Baptism of Jesus

Rev’d Howard Wallace

Texts: Genesis 1:1-4; Mark 1:4-10

In our modern church thinking we might feel there is nothing special about following the week when we celebrate the birth of Jesus with an account of his baptism. After all that is what we usually do: a birth is followed by baptism. But the story of Jesus’s baptism has little to do with our traditions or expectations. In each of the first three Gospels we have an account near the beginning of Jesus’s baptism by John but it does not take place at the start of Jesus’s life. According to the Gospels, Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his ministry, and his baptism was at the start of that. So why do we celebrate Jesus’s baptism in the first week after Epiphany, just after Christmas? Have we imposed our custom on the Gospel story? Or is Jesus’s baptism about more than just the beginning of a life? And does it have implications for our own baptism and Christian discipleship?

The readings today point to three things that help us understand the story of the baptism of Jesus and what it has to do with us.

1. The Old Testament reading is the account of the beginning of creation according to Genesis. It is the account of day 1 of creation. We heard this account last year at the start of our readings from Genesis. No doubt the passage fits in nicely with the baptism of Jesus with the reference to water and also with the coming of light – the latter understood in refence to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. But is that the only reason for its connection to the story of Jesus’s baptism?

The focus of the Genesis account is on the description of chaos before God began to create. Before God creates the world it is described as a watery chaos. Now we have to recognise that when the Old Testament speaks about creation it does not mean exactly the same as we do in using the term. God’s act of creation is not one of bringing something into being from nothing. Rather the ancient writers understood creation as a process of bringing order out of something that is disordered. Of bringing order to a chaotic and lifeless mess. Furthermore, it not only involved bringing the land, the sea, the mountains, the trees, the animals and the humans out of a chaotic mass of indistinguishable material, it also involved bringing order to the lives of the creatures and beings made. It involved establishing the cycles of nature, the processes of reproduction, and for humans even establishing the laws and customs by which they would live. Thus, creation not only concerned a first act back at the start of everything. In Old Testament thought it is something that continues to evolve.

By associating the story of Jesus’s baptism with the start of the creation story the makers of our lectionary, picking up on something implicit in the Gospels, suggest that his baptism, and by implication our own baptisms, relates to God’s act of creation itself. In baptism we are associated with God’s act of creating a good and whole creation. In baptism we are drawn into the community of people who seek in their discipleship of Jesus, to participate in God’s fulfilling of his creative purpose. We acknowledge our willingness, our readiness to be agents with God in helping create a world that is good, full of peace, grace, and truth; the qualities of God himself.

So, the first thing we might learn from today’s readings is that the baptism of Jesus is the beginning of the fulfilment of creation, and by implication of our own baptisms, we participate in that too.

2. In our Gospel reading we note that Jesus submits himself to John’s baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This has often been seen as a theological problem, and possibly was also for the Gospel writers themselves. Why would Jesus submit himself to a baptism of repentance? After all, surely Jesus is greater than John. John even says that in our reading today. And was not Jesus without sin according to tradition? So why submit himself to this? But let us not focus on an assessment of the characters involved as if that is the sum of the significance of the story. Its symbolism lies elsewhere.

The story does not simply tell us who is superior, John or Jesus, or how one gives way to the other, nor does it seem interested in whether Jesus sinned or not. In the baptism of Jesus the Gospel writer proclaims that Jesus also participates in God’s creating, good work. In Genesis, when God creates, God brings order and life to what was a formless void, a vast waste. In Jesus God continues the work of creating a good, loving, peaceful world, full of the life and joy of heaven. In Jesus’s baptism at the hand of John, as in our own, it is not that he or we repent in order to be acceptable to God’s company. Rather, even as God’s act of creation is an overcoming of what is evil, what is life-sapping, death dealing, what is chaos, so we enter in our baptism the company of God’s people who likewise shun what is evil and life-defying. We seek to bring about the loving, compassionate, healing and reconciling world of God.

So, the second thing we learn is that we do not earn God’s acceptance by repentance, but repentance in baptism is a turning, as the word means in both the Hebrew and Greek, toward a participation in God’s creating of the world.

3. The story of Jesus’s baptism ends with Jesus seeing the Spirit in the form of a dove, descend upon him. In Jesus, and in his baptism, there is a meeting of God’s sphere, the heavenly, and the human sphere, the earthly. In our baptism in Jesus we receive the Spirit of God from Jesus himself and so participate in that meeting of heaven and earth.

So a third thing we can take from these readings is that our own baptism, in some ways echoing that of Jesus, is an invitation into the extension of and completion of a world of newness, joy, hope, of a willingness to forgive, and above all of an expression of love. We are drawn into God’s creative activity in this world.

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In recording the baptism of Jesus at the start of the Gospel, and in our celebrating it at the start of the Christian year, we recognise that God’s creation of the world, started so long ago, is brought to a high point in the ministry of Jesus. We also recognise that in our own baptism as disciples of Jesus, we are given the Spirit of God within our community to participate in, to recognise and to proclaim the life-giving creation work of God in the world. A work in which we seek peace beyond understanding, love and compassion, forgiveness and truth, hope and freedom, concern and understanding.

Of course, we know that will not come without a struggle. It will not come quickly. We see that in many places in many events around the world – in Gaza, Ukraine, and many other places including in our own land from time to time. Yet we also see in some mass protests, in the words of some national leaders, and in small individual acts, the deep desire of many people for the things of heaven, for God’s creation of a world of harmony, peace and hope.

We acknowledge in recounting the story of Jesus’s baptism and in responding in our own baptism to be a people called to be God’s Spirit filled people working for God’s goodness in a world too often marked by chaos and evil.