Not Needing to Be Right

A legendary and somewhat humorous epitaph reads, “Here lies the body of Michael O’Day / who died defending the right of way.” We laugh somewhat ruefully because we all know the truth of it. If we admit it, there have been times in all our lives when we’ve been willing to go to extremes to defend the rightness of our position on something.

Matthew’s account of the baptism of Jesus contains an interesting exchange that the other Gospels don’t include. John the Baptist protests, with some cause, that it is he who should be baptized by Jesus. He recognizes that his is the lesser calling, that he is the forerunner, not the Messiah. And he’s right. But Jesus tells him, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” This is a bit of a mouthful. We might be inclined to say, “It’s okay, let it slide for now.” It’s a recognition that there’s a larger perspective, a bigger picture, than the immediate issue at hand. In the case of Jesus and John, Jesus knows that his ministry is just beginning and must be seen to be part of the bigger story of salvation, that began with creation, with the calling of the chosen people, the exodus and the words of the prophets. He is the fulfillment of all that has gone before, not a renegade bursting on the scene set to take over and dominate everyone around him. He doesn’t need to prove that he’s greater than John the Baptist.

We see a similar attitude in the other two readings for this feast. The prophet Isaiah notes that gentleness is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Servant of the Lord: “A bruised reed he shall not break, / and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, / until he establishes justice on the earth.” And in the second reading, we hear a bit of the revolutionary turn of events in the house of the gentile Cornelius. Peter, the leader of the Jerusalem church in the days after the resurrection and ascension, has been somewhat uneasy about Paul’s mission to the gentiles. In the early days of the Christian community, the question of the place of Jews and gentiles in the new dispensation was one of the biggest questions that needed to be resolved. So this event dramatizes Peter finally accepting that the gentiles were equal to the Jews. He proclaims, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.”

Again and again the Scriptures remind us that God is bigger than our human boundaries and power struggles. At times it takes a great deal of faith to believe that God has a higher purpose than we can discern at any given time. And the more we’re invested in a conflict, the harder it is to let God be God. We fall into the trap of needing to be right, and needing others to see that we’re right. And we don’t always care who we trample in our stampede toward rightness.

It can be helpful in a difficult situation to take a step back and reflect on the difference between what’s merely right and what’s righteous, on the difference between human judgment and divine justice. The baptism of Jesus, like so many other events in his life and ministry, reminds us that while he closed the gap between the human and the divine, he did it in such a way that we would be able to resist the temptation in the Garden of Eden to be merely like gods. Through Jesus, we, too, are children of God. If we live that way, others will listen to us.