Isaiah 43. 1 – 7
Luke 3. 15 – 17, 21, 22
The Baptism of Christ
Fr Alex
I wonder what you remember about your baptism? I expect most of us remember nothing at all, having been baptised as little babies.
Some of us might have been baptised as adults, and you might have a memory of the moment that water was splashed on your head.
I’m willing to bet that for most of us here, regardless of when we were baptised, our baptism didn’t look much like Jesus,’ that we commemorate today.
Luke doesn’t give a huge amount of detail in his account that we heard this morning, but Matthew and Mark also recall this moment at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
Between the three of them, we know that Jesus comes to the river Jordan, and goes down into the water to be baptised by John; and as he comes up from the water, the Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove, and a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
But why does Jesus come to be baptised? In Matthew’s account, John asks the same sort of question, and says, “You should be baptising me, not the other way around!”
And it’s understandable that he should say that. We heard what John is baptising for. It is “a baptism of repentance.” All about transforming your life from one of selfishness and greed, to one of godliness.
And so John asks Jesus, “why do you come to me?” Jesus is without sin, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Chosen One – he certainly doesn’t need to wash away any sins, or change his ways.
The answer to that question is in what this baptism teaches us about who Jesus is: and, in a wonderful revelation, who we are, as Jesus’ followers.
Jesus’ baptism is the beginning of his earthly ministry. Like John, he will call people to repentance and transformation of life; but more than John, he will be the one to bring about that transformation.
But how will he achieve it? Only through his death. This baptism is a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death, as he descends into the waters.
Indeed, in Mark’s account, at Jesus’ baptism “the heavens are torn apart” – just as the curtain of the temple will be torn in two, the moment Jesus dies on the cross.
Water in the Old Testament is often a symbol of chaos and disorder. In the beginning of Genesis, before God brings order to his creation, there is nothing but “a formless void,” the “darkness of the deep,” and “wind sweeping over the face of the waters.”
Later, a great flood will destroy everything, except what is preserved on Noah’s ark.
When Jesus and his disciples are in a boat on the lake, and a huge storm comes up, Jesus reveals his power by calming the wind and the waves. His disciples are terrified of the storm: but in a way they’re more terrified of Jesus’ mastery of the waves. To control the waters is a power beyond their comprehension.
Although our own baptisms might not have looked much like Jesus plunging down into the waters of death, the symbolism is precisely the same. The big stone font at the west of the church is designed to represent a tomb. Many fonts in the early Church were actually made in the shape of stone coffins, to make this as clear as possible: that baptism has to do with death.
It is the same for us, in our own baptisms: we follow Jesus down into the waters of death, dying to the way of life that leads to death. As St Paul said, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?”
But if Jesus’ baptism foreshadows his death, it also promises his resurrection. Jesus goes down into the waters, but he also comes up again: and as he does, the Spirit descends on him like a dove, and the veil between heaven and earth is opened, and the voice of God is heard.
In the same way, after his resurrection, when he rises from the death of the tomb, he will send that same Spirit to descend on his disciples. And what the voice of God said about the Son, he will say about those he has adopted as his children, through Christ: “You are my Son and my Daughter, my Beloved.”
And this is the wonderful truth of today’s feast. The baptism of Christ doesn’t just teach us about Jesus’ future death and life, it shows us our own future; our destiny as children of God.
Jesus passes through the waters of death so that when we pass through those waters too, as we must, we may rise with him to the new life of his resurrection. Our own experience of baptism is a pledge of this: our spiritual dying and rising is a sign of the physical rising that awaits us after our physical dying. As St Paul goes on to say, “We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
And Christ achieves all this, not by doing these things to us, or even for us; Christ does all this with us. As the Lord promised in our first reading from Isaiah, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.”
Jesus goes through the waters with us; the sinless one who needs no baptism takes our sins upon himself and is baptised with us. The one who is the source of all life, dies with us; so that we might live with him. This is truly what is meant by ‘Emmanuel:’ God with us.
I encourage you to remember your baptism today. Not necessarily all the details about it, especially if you were just a baby! But to remember what your baptism means: that you have died with Christ and been born again with him, adopted as a beloved child of God. May we all be faithful to this calling, and this wonderful gift Amen.