Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17
Did the Lord Jesus expect all this to happen to him at his baptism? It didn’t happen to anyone else. Was he surprised by the dove, and by the Voice from heaven? If he was, is that okay? What’s your picture of Jesus? How do you see him?
Let’s talk about Jesus today. Pretty much just the Lord Jesus. Is that okay? Not what he taught or did but who he was. That is the point of the Sundays of the Epiphany: his coming-out, his debut, his beginnings, his introductions, his manifestations, his identity.
Of course you will want some kind of take-home, some application to your life, and I will offer you one at the end, but it won’t be very pragmatic, it will be more like enlightenment, but you want that from religion anyway–enlightenment, you want “the eyes of your hearts enlightened,” as we said last week. But my main take-home is even less pragmatic, and it’s just your picture of Jesus.
Let’s make use of one of my favorite questions. “What did he know and when did he know it?” I mean about himself. Did Jesus know that the Holy Spirit would come down upon him, right there, as a dove, or, that he would hear the Voice of his heavenly Father for the first time in his life?
At this point did he even know that he was the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity? I doubt it, although I do believe he was, without him knowing it yet. I expect he knew about his virgin birth, but that did not necessarily entail that he was somehow God.
Did he know that he was the Messiah? Apparently so, already, but the Messiah expected by John the Baptist and all the rest of Israel would be a military hero and head-smasher, very unlike how the Lord Jesus was going to work it out. For that he got a signal from the dove, that the Spirit of God came down not as fire but as a dove, as both a sign of peace and the sacrificial victim of the poor. A different kind of Messiah! “A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”
What else could he know from what happened at his baptism? That God was in him uniquely? I think so, but what that meant he had to figure out. I do think he was surprised. And confirmed. And challenged, and maybe relieved. In any case, his baptism was his new beginning. At thirty years old!
His baptism was a sign for him, a sign with three signs in it: the water, the Spirit, and the Voice, and he had to read the signs in combination. These three signs combined signify beginning, new beginnings, new creations.
At the first creation, in Genesis, “in the beginning,” the world was a chaos of darkness and water. Then a wind from God swept over the face of the water, the Spirit of God brooded upon the water like a bird upon her nest, and then God’s voice: “Let there be light.” There were the three signs in combination at the very beginning, the water, the Spirit, and the Voice.
We get the three signs again in the story of Noah and the Flood. The water covered the earth and washed away the sin of humanity. Then God blew a wind to dry the water off, and Noah sent out a raven and then a dove to fly above the water to and fro, and then the dove came back with an olive leaf, for peace and reconciliation. And God spoke to Noah and promised the renewal of the creation and a new beginning of the world. Three signs again: the water, the dove, and the Voice.
At Jesus’ baptism the only sign that anyone expected was the water, the water for the washing of repentance. Back then it was at streams and rivers that people did their washing. The water supply of Jerusalem was notoriously poor, but in the River Jordan you could wash the whole nation symbolically.
Plus, that was where Joshua had led the Children of Israel across the Jordan into the Promised Land, and Joshua was the namesake of Jesus, that is, Yeshua. So John the Baptist was cleansing the nation to get them ready for the second Joshua to come, the second David, the Messiah, who would restore the nation to its proper purity. And that meant no Romans, and maybe no Gentiles at all, and certainly no tainted Jews. So the Spirit of God that John the Baptist expected with the Messiah was the Spirit of fire and purification and the burning of God’s wrath and judgment.
And here comes the new Joshua, to be baptized. No wonder John wants to be baptized by him.
Besides that, what has Jesus got to repent of? The Messiah should be righteous right off. But Jesus seems to sense that it’s not our righteousness, but the righteousness of God that is expanding with new generosity, and to fulfill that he needs to be one with us, fully one of us, God-with-us, God making us acceptable by fully accepting our human condition in all of our sins and weaknesses.
He had to work it out. In his humanity. And he was a great mind, a great thinker. He did not have the education of St. Paul, he hadn’t read philosophy, but he knew his Torah and the Prophets, much of it by heart, and he was a sharp interpreter of the human condition and a gifted teacher with a knack for metaphor. He wrote nothing down, but neither did Socrates. It was Socrates’ disciple Plato who did the writing, just as Our Lord’s disciples did the writing, and St. Paul. St. Paul was a great mind, but the Lord Jesus was the one who had to work it out and create a whole world.
But even Jesus needed enlightenment, which he got it at his baptism, and now he knew for sure, more than before, about himself, and he understood better his first thirty years. The signs confirmed him and inspired him and set him free and got him going.
Of course, the signs added new problems to his life. Just as with his father Joseph, they didn’t make things any easier, in fact, quite dangerous, but through the next three years of his life, with all the highs and lows, and the increasing opposition, he could remember his baptism, and the dove, and the Voice that said, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” That’s what he needed to know, and this was when he knew it.
What do you need to know and when do you need to know it? I did not know that I was called to the parish ministry until after I couldn’t get out of it. My colleague James Brumm says that God doesn’t tell you all that you’re in for until it’s too late; even Jesus only realized the full magnitude of what he let himself in for, and said “take this cup from me,” when it was already too late, and he knew it.
You too accept God’s call on your life based as much upon what you don’t know as what you do, because if you knew it you’d run for the hills. What you do need to know is that your life has meaning, and purpose, that your life is not a waste, and you need to know that now.
What can you know about your life by looking back? What other people tell you. When someone tells you something about your past that surprises you, you suddenly feel enlightened, for better or worse. What you know can save your past and present life and set you free. It’s never too late to be surprised. It may set you free and get you going despite what you cannot know about the future.
You need to know that people love you, particularly some people in your life. Once my therapist told me that all my life I’d been waiting for my father to tell me that I was his beloved son and that he was pleased with me. Eventually my dad did, indirectly, but I have friends whose fathers never told them at all.
And for me, it’s not the approval of God I doubt as much as the approval of you. I confess that when I give a sermon, I’m more concerned about what you think of it than what God thinks of it. I’m more secure with God than with you. Or maybe if I were truly secure with God I wouldn’t care so much about your approval. Maybe I need to know better that I am God’s beloved.
If you want to have some religion in your life you need to know that you are God’s beloved. The way you know this is by enlightenment, and your enlightenment is your baptism. That’s an ancient Christian take on baptism, not typically Protestant. It means that when you look out at the world as one who has been baptized, and claimed by God, from that stance looking out you get more light into your heart, and the Holy Spirit inside you energizes your receptors to register that light as God’s love and to hear it as God’s voice, telling you that God is well-pleased with you, right now.
For a life with God, for contending with good and evil in the world, you need to hear that every day. Every day is a new beginning of knowing that, because you have changed a bit since yesterday. You need to know that you are God’s beloved for charting your choices for the days ahead, and also for accepting and understanding your life in the past, who you have been and what you have done that you cannot undo. You have been baptized. Your whole life behind you can love again, and who you are today you can love, because you are God’s beloved.
Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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