IF WE take the primary two readings for Advent 2 at face value, the Second Coming is not going to be welcoming or comforting, but terrifying. Even God’s breath is sufficient to wither us (Isaiah 40.7).
Until the primary coming of Jesus, water baptism was in a position to cleanse people of their sin. But now, if we wish to be free of sin, we must steel ourselves for an encounter with God himself, by being baptised with the Holy Spirit (Mark 1.8).
Water and the Spirit, though, should not completely dissimilar things. God’s Holy Spirit has been related to water from the very starting of the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible: “The Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1.3 RSV). Water and the Spirit behave in similar ways (John 3.5): in Isaiah, “the Spirit is poured upon us from on high”, like rain on to dry ground (32.15). In 1 Corinthians, all of us “drink of 1 Spirit” (12.13).
So, the baptism that comes with Jesus doesn’t cancel out the baptism of John. Instead, it builds on it. A legitimate Christian baptism still requires what it has at all times required: water, and the name of the triune God.
How encouraging it could possibly be when God makes plain his way of working! There are things seen, and things unseen. Water belongs within the category of what’s “seen”. It is a visual, physical stuff, which God graces with invisible power, to speak salvation to the body and soul, which together constitute a single person.
When it involves the Spirit, we must always not regard the Spirit as in some way “superior” just because unseen. In any case, though we cannot see the Spirit, we are able to see what the Spirit effects (John 3.8).
It could be tempting to over-emphasise the spiritual dimension, and regard the actual water of baptism as unimportant; or the fabric of communion — bread and wine — as immaterial (a fantastic paradox . . .). Sometimes, though, the physical dimension insists on its right to be factored in, as we will see.
So, we come to 2 Peter 3. Verse 10 is an issue — perhaps a small problem within the panoply of Advent scriptures, but an insistent one. The reason is easy. The Greek doesn’t make sense. The final word of the sentence, heurethesetai, means “shall be found”.
Different English translations find different solutions. The AV and RSV work on the idea that the Greek text is mistaken. They follow an old Latin version, meaning “be burned up”. NIV says “be laid bare”, but gives “be burned up” in a footnote as a substitute. Other versions translate different but plausible words, which copyists substituted for that nonsensical Greek original.
When a Bible word is found that doesn’t appear to make sense, translators have two basic options. They can extend the meaning of the word to incorporate what they think the sense of the passage should be. Thus NRSV translates heurethesetai as “be disclosed”. This, and the NIV translation, depend upon making the thought of “being found” a type of “disclosure”. The only problem is an absence of corroboration for such a usage of the issue word.
The other selection for a translator is more drastic, and requires a conclusion which most Greek scholars use only as a final resort. They can admit that, at an early stage within the writing and copying of the text — a stage before the earliest manuscripts we’ve were written — the text was miscopied. The translator misread the work from which he was copying. If heurethesetai is an easy mistake, we’d like now not wrestle with its meaning in any respect.
That continues to be not a whole solution to the issue. For the scholar who decides that the word was miscopied must supply that lost word that would have been misread (or miscopied) as heurethesetai. That is just not easy, either.
If this verse holds an Advent lesson for us, it is a simple one. The Bible incorporates many mysteries which might be theological, but, sometimes, its mysteries are simply practical. Once upon a time, an unknown copyist lost concentration for a moment. This side of eternity, such mysteries as what the unique word was could also be insoluble. If that is just not an encouragement to Christian humility — even (one other paradox) Christian agnosticism — I have no idea what’s. There is a lot to know in regards to the Bible that one lifetime can’t be enough.
