Matthew’s
Baptism of Jesus
Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10.34-43; Matthew 3.13-17
Every culture and people have their foundational stories, stories which
are able to tell us who we are, where we belong, and what our purpose
in life might be. For Christians, one of those foundational
stories in that of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan river. It
is foundational because it is a story not only about who God is, for
Christians, but it is also about who we are. If we listen
carefully, it is a story that can also provide invaluable guidance
about where we belong in the world, and what we are to do with our
lives. It certainly did that for the early Christian
communities. So . . . listen carefully!
The first thing that Matthew tells us that Jesus came from all the way
from Galilee to be baptised by John in the Jordan. That’s quite a
long way and, if you happen to be a young man seeking your fortune in
the big wide world, in entirely the wrong direction! For John was
baptising people not in the middle of the city, where people gathered
to work and do their business, but in the desert wilderness—way, way
off the beaten track. For John was preaching a baptism of
repentance, calling people to reflect upon their lives and ask the
question “Is what I’m doing with my life really enriching, satisfying,
what I am put on this earth to do? Or am I just doing it because
everyone else is, or because I am afraid of something, or for some
other reason I don’t quite understand?” In John’s eyes, the
Jewish people, particularly the most wealthy and successful, had
forgotten about the call of their God to live lives characterised by
justice, compassion and prayer. And so he beckoned them out into
the wilderness, to a place where the normal trappings of life were no
longer there to support and ensnare. He beckoned them to a place
rich with meaning in Jewish faith, a place which marks the passage of a
people who had been slaves in Egypt to their freedom in the land of
promise. “Be baptised in the Jordan,” he told them. “Like
the people who crossed this river in ancient times, you cross this
river also. Repent! Put off your life of slavery to
economic and social demands. Wash away your sins and rise from
the waters to pursue the life of freedom that God will give you!”
So, when Jesus comes to John it is not by accident. It’s not that
he was wandering in the desert one day, like some tourist in modern-day
Palestine, and happened across a bizarre ceremony that would be kinda
fun to have a go at. No, Jesus comes to John with a deeply held
belief and purpose: that God had called him to leave behind all
that was expected of him by his community, that is, to be the head of
his household and chief provider for his mother, his brothers, and his
sisters. Jesus believed that God had called him to claim an
entirely different identity and mission, a vocation that could only,
perhaps, be finally discovered and embraced through this watery ritual
of death and rebirth.
For that is what baptism meant for the Jews of the first century.
The word “baptism” literally means “to be immersed in water”, and the
ceremony first came to prominence in the century before Christ as a way
for Gentiles, non-Jews that is, to embrace the Jewish faith and
community. After a long period of preparation in which the
candidates learned both the wisdom of the Jews in law and prophets and
the ethical demands of the Jewish life, they would be taken to a body
of water and washed thoroughly—yes, even immersed in that body of
water. Thus the name: “baptism”. The symbol is not
perhaps so obvious to us these days, especially to those of us who have
witnessed hundreds of infant christenings over the years.
Stripped naked and immersed in water, the candidates were killing off
their former way of life by a symbolic drowning. They were also
washing away their sins so that God might lead them in a new, and very
different, way of life. What John does, then, is take an
established Jewish ritual for the initiation of Gentiles into Judaism
and applies it to lapsed or lost Jews, Jews who had forgotten what it
meant to trust and obey the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
One should understand that, in the ancient world, water was no so
benign as we regard it today—flowing purely and freely from our taps as
it does. In the ancient world, water very often symbolised chaos
and evil. In water, people lost their lives. On the waves
of the sea, many ancient people lost their lives. With the
flooding of the rivers, they lost their harvests. In the ancient
world, people knew that water was both necessary to life but also the
bringer of death. “Fear death by water” said the Buddha in T.S.
Eliot’s famous poem, The Wasteland. What that meant for Eliot, as
it means for us, is that the waters of baptism should not be regarded
as tame, given only to feed and sustain life as we know it. The
waters of baptism are dangerous: they are designed to take our
lives away. Without doing so, they cannot give us a new
life. Look at the icon of Jesus baptism on your orders of
service. Under his feet is Leviathan, an ancient symbol of
water’s power to kill and destroy. In order to be baptised, Jesus
had to be willing to submit himself to the power of Leviathan.
For that is the only way to overcome Leviathan’s power. Perhaps
we moderns get in touch with something of that ancient sensibility when
a tsunami comes along. People who live more marginally, in
relatively poor coastal communities where the sea is both the source of
their livelihoods but also the very power that may steal life away, are
perhaps in a better position to understand what is really happening in
baptism.
So, all of these meanings hover in air and stir in the water as Jesus
comes to be baptised by John. That is why John at first refuses
to baptise Jesus, according to Matthew. For Matthew’s community,
you see, which knew these meanings very well indeed, Jesus is not a
person who needed to be baptised. He is not a sinner who had lost
his way and therefore needed to be cleansed and renewed in the
water. “That may be true,” says Matthew in reply, “but baptism
symbolises other things as well: not just the putting away of a
life of sin but, more positively, the embrace of an identity and
vocation from God. This is why Jesus asks John to baptise him—in
order to symbolise and fulfil all that God rightly asks of him.”
And so Jesus is baptised. Note the tense and the mood of that
verb. Jesus does not baptise himself. Baptism is not
something that he, or anyone else, can do for themselves. It is
something that another gives
or bestows upon us. The primary agent in baptism is God. It is God who baptises, it is God who gives us the grace and the
power to put aside the life of sin and embrace the life of faith.
