Undercover Boss

I've known about but never watched the reality program "Undercover Boss," until recently. I caught a few episodes of the Canadian and Australian versions on Netflix. The premise is that the CEO or some other senior executive is disguised and given a new identity so he can pass as an entry level employee in his own company. He lives in a budget hotel and gives up his fancy car. He gets to experience how his frontline workers do their jobs and the challenges they face. He often finds these jobs are a lot tougher than he thought. And they move him around between many low-level jobs so he understands the whole range of what working on the bottom rung is like. 

That's a good way to see what Jesus is doing in today's gospel. Why is the sinless Son of God undergoing a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sin? In Matthew when John balks at baptizing Jesus, Christ says, "Let it happen now, for it is right for us to fulfill all righteousness." Jesus is not skipping any steps in being an entry level worker of righteousness.

Baptism is what anthropologists call an "rite of entrance." It marks your transition from someone outside a group to a member of the group. Before baptism you are outside the church and the body of Christ. After baptism, you are a member of the Kingdom of God. On the theological level, even more is going on. It is the washing away of sins. It is going from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive. Yet it is not magical. Faith is a crucial component to baptism being effective, just as merely saying wedding vows doesn't make a relationship a real marriage if you don't in your heart believe or intend what you are saying. 

Another vital element, as we see in Acts 8, is the reception of the Holy Spirit. Peter and John go to Samaria to investigate this new batch of believers unexpectedly made through Philip's evangelistic ministry. And they lay hands on the new converts and pray that they receive the Spirit. To us this sounds odd. Doesn't the Spirit enter the believer at the moment of baptism? Yes, but we find in Acts various instances where there is dramatic evidence of the power of God, usually speaking in tongues, whenever a new group of people, like Gentiles, accept Christ. It could be argued that this was God's way of showing the apostles that he did indeed intend them to make disciples of all people, not just their fellow Jews. (One irony of this passage is that John and his brother wanted to call down fire from God on a Samaritan village when they were mere disciples of Jesus. Now as an apostle sent out by the resurrected Jesus he is calling down the Holy Spirit, symbolized on Pentecost as fire, on the first group of Samaritan Christians!)

To return to Jesus' baptism, we see the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove coming down on Christ as he emerges from the River Jordan. Our Undercover Boss is once again in the position of a newbie, dripping with water outside and welling up with the Spirit inside.

One thing a lot of the TV undercover bosses discover is how hard their entry level employees have to work. It's a sort of baptism by fire. The head of the Toronto Zoo found himself falling behind preparing meals for the various animals or exhausted by tasks such as cleaning up the animal cages. After his baptism, Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted. He is hungry when temptation hits him. He is tempted to use his powers to feed himself, or to start his ministry with a bang or to make a deal with the devil. You are more susceptible to temptation when you are hungry or angry or lonely or tired. Jesus is 3 out of 4 of those and the stress of them might make him more prone to anger. So he is facing temptation when he is physically and emotionally at his most vulnerable. He makes it through, though, by taking the time to think and see things from God's standpoint as represented in scripture. He does something a lot of older Christians never master.

It's not hard for most bosses to stay on message. Promoting their companies is part of their jobs.What surprises them is when they find low-level employees who act as good ambassadors for the company. In the Zoo episode, not only is the undercover boss amazed at how much faster and more thorough a cleaning lady is than him at cleaning the large viewing windows at the primate enclosure but also at her ability to be able to stop and answer the questions of curious kids visiting the zoo. In an episode about a pizza franchise, the undercover boss is impressed by a manager who took time to drive around hand-delivering coupons for free pizza to people whose orders were messed up the previous day. Jesus looked for humble people whom the world saw as unimportant or as disreputable but whom he knew would be good ambassadors of God's Kingdom and effective at proclaiming the good news.

A lot of the TV undercover bosses were struck by how dedicated their employees were. One woman, who has a handicapped child, admitted to coming in on Christmas to make sure all the zoo animals got their proper specialized diets. That boss gave her a cruise vacation. It reminds me how Jesus insisted the Sabbath was made for man and not vice versa and would take the disciples away from the crowds when things got so hectic they didn't have time to eat.

