The baptism of Jesus raises a question for us? It is a question that John the Baptist raised at the time because, in Matthew’s Gospel, we read that he tried to make Jesus change his mind about being baptised.
Why did he do that? He realised who Jesus was and how great Jesus was, as verse 7 of our Gospel reading told us, he had said that he was not good enough even to bend down and untie Jesus’ sandals, so how could he possibly baptise Jesus? More than that he had preached, that people should turn away from their sins and be baptised and God would forgive their sins. But Jesus had never sinned, so what possible need did he have of baptism?
We know, though, that Jesus insisted on being baptised saying that it was what God required. So what was going on when Jesus was baptised and what did his baptism signify if it was not a sign of the forgiveness of his sins?
Jesus’ baptism is actually a profound sign of what he was doing through his incarnation and what he would do through his death. In the waters of baptism we die to our old sinful way of life as our body literally is submerged under the water and we leave that old way of live behind – drowned or buried – as we rise to new life in Christ.
Jesus had no need to do that because he was already free of sin but by becoming a human being he immerses himself in a world and a human existence that is sinful, that does fall short of the glory of God. He immerses himself in our world and existence so fully, without being compromised by it, that it would eventually overwhelm and kill him on the cross.
In this way he went under the waters into death but he did so as a willing and sinless victim allowing the sinful nature of our world and existence to overwhelm him because he wished, out of love for us, to take the weight of our sin upon him, to be crushed by it and to die so that when he rose up out of the waters of death through his resurrection he had taken onto himself all that poisons our lives enabling us to follow in dying to sin and rising to new life.
His baptism then is both an identification with us in our humanity and the first step in forming a new forgiven and free humanity. The two things were made apparent by his baptism in water which is his identification with us and by the baptism in the Spirit which followed in which God confirmed him as his dearly loved Son. His baptism is then a rich portrait of what incarnation means; that God has become human and that humanity can truly reflect and image God.
It must have been a wonderful moment, a mountain-top moment. It was the culmination of all that Jesus had come to believe about himself while he had grown up in Nazareth. He would have read scriptures, such as Isaiah 42 our reading for this evening’s service, in which the Lord says, “Here is my servant, whom I strengthen – the one I have chosen, with whom I am pleased,” and he would have heard an inner voice telling him that that scripture was speaking about him. As he grew, he would have had doubts about whether the voice he heard was truly that of God but now, following his baptism, he hears God speaking those same words to him, “You are my own dear Son, I am pleased with you,” in the hearing of all who had gathered at the Jordan river that day.
What a wonderful and affirming moment; a moment in which all the strands of his life and belief come together and make perfect sense. I wonder if we remember similar times within our own lives; times when we understood God and ourselves, times when parts of our lives that had seemed broken or separated suddenly came together and were reconciled. Think for a moment about those moments in your life we you have been at your happiest, when life has seemed good and you have been at your best. Where were you at the time and what were those moments like for you?
One such moment in my life came during a Christian camp as a teenager. I had listened to a sermon in which God had seemed to be speaking directly to me about things that I knew were wrong in my life and so when the preacher invited people to come forward for prayer, I went. I wasn’t the only person that God had spoken to through that sermon, in fact there were so many that there weren’t sufficient people to pray with those who had come forward. So I sat on a chair myself and poured out my heart to God telling him everything that I needed to repent of and recommitting myself to him. As I did so, I experienced an overwhelming sense of joy that could only be expressed in laughter. I sat and laughed. I walked around the campsite in the shadow of the Malvern Hills looking up at the night sky and laughed. I went back to our tents and my friends and still could do nothing other than laugh continuously.
I have never experienced a moment like that, before or since, but look back on it as a moment when God was very real and when I knew his love within my whole being. It was a wonderful and affirming moment; a moment in which all the strands of my life and belief came together and made perfect sense. But I could not continue to live in that moment any more than Jesus could.
What happened next for Jesus was that “the Spirit made him go into the desert, where he stayed 40 days, being tempted by Satan.” From the mountain-top to the wilderness, that was what happened for Jesus. And that is how it often is for us too.
But Jesus had been strengthened and affirmed by his baptism experience, so much so that he was able to resist the temptations he faced in the desert. We need to view our mountain-top experiences in the same way. I cannot live life continually laughing, if I did it is likely that I would be locked up – but I can draw on the reality of that moment. I can take strength from the reality of its occurring. I can believe that even though I don’t continually feel that joy, nevertheless that joy exists and will return.
That is how it would have been for Jesus too and we can also draw from his experience in the same way. His baptism shows us the reality of the incarnation; the depth of his love in identifying with us and the glory of his being the Father’s own dear Son with whom he is pleased. Because he has identified himself with us, we can be identified with him and share that glory, the glory of being the precious children of our heavenly Father.
We may not always feel the wonder or reality of that, we may not always see God clearly in other Christians or especially in ourselves; that may not be our experience at this moment but even if it is not we can look at Jesus coming up out of the water, seeing heaven opening and the Spirit coming down on him like a dove and know that the incarnation is true and that as a result we are children of that same heavenly Father, whether we feel it now or not.
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