Matthew 3:13-17 is a story about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. Verses 13, 16-17 follow Luke and thus come from the source common to them. Verses 14-15 are unique to Matthew.
Matthew his account with material he shares with Luke. 13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. Jesus is one among many who would receive his baptism.
Matthew now moves to material unique to his Gospel. 14 John would have prevented him, the problem of receiving baptism from John arising precisely because Matthew and his community believe Jesus to be the Son of God, 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. Questions may well have arisen within the community of Matthew as to why Jesus followed John for a season. The response of Jesus suggests that any devout person should submit to baptism. According to many interpreters, the thought here, as in 5:10, 20, and 6:1, is of a human need. Thus, righteousness is first a requirement of law that one is to fulfill, the entirety of the divine will as Jesus interprets it in Matthew. This means agreement with the intention of all older and more recent interpretations that stress the exemplarity of Jesus. Matthew presents Jesus as the exemplary, obedient, and humble one. His first saying from Jesus in the Gospel refers to this. The behavior of Jesus has foundational significance. Next to God with us, the obedient Son of God gives to the whole Gospel the Christological frame. The uniqueness of Jesus in this text consists in his unique obedience. The way of the Christian in the Gospel is the way to perfection in the conduct of one's life. It stands under the demand of higher righteousness in 5:20. From a theological perspective, John baptized Jesus as a sinner in the sense that he stands in our place as our representative.[1] Gnostics and Adoptionists could appeal to the text more easily than the orthodox or Trinitarian theological perspective. The latter tended to view it as a testimony to the Trinity, or as a type of Christian baptism, or as part of the history of salvation.
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 (not “has now become”) my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This statement does not bestow divine sonship but proclaims it. Matthew directs the heavenly voice to John and the crowds. In advance of the Easter event, we have the first proclamation of the reality of Jesus before humanity.[2]
The baptism of Jesus by John, in the hands of Matthew, becomes a clear statement of the identity of Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry. The commission of the risen Lord to the disciples at the close of this Gospel is to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This baptism has the primary implication for us today in that when we receive baptism, we are publicly uniting ourselves with and standing with Jesus. In that sense, it becomes the basis for the early church to invite new believers to submit to baptism as well. Baptism is a sign that the favor or grace of God rests upon us. Baptism is a form of anointing us for ministry. Baptism is a sign that we have committed ourselves to the reign of God. As the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist stands at the beginning of his public ministry and had implications throughout that ministry, so our baptism stands at the beginning of our vocation to become increasingly a Christian. God calls Christians into fellowship with Jesus. In that way, the beginning of the ministry of Jesus is not of merely historical interest. It became exemplary, normative, and binding in respect of the form of the beginning of their new life. The beginning of a life of fellowship with Him is at issue. It followed His act of submission to God, of solidarity with humanity, and of service to God.
We know from other sources that nationalist uprisings occurred when Jesus was two and twelve. However, a non-violent protest by peasants occurred in Caesarea occurred against Pilate. A few months later, Jesus will come to the Baptist for baptism. It will be the first crucial decision he makes publicly. We can understand the ministry of the Baptist as inviting people to leave “Egypt,” that is, Jerusalem and the corrupt ways of institutional life in Israel and come to the wilderness. The Baptist patterned his ministry after Moses, Elijah, and other prophets. Significantly, however, Jesus does not stay with John in the wilderness. He will return to Galilee. The question naturally arises as to why Jesus was among those who freely submitted to the baptism of John. This act of Jesus is one of the few incidents in the life of Jesus in which scholars agree that it happened.