It is God who acts in
baptism, even though he does so through the agency of his
servant. For Jesus that servant was John. For us, it is the
church. What this means, of course, is that salvation is not something we can
accomplish for ourselves. In the Christian view of the
world it is simply not possible, by virtue of one’s own ingenuity and
power, to be liberated. In Christian understanding, even the will
to be liberated is a gift from God. Therefore, it is only by
virtue of God’s love and grace that we can ever be saved.
Yet, for all that, a well-informed
human will and intention must be present, as it was for
Jesus. Without such will, there is no sacrament. That is
why the church can never baptise a person for whom there is neither
faith in God, nor the will to follow God’s way. What does that
mean for infant baptism? Simply this: that we must stop
baptising children where the primary caregivers have little-to-no
informed intention of living a genuinely Christian life, immersed in
the church and loyal to the promises being made. The word
sacrament means “promise”. In the sacrament of baptism, we hear
the love and promises of God. But we also enact our own promises,
promises to turn away from evil and embrace the life of Christ not only
in word, but in deed and lifestyle as well. If we or, in the case
of children, our primary caregivers, can neither understand nor make
those promises, then the church has no business in baptising us.
To do so would be to mock the promises of God!
But what does God promise us in baptism? Here we can learn from
the baptism of Jesus once more. As he emerges from the waters of
death, Matthew tells us that Jesus saw the heavens opened and the
Spirit descending upon his ‘like a dove.’ This event is rich with
resonance from Jewish history and theology. It first recalls the
messianic passage we read from Isaiah, where the servant of the Lord is
given the Spirit in order to perform a particular task and mission in
the world: to accomplish justice for the oppressed, to open the
eyes of the blind, to be a light for the nations, and to release the
captives from prison. In his baptism, Jesus therefore learns his
task in the world: to be God’s light and hope, and the promise of
justice, for all who suffer. This image of the Spirit descending
like a dove reinforces that identity. In the story of Noah, the
dove comes as the waters of the flood recede, a sign that God’s new
world is beginning to emerge. So it is for Jesus, and for all who
are baptised. The Spirit is a sign or guarantee that there is
life after disaster and death, that no matter how much we lose in
baptism we shall be given, by that same action, blessings and riches
beyond measure. The dove: a sign of God’s love after the
deluge is over.
And then there is the voice from heaven: “This is my Son, the
Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Here Jesus finds out who
he is. It is likely that Jesus suspected something for much of
his life, but now all his imaginings and intimations are
concerned. For here God owns Jesus as his son and messiah, the
one by whom salvation will come not only to the Jews, but also to the
Gentiles. Remember that that crucial component of this identity,
in Christian understanding, is that of suffering. Christ will not
be the Son of God, and will not bring salvation to the world, unless he
suffers and dies. This understanding is confirmed, in Matthew’s
narrative, by Jesus use of the ‘sign of Jonah’ in chapter 12.
Here some teachers come to Jesus and ask him for a sign that he is
indeed the messiah sent by God. Jesus replies that no sign will
be given them except the sign of the prophet Jonah, who spent three
days in the belly of a sea monster, deep in the ocean. “So shall
it be for the Son of Man,” says Jesus, “who shall spend three days
buried in the heart of the earth”. Matthew wants us to understand
that Jesus baptism anoints him to be the messiah, certainly, but a
peculiar kind of messiah: a messiah who must suffer and die in order to
accomplish his work. The imagery of baptism is
unmistakable. Here baptism becomes a figure for his death and his
resurrection: buried in the water, risen to life on the third day.
Now, I said at the beginning that this story of Jesus baptism is not
only about God and Jesus, but also about us. We’ve seen something
of that as we’ve gone along. But let me now conclude by making
some things explicit which have perhaps been hidden in the detail up
until now. The baptism of Jesus became, in early Christian
theology, the paradigm or model for our own baptism. His baptism
became the model for a rite by which, from the very earliest times, we
ourselves become Christians. What we learn from Jesus baptism is
this, that baptism is for Christians:
- A leaving of the well-worn expectations and loyalties of our
society in favour of a life of faith dedicated to God;
- A dying to sin, and the lostness of our culture, in order to rise
to a new life, a life of grace and peace given us by God; in this we
participate in Christ’s saving death and resurrection—‘the sign of
Jonah’;
- The conferral and gift of a new identity. In our baptism,
God owns us as his sons and his daughters. Jesus was the first,
in other words, of many siblings. The whole company of these
siblings is called ‘the church’.
- A commissioning for mission, for now we share with Jesus his
vocation as messiah. In the baptismal liturgy we declare God’s
promise that we are now, as a baptised people, the body of Christ, in
whom the Spirit of Christ dwells. All of use, whether we are
‘priests’ or not, a therefore called to be lights for the nations and
to work for the freedom of everyone from whatever it is that keeps them
in chains.
The story of Christ's baptism is therefore foundational for the
identity and vocation not only of Jesus, but of ourselves as
well. As many as are baptised into Christ have died with
Christ. By participating in the baptism of his death and
resurrection we, each of us, are given a new, messianic, mission and
vocation. As Christ gave himself for the sake of the world, so
now we are called to join with him in loving the world, for the glory
of God.
Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now, and for ever. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
Baptism of our Lord 2004