Getting in Line with Sinners

Baptism of our Lord: Matthew 3:13-17

Poor John. He was so confused. But can you blame him? It just didn’t look right. What was going on here? John was baptizing sinners in the river Jordan when out of the crowd steps Jesus, the Messiah, who comes down to ask John to be baptized. This was not at all what John expected. Whether or not John had known that the person he had announced was coming was in fact his cousin Jesus, we can’t say. But the last thing John expected was to be asked to baptize him!

John had been telling everyone about how he was just the “warm-up” act for someone even more powerful who was coming after him: “I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand.” So what was Jesus doing here, as plain and normal-looking as anyone else, wielding no pitchfork, with no fire that anyone could see, queuing up with all the other penitents waiting to get dunked?

It would have been like if you were to go to a huge outdoor stadium for a concert. The place, packed with eager and excited music-lovers. You’ve heard all the hype from your friends and online about the show, how the performance is like a great battle, with an explosion of energy and sound, thunder and lightning. There’s even a massive fireworks display! A really spectacular event. Then the concert manager comes on stage and declares in ringing tones that the great show is about to start, how it’s going to knock your socks off. But then you watch as a lone figure comes on the stage. He doesn't look at all like what you expected. And he is carrying nothing but a small flute, which he begins to play, not powerfully or spiritedly, but softly and gently. The tune is haunting and fragile, not at all triumphal or bombastic. You can’t help but wonder if this is the right guy, if you’ve somehow gone to wrong show.

In the same way, John had been whipping everyone into excitement at the star soloist who was about to arrive. Everyone had been on the edge of their seats, waiting for the appearance of a great mighty leader, perhaps the living God himself, who’d come sweeping across the countryside with a great explosion, a blaze of light and color, transforming everything in a single blow. But when the curtain rises, the figure who walks out on stage is an unimpressive, normal-looking guy named Jesus.

This made no sense, not just to John but to anyone who understood the meaning of baptism in ancient Judaism. You see, baptism, in those days, was what is called “proselyte baptism,” a ritual washing, symbolic cleansing, that converts to Judaism would undertake in the process of becoming part of the Covenant people. Like circumcision, it was a sign of a person's belief and of his or her reception into the faith. John “tweaked” that a bit, by baptizing not converts to the Jewish faith, but people who were already Jewish, who came to him seeking a new life, who’d led a sinful life and now wanted to start over, to recommit themselves to God. His baptism was not a baptism of conversion, a turning towards, but of reversion, a turning back, redirecting one's life toward God.

Baptism then made no sense for Jesus, neither the proselyte version (Jesus was already Jewish) nor of the repentance-for-sins type (as he hadn’t committed any). So why would the Son of God ask John to be baptized? He was no sinner, and yet Jesus just showed up and got in line with all the rest of them.

I mean, seriously, if Jesus had listened to his PR people, they’d have told him he could be a “friend” to these sinners, an ally, a kind, loving helper, maybe. But he could never let himself be mistaken for one of them. His handlers would never, ever have allowed him to be baptized. He could have stood on the shore and offered words of encouragement to those going into the water. He could have held out his hand to those who struggled out of the river in their heavy wet clothes, sure. But he could not under any circumstances have gone into the water himself, unless it was to help his cousin out: “Hey John, you go rest. I’ll take over for a while.” Even if he were innocent, even if his intentions were nothing but good, it would be ruinous to his reputation. Got to keep up that immaculate appearance, you know.

Reputation was not something John cared much about—at all—but he didn’t like the idea of baptizing Jesus either. He knew what baptism means and he knew who Jesus is. To him, his baptizing Jesus didn’t just look bad; it was plain wrong. Not the way things are supposed to be. “This doesn’t make any sense, Jesus. You want me to baptize you? You should be baptizing me!”

Jesus tells John: “Let it be so now, for it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” In other words, “Just do it, because it’s what needs to happen, what God requires.” As we saw a few weeks ago with Joseph, being “righteous” isn’t always the right thing to do. Joseph was a “righteous” man, we were told, and, because of that, he planned to divorce Mary quietly, so as to not expose her to public disgrace. Joseph thought that he is doing the right thing, but it isn't what God wanted, as the angel told him. What was really the “right thing” turned out to be something entirely different—not divorcing Mary but taking her as his wife. True righteousness in that case meant not doing the “right” thing or the “just” thing or even the “compassionate” thing, but doing the “God-ordained, God-willed” thing. In the same way, Jesus telling John that he needs to be baptized “to fulfill all righteousness” meant that there’s a higher “rightness” called for here. God needs it to happen now.

