The appointed
readings for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity in the lectionary, which is used by most
churches world-wide, happen to be particularly appropriate for a service of
baptism. In
the Acts of the Apostles, we learn that early Christianity was referred to as
‘the way’ (Acts 19:9, 23; 24:22). As
Jesus makes clear in today’s gospel, the work of God is to believe in the person
God has sent to the world: the Way, in other words, is the way of Jesus Christ.
It is this way that Jesus points to in the gospel of John, when he says that he
is ‘the bread of life’. Whoever comes to Jesus, he
declares will never be hungry, and whoever believes in him will never be
thirsty. ‘Do not work for the food that perishes’, he warns us, ‘but for the
food that endures for eternal life.’
And it is the way of Jesus Christ to which St Paul points in
his letter to the young church at Ephesus. He talks about the growth from
infancy to mature faith in Jesus Christ. We need the various gifts that the
Church has to equip us for our journey in Christ. These enable us to ‘grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ’. A simpler
translation by Tom Wright of the last verse reads thus: ‘He [that is Jesus
Christ] supplies the growth that the whole body needs, linked as it is and held
together by every joint which supports it, with each member doing its own
proper work. Then the body builds itself up in love.’
The Christian journey, from infancy to mature faith,
assisted by parents and godparents who must ‘speak the truth in love’, is thus
a journey from an insecure faith – ‘thrown this way and that on a stormy sea,
blown about by every gust of teaching, by human tricksters, by their cunning
and deceitful scheming’ – to a mature faith in Christ Jesus, God’s son. ‘Then
we shall reach the stature of the mature Man measured by the standards of the
king’s fullness’, that is the fullness of Jesus.
There
is an important textual link between our Gospel reading and St Paul’s letter to
the Ephesians. At John 6:27, Jesus comments: ‘Do not work for the
food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the
Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his
seal.’ This idea of God ‘setting his seal’ – akin to a human ruler affixing his
seal with hot wax on a document – also appears twice in Ephesians. In the first
chapter we read ‘In Him, you also, after listening to the message of
truth, the gospel of your salvation – having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise’, or
‘the spirit of promise, the holy one’ (Ephesians 1:13). And just before the end
of chapter four, from which our reading this morning comes, we read ‘Do not
grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption’, or ‘the spirit who
put God’s mark on you to identify you on the day of freedom’ (Ephesians 4:30).
In almost legal language – and today it
is lawyers who are virtually the only ones who still affix wax seals on
documents – we thus see a connection between God, his son Jesus Christ, the
work of the Holy Spirit within us, and ourselves as believers. Jesus is the
‘person whom God the father has stamped with his seal of approval’. Those who
believe in Jesus’ gospel are stamped with his seal of approval by the Holy
Spirit; and finally, ‘God has stamped his seal on us, by giving us the [Holy]
Spirit in our hearts as a first payment and guarantee of what is to come’ (2 Corinthians 1:22).
The Holy Spirit comes into our lives through baptism
(Paul tells us that ‘we were all baptized into one body, by one spirit’: 1 Corinthians 12:13). The seal of God is the Spirit who descends upon us
as individuals at baptism and takes residence inside us and confirms us as
God’s children. In a legal sense we are ‘adopted’ and ‘sealed’ for God; from a
relationship point of view, we become members of God’s family. The gift of eternal life begins for the
believer because of the arrival of the Holy Spirit at baptism and his
continuing indwelling in us, ‘his spirit who lives within you’ as Paul tells us
in chapter eight of Romans (Romans 8:11). The opportunities for a Christian
life for the believer are boundless as a result of our baptism. ‘Don’t you
see?’, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3, ‘You are God’s Temple! God’s spirit
lives within you!’ (1 Corinthians 3:16). It is for that exalted purpose that we
all should strive, and especially for this that parents and godparents should
nurture this young child to be baptized in the faith. ‘All who are led by the spirit of God… are God’s
children’ (Romans 8:14). Thanks be to God.
