Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him. After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3.13-17)
With our Christmas trees either put on the curb or stored in a closet and all the snowmen and colorful decorations taken down, a sure sign that the holidays are done, we take a sigh of relief, ready for getting things back to normal. In some sense, the liturgical calendar embraces the same schedule, having the Christmas Season end today with the Baptism of the Lord and initiating for us the season of Ordinary Time, as it is called.
The gospel each year on this First Sunday in Ordinary Time offers us the story of the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. All things considered, it is a logical move, following on the heels of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the interval between the two events known as the “silent years” of Jesus’ life because next to nothing is provided to us in the scriptures, save Luke’s Temple stories of the presentation and the finding of the twelve-year old Jesus.
Practically speaking, then, the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan is the start of Jesus’ public ministry, all four gospels making much the same point, although John’s text only assumes the baptism when it has John the Baptist state that he had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus. Without an infancy narrative as found in Matthew and Luke, the earliest gospel writer Mark begins right off the bat with the baptism of Jesus by the Baptist.
In many ways, then, with Jesus’ baptism we can say we are off to the races, this episode clearly seen by all the evangelists as the starting point to the story of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection. It makes sense that the many subsequent Sundays ahead of us should be called “Ordinary Time,” with the exception of the Lenten and Easter Seasons that interrupt the smooth flow of the story of Jesus as otherwise presented in the texts.
Given the title affixed to this Sunday, I suspect that most people in the pew will hear from the pulpit a message about the significance of their own baptism into the Christian community. It is expected and overall I don’t have a problem with it. However, we don’t want to draw too much of a direct parallel between Jesus’ baptism and the baptism ritual as experienced by later believers. There are obvious differences.
For one thing, baptism was nothing new in the time of Jesus. It had been around for a long time, being a part of the Jewish religious tradition and culture for centuries before Jesus’ birth. Granted, it primarily was seen as a ritual for someone already in the Jewish sect, the washing or bathing understood primarily as a cleansing from some impurity, a condition of uncleanness without the sexual connotations we have allowed to become strongly attached to the word.
At the same time, baptism was seen as an initiation rite for non-Jews called proselytes who wanted to join the community. The Qumran sect in Judaism, a part of the Essene movement active in the century before and during Jesus’ life, also tended to see baptism as a form of initiation while allowing its use multiple times in order to restore purity. Excavations have found very large pools that provided access to these ritual bathings for members of the movement.
In other words, when the scriptures say that John the Baptist was baptizing at the Jordan, it should not be seen as special or as particularly odd, especially since scholars believe John shared many similarities with the Essenes. As he defined the baptism that he provided, it signified repentance and a conversion, a preparation for the coming of the Messiah that required right living on the parts of those who had had a change of heart.
All this is to emphasize that Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus’ baptism is probably not primarily a story about baptism, in all likelihood being a secondary interest of his, especially given the fact that there was nothing unusual about baptisms at the time, the Jewish culture having practiced it in one way or another for centuries beyond counting.
So what is the intention of this particular evangelist in sharing the story of Jesus’ baptism with his readers? All things considered, it seems his primary purpose may have been to draw our attention to what happened after Jesus’ baptism. We tend to do the opposite, seeing the baptism as primary, probably because it is told first, when Matthew may be more interested in the incident that immediately followed.
Overall, Matthew is little different from the other synoptic writers in this regard, telling of this post-baptism event in similar language. According to this synoptic tradition, as soon as Jesus had stepped out of the water, the clouds parted, a dove-like being defined as the Spirit descended upon Jesus, and a voice from heavens declared Jesus to be the beloved Son.
For Matthew, this second scene seems to be the important stuff of the story, not the baptism per se. Here, in this tripartite action–the opening of the heavens, the descent of the Spirit, and the heavenly voice–the identity of Jesus is revealed, presenting him as the beloved Son of God. The moment is crucial to Jesus’ self-understanding and to later believers’ understanding of who Jesus was.
Now identified as the beloved Son by the voice from heaven, Jesus will begin to do the work of the Son, fulfilling the mission that was given to him by the Heavenly Father. It is important for Matthew, as it is for both Mark and Luke, to establish who Jesus is as he starts his public ministry. Not without cause, the temptation in the desert is next in the storyline, Satan now wanting Jesus to question his own identity, offering him another option in understanding himself. Of course, Jesus did not fall for the ruse, his identity firmly established in his mind.
Also, as we will see soon enough, Jesus’ identity will become an open question for the crowds as well as for the religious leaders of the Jews. Matthew wants his listeners to have no doubt on their part, even if Jesus’ contemporaries did, skeptics who often failed to grasp that the work that Jesus was doing was assigned to him by the Father.
Woven into the narrative, although perhaps not as visible as other things, is the notion of Jesus’ obedience to the voice from heaven. It is carried in the second part of the message spoken by the voice when it says that Jesus is the beloved Son “with whom I am well pleased.” Why is the voice “well-pleased” with Jesus? Because he has been and will be obedient to the Father.
It is also behind the explanation that Jesus gives to John the Baptist for his undergoing a baptism at John’s hands, following a strong protestation from John who said to him, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” As we have seen, Jesus’ answer to John was, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”
And what is that righteousness or right living? It is doing the will of the Father, his obedience first shown in his humbling himself to become one with humanity. Now, again, Jesus humbles himself, allowing John to baptize him, even though John is reluctant to do so, recognizing Jesus as the one sent by God and who has no need of repentance as his baptism might otherwise suggest.
Saint Paul, writing decades before the gospels, offered a similar thought in his Letter to the Philippians in which he writes, “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”
Looking more closely at this second part of the baptism story, as Matthew would have us do, the question that presents itself to us is how we also might make the Father well-pleased with us. By the very fact that we call ourselves followers of the Lord Jesus, we have a responsibility to present to the public the persona of someone who is like the beloved Son.
However, if we are to be true reflections of the beloved Son, not cheap placeholders, then it means we also become humble servants of the Heavenly Father, obedient to his will. Through that obedience to the divine will, we make possible righteousness or right living. Then, and only then, can well-pleased enter the scene as the Father’s response to fruits we have borne.
That may require, first of all, that we reinterpret our own baptism, understanding it more precisely as a pledge to be obedient to the will of the Father, our obedience an act of humbling ourselves, not putting our own will before the Father’s, and in this way finding our identity in selfless service to others. Like Jesus whom we wish to follow, we step out of the waters, finding our identity in becoming obedient as he was obedient, humbling ourselves as he humbled himself in doing the will of the Father.
David Novak, the writer and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, once shared this personal story in an essay that he wrote. He told of a time in 1963 when he was a student rabbi and was sent to a small southern town to conduct Yom Kippur services at a synagogue too small to have a resident rabbi. The night before, there had been heavy rains and the sides of the road were full of mud.
The next morning as he made his way down the sidewalk to the synagogue, he saw a woman approaching him, walking in the opposite direction. As she drew nearer, he could see that she was an elderly, black woman, toothless, dressed in a faded calico dress and wearing a ragged straw hat on her head. For her shoes, she wore cheap canvas slip-ons, well-worn and soiled.
When she was about twenty feet away from him, she suddenly stepped off the sidewalk into the muddy gutter, obviously making way so that he could pass, her shoes filling with mud and dirty water. He was stunned by the action of the woman, so much so that the moment stayed with Novak for the next forty-five years.
He knew he should have been the one who stepped into the mud, in this way showing simple human decency to this elderly, black woman. More than that, he saw how that woman had identified him, quickly assessing who he was. To her, he was a young, white man, someone who had told her all her life that she was his inferior, less important, his equal in no way. Her life-long experience had taught her that her safety, maybe even her life, depended on presenting herself as lesser than him, going so far as lowering her head and casting her eyes down as he walked past.
He said that as he walked on to the service in the synagogue on a day that was seen as the holiest of days, a day when he was supposed to be cleansed before God, he found himself feeling profoundly dirty, not only for what he had not done by taking the sidewalk, but for what the woman saw when she looked at him, someone who thought himself privileged, special, and somehow better than her.
To say the least, it was a humbling experience for him, one that changed him in a way few things could have. Although she was the one who had stepped into the mud, he was the one who was humbled. There is much for us to think about in that incident. As we listen to the story told of Jesus’ baptism, we do well to see him as that old black woman stepping into the mud, the very act of his entering the mud of the Jordan River also seen as being one of diminishment and humiliation.
If we are able to do that, then we might be able to see our baptism in a new way, allowing us to join Jesus as he humbled himself to do the will of the Father. Reenvisioning our baptism in this way, our lives will be forever changed, understanding it less as a moment that turned us into someone different from the rest of humanity and more as the means of making us one with all others, the action more humbling than ennobling as we immerse ourselves in the full, crowded company of God’s children, every last one of us made from the same mud of the earth.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 