But why? How is baptizing Jesus the “right” thing to do? It only makes sense when we take into account who Jesus is, what he came to do, the kind of Savior he is. You see, everyone was expecting a warrior-king kind of Messiah, someone bigger, stronger, more powerful than everyone else, who stood above the crowd. A kind of superman. But that’s not who Jesus was, not what he came to do. By being baptized along with everyone else, Jesus was showing he didn’t see himself as being above them, but as being with them. Indeed, by wading into the waters, Jesus took his place beside humanity, identifying with our faults and failures, our pains and brokenness. He showed that he stands with us in our fears and anxieties, our sins and shame, taking sides with us in our neediness, declaring that God is biased towards sinners. God's blessing, Jesus indicated, is available to every person, not just to those who “have it all together,” but everyone.

We just wrapped up Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, when we celebrated God becoming flesh, becoming human, literally one of us. Jesus’ baptism is a reiteration and amplification of that reality, that same truth, that Jesus was human, as human as any of us, “like us in every way yet without sin,” the book of Hebrews tells us. But even there, Jesus didn’t separate himself from us. He didn’t think twice about getting messed up and mixed up in our sin, not here being baptized alongside sinners nor at his death when he was crucified between two criminals on a cross. His identification with us goes all the way down.

And yet, even while Jesus was a man like us, he was not merely a man. He is God, too. The voice from heaven at his baptism affirmed that: “This my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.” Contrary to what we often assume, this declaration was more than just sentiment, an expression of divine affection. It was nothing less than God’s affirmation of Jesus’ divine authority. A thousand years before, David before becoming king had been anointed with oil and declared the titular “son” of God. And for a thousand years afterwards, God’s people had been waiting—hoping—for a descendent of David to appear. The Messiah, they called him, the “Anointed One,” or in Greek the “Christ,” who would restore the nation of Israel. And here now Jesus was being anointed, not with the oil of blessing but with the Spirit of God himself, and affirmed as the legitimate heir to David’s throne, God’s throne. As God declared through the prophet Isaiah, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him; and he will bring forth justice to the nations,” he will bring about God’s will on earth.

So at one and the same time, Jesus’ baptism declares his unqualified decision to stand with us, to be one of us, and also his mission, as God’s anointed heir, to act as God’s divine agent, to bring God’s Kingdom on earth. So here we see that Jesus’ identification with humanity is more than just a matter of God palling around with us as a cool upperclassman might with a dorky freshman—out of pity—nor is God simply slumming it with us because he wanted a break from the stress of heavenly perfection. God came down to our level, precisely so as to bring us up to his. That’s the dynamic of the Incarnation—"God became man that man might become divine,” as St Athanasius put it. Matthew says that at Jesus’ baptism, the heavens were opened. That’s not  just so that God can come to us, but that now we can come to him.

That’s where the concert metaphor breaks down. Because, at a normal concert, you have the performers and the audience, and that’s it. But Jesus’ baptism is not simply a spectacle we can gaze on from a distance, as passive observers. Rather, it’s as if, in the middle of a concert performance, the conductor gets down from the stand and starts handing out instruments to the audience. Then he returns to his stand, baton again in hand, and starts directing the audience along with the performers on stage. We’re invited to play along, to be a part of the performance. That’s the consequence, the intended effect of the Incarnation—the mission that Jesus inaugurated with his being baptized is something that we’ve been drafted into as well at our baptism.

Most of us, I reckon, are many decades removed from when we were baptized, and few of us have any recollection of the event. I have no memory of my baptism, which occurred, I am told, when I was about three months old on a sunny afternoon in January. At least that’s what the photo says. But even if we don’t remember our baptism, it doesn’t change the fact that when we were baptized, it was, like Jesus’, to “fulfill all righteousness.” It was done because it is the “right thing to do,” because God said so, and also as a sign of our “being right” with God. There was however another reason, even if it was never discussed. We were also baptized to become part of God’s mission, to become involved in God’s work of making the world “all right.” For all of us who have been baptized, we have our parts to play. We’ve all been given “instruments” so to speak, spiritual gifts, and charged to make something beautiful with them, to join in the symphony God is conducting, that is, to share in his passionate commitment to heal creation, to bring the world to rights, to reestablish God’s Edenic rule on earth.

Just how Jesus will go about doing that, we will see in the weeks and months to come. But it’s enough today to know that he won’t do it without us, apart from us. With Jesus’ baptism, God has involved himself in our sin, in our mess, and in our baptism we’ve gotten involved, been recruited into God’s work of cleaning that mess up. We’re in it together, God with us and us with God, as we work with God to bring about God’s plan to bring the world to right. What a great challenge! What a great gift! Thanks be to God!