It seems as if the early church thought of the reception of baptism by new followers of Jesus as a self-evident matter. We need to consider the basis and reason the early church considered baptism as the first step of the human decision that recognizes the faithfulness of God to the individual. Baptism is a sign that the faith of the individual will include obedience and the actual following of Jesus. The simplest answer is that the risen Lord commanded them to do so (Matthew 28:19). The submission of Jesus to the baptism of John may well be an invitation for his followers to repeat it and express their faith and obedience in this act. Jesus freely submitted to baptism with water. He began the fulfillment of His mission as the Son of the Father who had come into the world to reconcile the world to God. John may have the title, “the baptist,” precisely because he baptized Jesus, just as Judas had the title, “the traitor.” Jesus accepts the announcement of John that a new and imminent act of Gold will radically change the situation of Israel. He submits in advance to what God is about to do according to it. He accepts the implications of this event for humanity. He stands by this event as the act of God. Readiness for this even can only mean renewal. Renewal means conversion and repentance. We also note that Jesus fully identified with sinful humanity. He put Himself under the judgment of God and referred to the divine remission of sin. Because Jesus confessed God, therefore He confessed humanity. Because He submitted to God, He put Himself in solidarity with humanity. With the rest of humanity, He confesses His sins. He did not let the sins of humanity remain with them but took them upon Himself. He submitted to baptism in prospect of the rule of God, judgment, and forgiveness. No one who came to the Jordan was as needy and burdened, as was Jesus. Jesus undertook to do in the service of God and humanity that which he alone could do. He accepted his election and sending as the Son. He would live for God and therefore for humanity. His act of obedience in the water of baptism will be an anticipation of a life of obedience as he enters his public ministry. He will adopt a particular way of life that became a pattern for those who seek to be disciples of Jesus. The story stresses divine appreciation, acknowledgement, approval, and affirmation of the service Jesus renders for God and for humanity. Yet, all this still makes us ponder whether the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan is an adequate basis for why the Christian community should invite new Christians to baptism. One can imagine future Christians treating baptism with a neutral attitude. Yet God calls Christians into fellowship with Jesus. The beginning of the ministry of Jesus is not merely of historical interest. It became exemplary, normative and binding for future followers of Jesus. Water baptism is a sign of the beginning of a life of fellowship with Christ. Thus, the command of the risen Lord (Matthew 28:19) has its proper basis in the historical baptism of Jesus in the Jordan.[3]
Of course, the baptism of Jesus would later become the basis of saying that Jesus “instituted” baptism. It was also a model of Christian baptism, especially connecting baptism with the gift of the Spirit. Baptism into the death of Jesus Christ changes all individual particularities and brings them to a new boiling point, freely establishing them in a new form. The expression of this is the freedom that with the Spirit the baptized received as children of God and that enables them to go their own way, to follow their own specific calling, and to accept the consequences as Jesus did.[4]
The matter of identity rises again in the account of the baptism of Jesus. Why was Jesus among the crowds coming to receive the baptism of John? To ask the question is to raise the question of his identity. He could simply be a follower of John. Yet, we know he was more. John said so. In fact, his baptism testifies to who Jesus is. His baptism was an act of submission and obedience. Yet, his baptism has become the pattern for an understanding of Christian baptism. Look at how much we as Christians borrow from this baptism to understand our own.
· It symbolized the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit. An important apocalyptic symbol was the heavens opening. However, the “Not Yet” of the heavens opening must give way to the “Already” of the dove coming to rest upon Jesus while he prayed.
· His baptism identified the moment when Jesus began his public ministry and therefore a new course in his life.
· His baptism was an act of obedience and identification with the sins of humanity.
· His baptism identified him as the Son of God. The phrasing here combines two Old Testament passages. One is from Psalm 2:7, a royal coronation in which we hear these words: “He said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you.’” The other passage is from Isaiah 42:1, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him …” We must not lose sight of these images, that of king and servant of the Lord, throughout the course of the life of Jesus.
As we can see, there is no parallel between this exalted status and that of John the Baptist. This is the one-of-a-kind identity of the uniquely Anointed One, the Son, the Messiah, the Christ.
How can the baptism of Jesus by John be a pattern for our understanding of Christian baptism? Well, we can reflect on that for a moment.
· For the Christian, baptism is also an act of obedience.
· Baptism also symbolizes finding identity in union with Christ.
· To experience Christian baptism is to identify with the course of the life of Jesus, who lived in submission to the will of God to the point of death and resurrection. Christian baptism opens the door to a new way of life lived out of union with Christ as empowered by the Holy Spirit.
· As Paul will later write of this, even as Jesus finds declared in his baptism his identity as the Son of God, so we find our identity as children of God. Out of this identity, Christians can live out their calling in a new form of life.
As identity is important in this passage, identity is important for us. With good reason, early Christians took baptism seriously as a way of shifting our sense of who we are away from self and toward Christ. Properly understood, our baptism describes the course of a Christian life. Our baptism describes a vision of Christian discipleship that remains meaningful. The question, of course, is whether it is meaningful to you today.
