Matthew 3:13-17
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" 15 But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
He woke up that morning as he had done for some time now: he likely spent the night on some hard, flat surface, perhaps with nothing more than a rock to support his head. He got dressed in what had become his trademark camel’s hair shorts and leather belt, and walked out into the world picking bits of locust out of his teeth and crystalized bits of honey from his beard. He was going down to the river, down to the Jordan, to take his usual place there in the water, to preach his usual message of repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins, but it wasn’t a usual day. As he left for the river, he noticed on his calendar that that day his cousin was coming to the river. Things were about to get real.
You see, he had grown up his entire life hearing about his cousin, how God was really his father, how an angel told his aunt Mary she was pregnant with the baby, how angels were there when he was born. Now, John himself had been born under some pretty spectacular circumstances, but his cousin Jesus was on another level. Of course, John understood that to some degree. Jesus had likely been a disciple of John’s, following his cousin in the desert, listening to his message of repentance and forgiveness. No doubt, John had come to see in his cousin all that he had been told about him, so on that day, as John headed for the river knowing Jesus was coming, perhaps John mulled over in his mind what he was going to do that day, how he would introduce Jesus to the crowd—for there was a crowd.
Matthew tells us there was a crowd from all over in verse five just before our text this morning: “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan.” A crowd would be good. After all, if John is going to introduce Jesus, he’s going to want a crowd, and this crowd would have been just right. They had gathered there at the Jordan because of John: maybe they wanted to hear his message; maybe they wanted to witness the spectacle; maybe they were desperate for any sign of spiritual fervor or political uprising. Whatever brought them to the river, they came in droves, and John was going to make the best of it. In fact, John looks out in the crowd and sees Pharisees and Sadducees (some of the real religious folks of the day) and decides to really turn up the brimstone: "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” You can almost feel the heat of their embarrassment and anger at being called out by this country preacher standing in a muddy creek. Perhaps John was in rare form that day, encouraged by the knowledge that Jesus was coming down to the river, that all these folks were about to witness firsthand all that he had come to know about his divine cousin. Why, he even works it into a sermon: “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
“Yessir! Preach!” I can hear them now, can’t you? John was (as they say here in the South) really shelling the corn! I mean, he calls the religious folks snake, tells them to bear good fruit or else be burned up, and then he starts talking about someone coming after him, a headliner to his opening act, who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and FIRE! John’s water baptism would seem puny in the blaze of a fiery baptism. John practically says so himself when he says he isn’t even able to carry the shoes of this one who’s coming after him. He’s really hyped up Jesus’ arrival! I can imagine the folks there at the Jordan expecting some real showstopper to come strolling up on the banks of the Jordan, someone with an even more outlandish appearance than John, someone with an obvious power and authority in his cadence. Why, I can imagine them whispering to one another, “Where is this guy? I’d like to meet him. Is John going to go get him? Because if he is, I’d rather stick around for the main event than settle for the opening act!” I suppose it’d be like someone coming out on the stage at a concert, putting on a great show, and then saying to the audience, “If you liked that, then you’re going to love the next guy about to come on stage.”
“Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him.” That’s it? Jesus just showed up? Well, not exactly. I mean, Jesus was intentional about being at the Jordan that day, and he was intentional about being baptized by John.[1] This wasn’t an accident; Jesus didn’t come with other intentions only to find himself moved by John’s sermon to be baptized by him. No, Jesus meant to be there, but come on: John had just spent six verses railing against the religious leaders and building up Jesus as one who would baptize with fire, who had a winnowing fork in his hand, as one who come to take names and judge sinners for their sins, and Jesus just shows up like it’s no big deal! Then, on top of such an underwhelming entrance, he does the last thing anyone would expect this guy John had just been preaching about to do—he came to John to be baptized! What in the world is going on?!