A lot of rich and powerful bosses don't realize how little things and practical matters often make life harder for people. One boss was appalled to find that the employee refrigerator no longer kept their lunches cold. He replaced it. Another boss found that a line employee's scooter was on the fritz. He bought him a new one. As God become man, Jesus similarly learned the importance of little things. When he raises from the dead the 12 year old daughter of a synagogue leader, he then tells the parents to get her something to eat. Poor girl's been sick and dying. Now that she's better, she's bound to be hungry. And when he heals a deaf mute Jesus communicates with him visually by putting his fingers in the man's ears, spitting and touching the man's tongue, raising his eyes to heaven, sighing dramatically and commanding his mouth and ears to open. To encourage his faith, Jesus accommodated himself to the man's handicap.

The TV undercover bosses also get exposed to human suffering and learn compassion and are even treated to it. One boss learned that a very good local manager at a pizza place turned to that job after losing a loved one and finding himself unable to complete college. The job helped keep his life together. In a very moving moment on a different episode, an employee on lunch break spoke of losing a daughter. The undercover boss was reminded of the recent death of his dad. Upon sharing with her, the man started to cry. His employee gave him a hug. She later wrote him a letter, telling how she and her husband dealt with their grief by writing letters to their deceased daughter, pouring everything they wanted to say to her into their missives. It reminded me of the time when Jesus, seeing the grief of Mary, Martha and their friends over Lazarus, began to weep himself. The comforting reminds me of the woman who anointed Jesus with perfume, washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Jesus saw it as an act of compassion and said she would be remembered forever in the gospel. In a similar way, the undercover boss dedicates the employee's favorite bench at the zoo and names it after the woman's daughter as a memorial.

As you've probably guessed, at the end of each Undercover Boss, the CEO removes his disguise, calls the people he worked with to the boardroom and reveals who he is. He also rewards them, both personally and professionally, for their hard work and dedication. Jesus will do something similar with us. Baptism received with faith in Jesus gets you into the kingdom, and thus assures your salvation, but there will be rewards for those who really let God's Spirit work in them. Jesus give us a parable about a master making his servants stewards of talents and rewarding them for investing wisely. Paul speaks about our works being judged in 1 Corinthians 3. "For no one can lay any foundation other than what is being laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, each builder's work will be plainly seen, for the Day will make it clear, because it will be revealed by fire. And the fire will test what kind of work each has done. If what someone has built survives, he will receive a reward. If someone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved, but only as through fire." In one episode of Undercover Boss, a poor worker is not fired at the end but given further training so he will do a better job. In the same way, just because we are saved by faith does not mean that how we live our lives after accepting Jesus is consequence-free. We need to do good.

I have only watched a few episodes but I'm willing to bet that no TV boss has done what ours has done: sacrifice himself for the good of all. The little experiment they do for the TV show costs these leaders a week or two of living in a budget hotel and hard work. Jesus lived among and as one of us for around 33 years. And his exit interview was brutal. He did not reveal his true identity as undercover boss in a boardroom but on a cross and in a garden tomb. He doesn't give out vacation vouchers but offers eternal life with him.

Baptism was just the start for Jesus' mission, as it is for us. Because of what he did, he understands what it is to work for God on the frontlines in this life. Because of what he did, we know he loves us and we can trust him. And that looking good to others was not part of the reason, unlike TV's undercover bosses. Let's face it: no CEO is going on a show that will make him or his company look bad. The cameras are not hidden; a cover story is given that a documentary is being made. So we can never be sure if anyone is being completely honest in their observations.

Jesus is totally honest. He tells us what's wrong with us, what we need to do about it, that it will be costly but also that it will be worth it. Life is, thank God, not a job. But it can be an adventure where the goal is to make the world better, to make people better by introducing them to the God who working to do just that. Not for fame, not for money, not for power, but because he loves us.