Baptism of the Lord

“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.”