The Baptism of Christ
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews
It’s crowded on the banks of the river Jordan. John the Baptist’s preaching has gathered people from across the region, his call to a new life and his message of repentance resonating with those who were running low on hope. They came to listen to his preaching, and a lot of them responded, plunging into the cool depths of the green-brown Jordan river and emerging, gasping, to a new start.
Some of them are still soaking wet, streams of water running off them as they stand exhilarated on Jordan’s bank, the newly washed, the clean, the forgiven. Others stand further back, irresolute, caught between past and future, drawn by hope but not yet believing, quite, that hope is possible.
It’s a mixed group, this crowd on the side of the river. John’s preaching has brought together people who normally keep far away from each other. Notorious sinners are here: the public drunks, sex workers, thieves and tax collectors and extortioners. The respectably pious are here: Pharisees who are the guardians of public morality. Some of them to keep an eye on what’s going on, for sure, but others for whom John’s message hits home, beneath the carefully maintained piety and devotion. There are others here whose sins are a bit more hidden but nonetheless whispered about: the adulterers, the filthy-tempered, the mean. There are those whose sins are almost socially acceptable: the gossips and tax dodgers, the greedy and the ambitious.
Some of them will have been drawn by John’s preaching because they were already sorry: they recognised their sin and wanted to turn away. Others will have heard his call and invitation reluctantly, their sin being a habit they’re not sure they want to break. Others come to John in desperation: anything to break free of a past that holds them captive, willing to give this promise of newness a go. And others will have been there as observers, unwilling, unable, to think that John’s message might be for them, too.
In the midst of this crowd of sinners we find Jesus. He’s not watching from afar. He’s not, at this point, the one doing the preaching or the baptising. He is, rather improbably, wading out into the river, joining in with all those other sinners who hope and trust that this water can be the means of freedom and new life, as it had been all those centuries ago, when Israel passed through the Jordan dry-footed, and entered the Promised Land.
This is problematic for John. He’s staked everything on his call to be the forerunner, the one who prepares the way for the promised Saviour, through whom God would redeem his people. And he’d thought Jesus was that promised Saviour. But God and sin don’t mix: everyone knows that. The holiness code of the Law maintained God’s separateness: if you were ritually unclean – which could be the result of disease or sin or contamination or occupation or gender – then your access to God was limited. In the temple there was a physical dimension to this ordering of holiness: the courts of the gentiles, and of women, at the outer perimeter, with access to the holy of holies, the place God was said to dwell at the centre of the temple, accessible only to the high priest.
Which means it makes no sense that the anointed one on whom God’s spirit rests, the promised Saviour, the holy one of God, should be found in the teeming mass of sinful humanity, asking for baptism just like the rest of them. Salvation is supposed to be about drawing people out of sin, not entering into it. Jesus is better fitted, surely, to a role of preaching and exhortation, of ministering baptism rather than receiving it. Why does one who has no sin need to be baptised, anyway? What does he have to repent of?
Nothing. Jesus has nothing to repent of. He is baptised not because he has sinned and needs forgiveness, but because he comes to identify with humanity in all our sin and estrangement and lostness. He is baptised because we have to be: because he loves us too much to leave us in our sin when he longs for us to know the new life he comes to bring.
In the crowds on the riverbank are those who are desperate for a new beginning, those who are drawn by this promise yet still with one foot stuck firmly on dry ground, those who are not sure about finding themselves in quite such sinful company, those who are cynical about the possibility of anything new at all, and those who daren’t trust hope, however much they long to. For all of them, for all of us, Jesus submits to baptism.
Because this isn’t just a baptism of repentance. Later on in the gospel Jesus will talk about his death in terms of a baptism, so what happens here, in the waters of the river Jordan, is a foretaste, a sign, of the death and resurrection that are to come. His acceptance of baptism is an acceptance of the death that is the lot of sinful humanity and his identification with it. Jesus doesn’t just stand on the edge of human experience observing and exhorting. He goes all in, putting himself where we are, in our sin and estrangement and lostness, so that he can bring us to where he is. If the baptism, the plunging into the Jordan, is a sign of the crucifixion, then the voice that calls Jesus the beloved son is a sign of the resurrection.
For this is what God says to all who are in Christ: you are my beloved child. No matter what’s gone before, what you’ve done, what’s happened to you, whether your resolutions to be better are going well or badly: you are my beloved child. It’s what he says to Benedict today, before he’s done anything very much. Benedict, you are not just the beloved child of Sally and Alex, but God’s beloved child, not because of anything you have done or will do, but because of what God has done in Christ.
You are my beloved child. In the baptism of Jesus, God shows us not just who Jesus is, but who we are in him. It’s what God says to those who come for baptism whose sin is public and scandalous. To those whose sin is secret, or covered up by the appearance of piety. It’s what God wants to say to us all: those of us who know our need of his new life; those of us who think we’re managing fine without it; those of us who are hopeful, or cynical, or can’t quite bring ourselves to believe that there is a love that goes deeper than our fears, our past, our sin.
When Jesus steps from the riverbank into the Jordan he does that for all of us, so that in him we too can be beloved children of God. And whichever bit of the crowd we most identify with – from the ones already knee deep in the water to the ones watching from what they think is a safe distance – Jesus will have us follow, draw us into the water with him where all the voices that tell us our identity lies elsewhere, all the ways we say ‘yes, but…’ and list all the reasons why we don’t think we should be loved when he tells us who we really are, all of those get drowned out so that the one voice we hear as we emerge gasping with him into new life is the voice of his Father and ours: the voice that says to us what it says to him. You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased.