Water Into Wine. Tom Harpur
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to do with the kind of message that conservative preachers constantly proclaim. It’s not about “the blood of Jesus,” the Cross or even being “born again.” The Mark text explicitly says the Good News is the reality of the Kingdom, the reality of God’s presence in power in the world and intimately in one’s life.
Before going any further, we should notice that earlier, in Luke’s Gospel, he tells the mythical story of how Mary, upon learning that she is with child, goes to visit her relative Elizabeth. Though of advanced years and well beyond child-bearing age, Elizabeth has also conceived a son and is already in her sixth month.3 Thus, we learn that John and Jesus were six months apart in age. From the point of view of the astronomical allegory, this is of crucial importance:
1) Elizabeth is yet one more example of the many women throughout the whole of the Bible who conceive in a miraculous fashion in their senior years. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, the mother of Ishmael and Isaac, is one. You may remember she laughed at the angel’s message. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” In Hebrew, the name Isaac means “he laughs.”4 The mother of Samson is another, as is Hannah, the mother of Samuel. The meaning is clear to those who understand the esoteric sense of it. We must return here to the belief of the ancients in several accounts that there were three evolutionary stages before the emergence on the scene of the human animal soul and finally the Christly or spiritual soul. First came the mineral, then the vegetative, then the animal, and finally, after “ages of ages,” the dawning of self-reflective consciousness and the flame of divine fire within. The aged women reflect or portray this fourth or “late in time behold him come” theme, as the familiar Christmas carol puts it so well. We will see later also how the story of Jesus coming across the water “in the fourth” watch of the night—just before the dawn—makes the same point.
2) The sixth-months-apart aspect is making the significant point that, in the earlier astronomical allegory, the natural man, who rises under the sign of Virgo on the eastern horizon, gives way six months later to the spiritual man or Christ, who is born on that same horizon in the sign of Pisces, the fish. Eventually, as the evolution of our soul continues, the natural man is surpassed by the spiritual. This is the meaning behind the Baptist’s words in John’s Gospel: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”5
Baptism Means Claiming Our Divinity, Not Removal of Sin
In Mark we read:
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:9–12)
That such a baptism had nothing whatever to do with sin is transparent from both the text itself and from the fact that the sinlessness of the Jesus character in the drama is vigorously maintained in all of the New Testament.6 In John’s Gospel, the Evangelist is in fact obviously embarrassed by this whole event from that point of view and tries to explain it all away or at least to downplay it. Water, as we have seen, symbolizes a number of things, but principally it is the symbol of matter. Since our bodies are made up largely of water, the soul was thought of as held fast in a watery dungeon. It was a kind of death. When Jesus goes down into the water, representing the divinity in every one of us, his immersion symbolizes this central fact of Incarnation. The soul accepts the lot and the struggle of being human—a blending of spirit and matter—in order to expand through experience on this plane. Those who believe in reincarnation hold that it may take several or even many lifetimes to gain all the experience necessary for winning full spiritual maturity. My own view inclines towards the belief that we continue to unfold and grow on higher spiritual planes beyond the grave. What is certain is that nobody can say for sure what form our future development will take.
But while John, as the natural man, baptizes—symbolically buries or clothes the divine spark or soul in the “tomb” of matter—so in turn the Christ figure is proclaimed as the element or agent by which the natural man will now be baptized or endowed with the divine Holy Spirit. This is why John the Baptist is made to say: “I baptize you with water but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Significantly, Luke says here: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The fire symbols the divine flame of intelligence and of potential Christhood. That is why, incidentally, baptism in water is accompanied by anointing with oil in some major branches of the Christian church, for example in the Orthodox Church. Oil (“thou anointest my head with oil,” the Psalmist says) symbolizes this same reality. It is highly flammable and gives off a shine even when not ignited. It floats on water, that is, it rises to the top or the head, where reason and self-reflective consciousness were believed primarily to be embedded—and oil will even burn in the midst of the waters. In the watery “grave” of our material bodies, the “fire” burns on and nothing can ever put it out. This may be what the Gospel of Thomas’s Jesus (Yeshua) means when he reportedly says: “I have thrown fire upon the world, and look, I am watching ’till it blazes.”7 Or again: “Yeshua said, Whoever is near me is near the fire . . .”8
In any case, St. Paul, whose thoughts and arguments can be extremely complex and at times virtually incomprehensible to an average reader, goes on at considerable length in Romans using the imagery of death, burial and resurrection in relation to our oneness with the mystical Christ. For example, in chapter 6 of Romans, Paul says: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” None of this, by the way, implies that Paul took any of this literally. His Jesus Christ is supremely a spiritual ray from the Father, as was Horus before him. All the action he describes takes place on a spiritual rather than an earthly plane.
In adult baptism, where there is a total submersion of the person under the waters, this burial and resurrection symbolism is of course more vividly portrayed than in the sprinkling of infants, though the symbolism remains the same. Once, long ago when we were going through one of my family’s phases of attending a Gospel Hall form of worship (where the “whole Bible” was said to be preached and believed in), I took my place, at age twelve or thirteen, in the baptismal lineup at a tank at the very front of the church one Sunday evening. There, I had to endure the embarrassment of being nearly suffocated in front of some of my wide-eyed friends who had come along to observe the proceedings. The overzealous pastor got carried away and held me under unduly long as he simultaneously harangued the congregation. I emerged sputtering and half drowned. But as the proponents of infant baptism have always stoutly maintained, it’s not really the amount of water that counts. This is true, if only they truly understand what the fundamental symbolism actually represents.
Put as simply as possible, the Christian rite of baptism is not about forgiveness of sins, original or not; nor, obviously, is it about enrolment in a certain exclusive, ecclesiastical “club.” It’s at the same time much more universal, much grander and yet simpler than any of that. The sacrament is one of celebrating and ritually expressing the basic datum of all religion, that of Incarnation of spirit in flesh. As St. Paul triumphantly exults: our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. When a baby, for example, is baptized in the presence of all the congregation, what is really happening is that a fresh, incarnated soul is being symbolically welcomed into the whole human family. It’s an occasion for all present to share in the rejoicing at our common, God-given inheritance.
That is truly the theme of the account of Jesus’ baptism in the Gospels. As he comes up out of the water in the drama, he experiences a vision. The heavens are “torn apart” and the Spirit, in form like a dove, descends on him. Then the voice “came from heaven” saying that he was “my son, the beloved.” Instead of the negativity inherent in the mention of sin, the voice says, “with you I am well pleased.” The allegorical sense is crystal clear. The whole event is a claiming of our own divine