Famously The Proclaimers sang about walking five hundred miles. We are of course not meant to take five hundred literally and there are internet memes aplenty of a map showing 500 miles leading you to somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and other places no one would want to go!
“I would walk a significant distance,” does not have the same poetic force or lyrical ring to it as “I would walk five hundred miles”. If five hundred miles is significant in terms of walking, then similarly five hundred years marks a significant anniversary.
Radical
This year many Christians will mark a five-hundred-year anniversary.
On the 21st of January, 1525 people gathered in the home of Anna Manz in Zurich, Switzerland. Her son, Felix, (remember that name) was one of the leaders of this group of Christians. They had been ordered by the city council to stop meeting for Bible study. Yet, on that dark winter’s night, they gathered to pray, discuss, and discern what they understood the Spirit to be teaching them about how to live lives shaped by the life of Jesus as revealed in scripture.
The life of Jesus was central to their understanding of what it meant to be a disciple, and it was also the lens through which they understood all of Scripture.
Baptised
When they had finished talking and praying George Blaurock asked to be baptised. George, like most people in society at that time, was baptised as a baby. His request was radical. George and then all those gathered in Anna’s house that night were baptised.
Reflecting on the life of Jesus and the books of Acts, those gathered in Anna’s house concluded that following Jesus was a conscious decision a baby could not make and that the act of baptism was something to be done as a believer. For them baptism was a conscious act of discipleship.
The city and church authorities called this group of people “rebaptisers”, or Anabaptists.
Costly
To be baptised as a believer in 1525 was radical. It was a break with how the church had done baptism for centuries.
As with many things in history, it is hard to say exactly when infant baptism became the “normal” practice of the Church. Yet arguably it became normalised with, during, or shortly after, the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th Century CE.
Felix
The authorities in Zurich, and then Switzerland, and then pretty much the whole of Europe decreed that being “rebaptised” was a heresy punishable by drowning.
Two years after their January gathering, Felix Manz, Anna’s son, became one of the first Anabaptists to be martyred when hands and feet bound, he was drowned in the Limmat River. It is estimated that between four to five thousand Anabaptists were killed for their faith during the Reformation years.
Why This Story?
It is customary on the second Sunday after Epiphany (i.e. this coming Sunday) to consider the baptism of Jesus by John in the river Jordan.
So, this Sunday we will look at Luke’s account of the baptism of Jesus in Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
For me, especially this year, I cannot read this and the other accounts of Jesus’ baptism without thinking about brothers and sisters who gathered in Zurich five hundred years ago to baptise each other.
Their time is not our time.
Yet, their time is not our time. While we must never take freedoms we have for granted, (e.g. freedom to assemble, freedom of belief etc.) there is no threat today in Scotland or mainland Europe of someone who is baptised being killed for this obedient act of discipleship.
However, the persecution of the Anabaptist movement reminds us that, in all places and at all times, faithfully following Jesus is costly. We cannot faithfully follow Jesus and then carry on with our lives as if nothing has changed.
This story also reminds us that in many places in our world, brothers and sisters in Christ are still being killed for their faithful following of Jesus.
Learning
While we have much to learn from our Anabaptist brothers and sisters, on Sunday the focus will not be on their story but on the life of Jesus.
This year is 2025, not 1525, the challenges we face, and the world we live in has changed dramatically in five hundred years. What do we need to hear and learn from the baptism of Jesus for our context and time? That, in the business of everything else happening this week, is the question I’m pondering.
See you Sunday.
Brodie