Jesus’ baptism has caused many a Christian down through the centuries to scratch their heads. Why does Jesus get baptized? What’s the point? Did he actually need to repent of something? That doesn’t line up with Christian orthodoxy. Was there some grand, mysterious reason behind this? Did Jesus want to model the proper way for baptism so we Baptists could spend centuries trying to correct our Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist and other baby-sprinkling brothers and sisters? We’ve come up with all sorts of ideas as to why Jesus went down for baptism when he had nothing of which to repent and no need for forgiveness. It’s been something we’ve struggled with from the beginning of the Church. It’s why Matthew tells us about John’s question to Jesus in verse 14: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’
I mean, isn’t that just like Jesus? Really, isn’t it? John thought he knew Jesus (he did grow up with him after all, knew about him from the time he was old enough to know anything), thought he knew what to expect when Jesus showed up, preached him up in a big way with dramatic imagery and fiery language, but then Jesus just shows up and wants to be baptized. It’s understandable that John would question Jesus’ actions, but again, in typical Jesus fashion, Jesus doesn’t really answer John’s question in a clear, direct, well-outlined way. All Jesus says is. “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” What does that even mean?! I suppose we might think that Jesus means baptism is some piece of righteousness, some deed necessary to accomplish in order to achieve righteousness, but that misses the original intent of the word. Jesus doesn’t come to John because he needs the effects of baptism, because he has some sin of which he needs to repent. No, John baptizes Jesus as an act of obedience, a part of God’s in-breaking kingdom coming through the incarnate Christ.[2] It’s not exactly a cut-and-dry sort of answer, but the point is that it doesn’t really matter why Jesus came to be baptized, he came to John to be baptized—Jesus came to John to be baptized—and to deny him baptism would be to do the very thing so many of us are guilty of doing—refusing to accept what Jesus calls us to do because of what we think about it. If John had refused to baptize Jesus, I doubt things would have turned out much different (in fact, there’s no mention of Jesus’ baptism at all in John’s gospel), but if he had refused it would have been because of John’s own expectation s of what Jesus was supposed to be, of who Jesus was supposed to be. John had preached an image of Jesus as a powerful judge and fiery preacher, yet Jesus came to be baptized by John himself; there’s more than a bit of dissonance there.
Again, though, isn’t that just like Jesus? So many of us believe we have Jesus all figured out. After all, we’ve heard about him our whole lives, read about him our whole lives, many of us have even been involved in churches where we’ve worshipped him most of our lives, so we’re pretty sure we’ve got him figured out. We know what he’ll do, what he expects of us, who he likes and doesn’t like. We’re pretty sure we’ve got Jesus all figured out, but then something comes along and jars us, causes us to question what we think we know about Jesus: we lose a job, receive a surprise, devastating diagnosis, go through a divorce, have a family member come out, hear a sermon that challenges us, meet someone who causes us to question what we know about ourselves, lose a loved one unexpectedly. Something shakes the comfortable ground beneath our feet and whatever certainty we had about Jesus is suddenly less certain. How we respond to Jesus in those times says everything about the kind of faith we have in Jesus.
You see, John could have refused to baptize Jesus. He could have insisted and said, “No, no, no. Jesus, I’m not fit to carry your shoes, let alone baptize you. You’ve got it wrong. There’s just no way I’m supposed to baptize you. It doesn’t make any sense.” John could have protested, claiming he believed that Jesus was too good, too righteous to need baptizing. He could have refused, but he would have been out of line with God’s will and purpose. In the same way, we can argue with Jesus when we’re confronted by him, when we’re made uncomfortable by the reality of Jesus’ power, grace, and love. We can argue, quote Bible verses, cite tradition, and even claim we know Jesus to be better than whatever it is with which he confronts us, but the more we push against Christ, the more we claim to know better, the more we simply refuse to acknowledge that maybe the things that shake us, that make us uncomfortable, the realities that cause us to question, may in fact be from Christ himself, the more out of line we may become with God’s kingdom purpose for our lives.
See, even though John may have imagined Jesus’ arrival at the Joran differently, even though he may have initially protested baptizing Jesus, John demonstrated his faith in Christ by following through with Jesus’ baptism, even with such a mysterious reason from Jesus himself. John demonstrates his faith in the One he had heard about from birth, the one he had grown up with, the one he was absolutely sure he knew as well as anyone, and he demonstrates that faith in the wake of shaken convictions and challenged assumptions.
Is your faith in Christ one that can withstand having your assumptions shattered? Is your faith in Christ one of obedience, even to those things which you might think are below you or below Christ? Or is your faith one that requires certainty, the type of faith that needs final answers and for your imagined images of God to be reality? When our faith is built upon required certainties and those certainties are shaken or shattered altogether, our faith can be shaken or shattered altogether, for it is a faith in a god made in our image. But when our faith is truly placed in Christ—a Christ who challenges everything, who calls us beyond ourselves, whose place is so often with those we deem to be “other”—when our certainties our tested, our absolutes shaken, our faith remains, for Jesus remains. Amen.
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