“You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Lk
3:15-16, 21-22
G. B. CAIRD
John was a great man. But his greatest
contribution to the kingdom of God was one of which he himself was quite
unconscious: he excited to open flame the hidden fires in the soul of Jesus of
Nazareth. The stories of the baptism and temptations must have been told to the
disciples by Jesus himself. The pious ingenuity of the early Church could no
more have created these stories than the parables of the Good Samaritan and the
Prodigal Son. On this subject Luke has two pertinent editorial comments. Jesus
was praying: the rending heaven, the descent of the dove, the voice are all
part of a religious experience which belonged to Jesus' life of private
converse with God. But the Spirit descended in bodily form, i.e. not in
hallucination or fantasy, but in real event, spiritual and private, but nonetheless
objective.
Jesus also was baptized. Why? To be
baptized was to ask God's forgiveness, and it is the uniform witness of the New
Testament that Jesus had no sins of his own to confess (Acts 3:14, 2 Cor. 5:21,
1 Pt. 1:9, Heb. 7:26, John 8:46). In his own teaching there is no suggestion
that he ever experienced the alienation from God which is the most baleful
consequence of sin. Yet his scathing attacks on empty formalism forbid us to
believe that he would have undergone baptism unless the ceremony had held for
him, as for others, a profound significance. The story of his baptism, brief as
it is, gives us Jesus' own answer to this question.
The voice from heaven addressed Jesus in a
composite quotation from scripture (Ps. 27, Isa. 42:1). Psalm 2 proclaims the
accession of the anointed king, who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron.
Isa. 42:1-6 is the first of a series of prophecies about the Servant of the
Lord, who has been chosen to carry true religion to the Gentiles and who, in
achieving this mission, must suffer indignity, rejection, and death.
Thus the words which he heard must have
meant to Jesus that he was being designated to both these offices, “anointed…with
the Holy Spirit and with power (Acts 10:37; cf. Luke 4:18), sent out to
establish the reign of God, not with the iron scepter but with patient and
self-forgetful service. Remembering Luke's story of the boy Jesus, we cannot
suppose that all this now flashed upon him as a new and startling revelation,
that up to this moment it had never occurred to him that God had singled him
out for a special vocation. The baptismal experience represented the end of a
long development, of deepening appreciation of the divine fatherhood and his
own filial responsibility, of growing insight into his mission and the world's
need, of meditation on the meaning of the scriptures and their application to
himself
Jesus went to be baptized, then, not for
private reasons, but as a man with a public calling. John had summoned all
Israel to repentance, and with Israel Jesus too must go. He dwelt in the midst
of a people with unclean lips and could not separate himself from them. Rather
he must be fully identified with them in their movement towards God. If he was
to lead them into God's kingdom, he himself must enter it by the only door open
to them. He must be their representative before he could be their king. He must
be numbered with the transgressors before he could see the fruit of the travail
of his soul (Isa. 53:11-12). The words from heaven were more than a: divine
appointment: they were the divine approval of the course to which Jesus had
committed himself in accepting baptism. To him who had chosen to identify
himself with his people in their need and their expectation the ratifying voice
declared, “Yes! That is what it means to be my Son, to be my Anointed One, to
be my Servant.”
