Baptism of Christ
Sermon Preached by Dr Austin Stevenson
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of emperor Tiberius . . . the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.”
As the angel foretold before his birth, John explodes onto the scene, calling the crowds to repent and baptizing them in the river: ‘turning the people of Israel toward their God.’ His message is this: God is preparing to do what he promised long ago, and you are all about to discover that the bad guys and the good guys are not who you think they are. It’s time to bear good fruit, lest you be thrown in the fire.
Despite John’s abrasive message, the people want to know more. ‘What should we do?’ they ask him. And he answers: deal justly with one another and show kindness to those in need. “Are you the Messiah?” they ask him. And he answers: one more powerful than me is coming. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Taking his cue, Jesus enters the cleansing waters and transforms them. As Ambrose of Milan put it in the fourth century, “Our Lord was baptized because He wished, not to be cleansed, but to cleanse the waters.” Or, in the words of John Chrysostom a generation later, Christ was baptized “that He might bequeath the sanctified waters to those who were to be baptized afterwards.” Christ enters the baptismal waters, and when he emerges, they contain Spirit and Fire in their depths.
In case we need more confirmation that this is the one of whom John spoke, the Holy Spirit descends on him in bodily form and a voice from heaven calls him Son. When we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in waters containing Spirit and Fire, it is because the Triune God sanctified those waters and called us to them. We become sons and daughters of God by adoption because of he who has gone before us, the one who is Son by nature.
I find Luke’s telling of this story strange and captivating. It is striking how directly God orchestrates the events as they unfold. He keeps sending angels to tell people what’s about to happen, and then prophets to explain its significance. The Holy Spirit is visibly present at Jesus’ baptism. Some people might take issue with these elements, suggesting that they undermine the historicity of Luke’s narrative. But, as far as Luke is concerned, after investigating everything carefully, he has concluded that God himself was the agent of the events he describes. If God acts in history, then those actions are ‘historical’, however much our historical methods struggle to cope.
But I too find these elements challenging. However, I think the deeper reason for this is that this isn’t how I experience God’s presence in my life. I have never met a prophet, nor seen an angel, let alone the Holy Spirit. For the most part, my experience of God has been far more mundane, for lack of a better word, mediated through relationships and texts, through communities of Christians living out their faith from day to day.
The challenge presented to us by Luke’s narrative is not primarily an intellectual one: it’s a spiritual one. We might believe abstractly that God guides and directs all things—that nothing stands outside of his control—but we often experience life as something chaotic and random, not clearly guided by anything beyond chance. It can be a stark contrast with these stories where God’s hand is so clearly present.
The more I study the gospels, the more I think that this wouldn’t be a surprise to their authors. It’s precisely because these events are so shocking and out of the ordinary that Luke has taken the time to write them down. And the way he’s done it offers us some important insights.
Luke continually returns us to the story of Israel’s ancient scriptures, placing current events in the context of God’s past actions and promises to his chosen people. While each of us as individuals might not see a burning bush, wrestle with angels, or receive a prophetic word from the Spirit, we are part of a people who are led and guided by God in profound ways. Luke helps teach us to narrate our stories in that light.
How do we see our own stories in a way that captures the reality of God’s presence within them, not as a practice of apologetics, or sentimentality, but as a genuine search for the truth of things, grasping after the thread that runs through our story and points to something beyond it?
Watching the news, it becomes immediately apparent how acute this need is today. Seemingly more than ever, people are unable to fit together the pieces of their life into something intelligible, and they are desperate to escape the fractured, chaotic reality they inhabit. Think of the proliferation of conspiracy thinking, for example. People grasp at increasingly tenuous threads to tie things together, in order to cope with the barrage of information and their utter lack of control.
Luke offers an alternative approach: the one recounted by Isaiah in our passage for today.
But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
We are baptized into this story, invited to understand the opaque and incomplete narrative of our lives with reference to it.
James Cone, the great liberation theologian, writes that “Truth is divine action entering into our lives and creating the human action of liberation. Truth enables us to dance and live to the rhythm of freedom in our lives as we struggle to be who we are.”
What does it look like to dance and live to this rhythm of freedom? We might take our cue from John: act justly, show mercy, and most of all, repent. The more readily we let go of our own narratives, which serve to justify our actions or build us up, the deeper our vision of truth, and the truth will set us free.