too to share and become icons of divine beloved-ness ourselves…
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