Our baptism declares our identity as embraced by Jesus Christ. The questions of who we are and why we are here find their answer in baptism. We are children of the heavenly Father and we are to live as children of the heavenly Father. Few of us will have a heavenly vision. What we will have is the witness of the Christian community, scripture, and the witness of the Spirit. Regardless of our career choice, our vocation in life is to learn to live in this world as representatives of our heavenly Father. Developing a career demands intelligence and to learn a skill, finding out how we get from where we are to where we want to be. Calling considers whether where we want to be is worth moving toward. Since baptism is open to all persons, we can honestly say that all of us have a calling from God. Hearing a divine call is not an event reserved for clergy. Our common calling is to learn what it is like to live as children of the heavenly Father. Such a calling will unlikely be a heavenly vision or an audible voice. It will be through participation in Christian community, through worship, prayer, reading a book, studying the Bible, and so on. Such an event can be life changing as we consider who we shall be in the brief time we have for life in this world. Of course, there are times in our lives when we have the outward sign but do not have the inward grace (John Wesley). That is why children of the heavenly Father need daily repentance and recognize their need for forgiveness. Of course, many people received their baptism as infants or as a rite of passage into their teen years as part of confirmation. Did anything happen? The question for each of us is not so much what happened then, but what is happening now. Do we continue to embrace what our parents and sponsors intended in our baptism? We do not have to, of course. We can turn our backs upon it intentionally.
All of us are ministers. A little boy did not have any shoes. It was cold. A woman asked him where his shoes were. He was embarrassed, but he said he did not have any. She bought him the shoes. He started running to tell his family. Then he stopped, went back to the woman, and thanked her. "Ma'am, could I ask you a question? Are you God's wife?" She smiled and said she was not God's wife, but she was one of God's children. The boy grinned, "I knew it! I just knew you were related!"
It would be wonderful if we lived in such a way that at least occasionally, people wonder whether we are related to God. Some good advice is to always take a job that is too big for us (Harry Emerson Fosdick). If you can do the job, it is too small. It will not call forth from us all the faith, hope, and love we can muster. Thus, regardless of career, we have the larger task of learning to be children of the heavenly Father in it, as well as in our families and communities. Mother Teresa once said, "I am just a little pencil in God's hands . . . Doing something beautiful for God." That is all. Let us remember these words, from a poem from C. Farrar, "I am only One.":
I am only one: but I am one.
I cannot do everything,
but I can do something.
What I can do I ought to do;
And what I ought to do,
By the grace of God, I will do.
First, identify with the family. The family of which I am speaking now is the family of God. Are we willing to openly identify ourselves as belonging to this family? When you were born into your biological family, you were not born into the family of God. You must respond to the call of God, and thus to the grace of God that you experience. Can you testify to that response?
Second, identify with the kingdom. The family of God has business in the world. It has work to do and Jesus identified himself with all who would come to the kingdom, and we must as well. He will begin his public ministry after he receives this baptism. He will live the rest of his life in the light of that baptism. Do our neighbors know that we are Christians? Do our coworkers know it? Do the parents of our children’s friends know we follow Christ? But beyond just knowing we claim that identity, what have they learned from watching and listening to us about who Jesus is? Bear the name of Jesus well among a watching world.
Third, identify with our baptism. The example of Jesus reminds us of what baptism is really meant to be. It is not a hoop to jump through and a box to check. It is not a spiritual security blanket for our children. It is not a religious routine that just goes with the territory. Jesus goes into the waters of baptism to publicly affirm that he identifies who he is with whom God has made him to be. When we baptize people in the church, we recognize their place in the family. We agree with them that they are God’s and God is theirs. We celebrate our destiny as God’s eternal family.
Finally, identify with Jesus. Your baptism means you identify your life with Jesus. You live in fellowship with him. You follow his lead. It leads to the death of simply living for yourself, but also to the new life of living for and with him. There is a call to each of us to remember that God grants us this new identity — we are his beloved children. The name of Jesus is salvation, the beloved son, the Messiah. In following him, you receive his name – Christian, Christ-follower. He is your identity. Your destiny is united to him. Sisters and brothers rise up and bear the family Name!
Thought this was good. One question. I believe you do infant baptism as do us Presbyterians, how does infant baptism meet the purpose of baptism as you have described it?
ReplyDeleteI fat baptism does not in itself do this, of course. It has the potential to do so when combined with confirmation. I do think it has slender biblical basis. I puzzle over whether the church would be better off focusing on baptism as described here.
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