The baptism of Jesus
Today we are celebrating another Epiphany. The word Epiphany means “manifestation” or “appearance.” So in this part of the church year, following on as we are from the Christmas festival, we are celebrating the manifestation of God in Jesus, the human being in whom the eternal Word of God was made flesh. We recognise in Jesus the fullness of God, God’s compassionate love in human form, God choosing to be revealed in a complete human life. As Jesus comes to John to be baptised we are seeing in him a person shot through with God’s life and love; God breaking into the human world. There have been many holy people in human history who have provided inspirational spiritual leadership. But few have attracted the kind of language used to describe Jesus. Jesus was more than a someone showing up to give a course of lectures on God and personal self improvement. When we gaze upon Jesus the emphasis is not so much on his ideas. The key question is, “Who are we dealing with?” St Luke has been answering the “who question” in the early stages of his gospel. Ever the master story teller, Luke tells us that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and welcomed with choirs of angels, recognised by John the Baptist before he was even born, blessed by Simeon and Anna in the temple. As Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptised, we are seeing none other than the Creator of the universe dwelling within a human being, Jesus. He is completely associated with God and is now being empowered by the Spirit to do what God does.
In recent novels and popular journalism, in characters like “the teacher” in The Da Vinci Code” there is a suggestion that Jesus was really just a great man who suffered a tragic death. It is said that Jesus’ divinity was a later invention by a power hungry church hierarchy who manipulated generations of people to suit their own ends. But the striking thing here is about how quickly this understanding of Jesus fell into place in the imagination and prayer of the early church. The earliest witnesses, the disciples and the first Christians, had a strong conviction from the start about who Jesus was, and this conviction drove them to communicate the gospel to lands far and near and to risk their lives in its telling. They knew that what they had to say about Jesus would be life giving anywhere and everywhere, that Jesus was for every person in every time and place and that he could transform any situation.
And so we come to contemplate a second Epiphany, a second episode in the life of Our Lord in which he is revealed as the Son of God, his baptism.
We might wonder why Jesus, who is of one substance with God the Father, might need to be baptised at all. Baptism, as John the Baptist practiced it, was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But the gospel writers are on to something here. Jesus is God, not just because he is all presence of the all powerful Creator of the universe and can do what God can do. He shows his divinity also in his humility and in his demonstration of dependence on God. The divine life in Jesus is generated by unconditional, compassionate love. In Jesus there is one who listens in humility to God and responds, who allows his will to be bent to God’s purposes, and that includes being united to the human condition in every way. So Jesus comes to be baptised, just as we do. God is more than power and initiative. God also receives love and reflects that love back with gratitude and thanksgiving.
This is what we are witnessing in the baptism scene today. Jesus is baptised by John in the River Jordan. We see the whole Trinity involved here. We hear the gentle, affirming words of the Father, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased”. We see the Holy Spirit descending upon him in bodily form like a dove. Jesus is embraced and affirmed as the “servant-Messiah” of God that Isaiah foreshadows. From the beginning, God’s energy is flowing through Jesus. This energy will shortly drive him into the desert and empower his ministry of teaching and healing. But this creative, living, communicating energy is not just directed to us and to the world. It is directed back to God. In the baptism we see all the members of the trinity communing together, giving and receiving love, affirmation and support. Jesus is lovingly and humbly receiving love from God and reflecting back that same love and the life to God, the source from which it comes. Jesus is both the outflow of God’s life and energy which is now directed toward us, and he is the world’s energy and love being redirected back to God in a movement of reconciliation, love and gratitude. Jesus stands at the heart therefore of a twofold movement. He comes to communicate God’s compassionate love to us, and he comes to unite us back to God and to redirect our love and energy and our thanks to God. In this short little episode of Jesus baptism, we see this action beginning to unfold. It will become more visible as Jesus’ ministry and his passion, death and resurrection unfold. We are seeing Jesus bound up in the life of the Holy Trinity, being held and affirmed by the Father and the Holy Spirit. He reveals God who is in the habit of sharing love, pouring love out, giving it back with gratitude, a circle of love being given and shared around.
Notice how observant St Luke is in telling his story. St Luke notes that after his baptism, Jesus was praying. All the gospel writers tell us that Jesus was someone who prayed, meaning that he continually put his will and his decisions at the service of God.
While we may nod our heads in wonder as Jesus unites himself with the human condition in submitting to John’s baptism. But the meaning of Jesus’ baptism does not end there. His going down into the water and rising up again Christ anticipates his death and resurrection, his dying and rising again. In doing so, he sanctifies the waters of baptism to be a means by which we are united with him. So Jesus’ baptism becomes a prototype of our own. We too are embraced by God to be included in the mission Jesus freely entered. We too, are caught up in the dynamic of dying and rising, being united to Christ’s death in a baptism like his, so that we might rise again into eternal life with him. We too will be participants in the Day of Pentecost. On that day the whole family of Christ’s people will be incorporated by the Spirit into the servant community, charged with bringing the light of God’s justice and peace into a broken world. It will be our task to allow God to enflesh the Word of God in our hearts and lives and to be channels of God’s love and affirmation, mutually receiving and giving love as we echo the life of the Holy Trinity.
All this means that you and I, in our own baptism, are immersed in the baptismal experience of Jesus. When Mary first said yes to the message of God given her by the angel Gabriel, she seemed to be a very ordinary woman, just like one of us. Yet all was not as it seemed, for the child she carried would turn out to be the Word-made-flesh. When Jesus was born, he was an ordinary baby, just like any other child born every day of the year. But again, all was not what it seemed, as the shepherds and the Magi attest. There is more to Jesus than meets the eye. Today Jesus is seen for what he is. Jesus is “The Beloved Son of God, the Word-made-Flesh.” The ordinariness of his earthly body and his earthly being is united to the divine holiness of God. He has come that we too might be united to one another and to God in a divine circle of love. In our baptism we are immersed into this mystery. God unites us to himself and God’s purposes become ours. We might look like an ordinary group of people, but just as it was with Jesus, all is not what it seems for we are the holy beloved people of God to be driven out into the world by the Spirit.
