The Baptism of Our Lord
Today is the First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord. Today we commemorate with joy and thanksgiving the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. As I am gathering that you may have never even heard of such a holiday or may not have thought of celebrating the baptism of Jesus, I intend to give a few thoughts on the significance of the event.
I mentioned in a previous post that a week ago, January sixth was The Epiphany, which in fact begins a season (stunningly called the Season of Epiphany). This season extends until Lent and commemorates and celebrates the saving significance of Jesus’ life. His life does not serve only to lead up to the cross where salvation is wrought. The Gospels show us Jesus actually bringing salvation through his life on earth. This sounds strange to us because we often conceive of salvation as “going to heaven,” while such an idea, save a few verses, is remarkably absent from the Bible and entirely absent from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, salvation always means earthly deliverance, often from enemies. It never means escape from the earth, but refers to the transformation of earthly circumstances and the renewal of the quality of life. The earthy, embodied and grounded spirituality of the Psalms bears this out over and over. A few examples will suffice for now:
Psalm 3:7-8 – “Arise, LORD! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the LORD; Your blessing be upon Your people!”
Psalm 9:13-14 – “Be gracious to me, O LORD; See my affliction from those who hate me, You who lift me up from the gates of death, That I may tell of all Your praises, That in the gates of the daughter of Zion I may rejoice in Your salvation.”
Psalm 14:7 – “Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion! When the LORD restores His captive people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad.”
Psalm 18:2 – “The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”
As you can see above, I simply picked the first few verses that came up in my Bible program when I searched for “salvation” in the Psalms. It would have been easy to find dozens of additional verses in the Psalms (and hundreds elsewhere) to affirm the same conclusion: the hope of Israel was not a disembodied escape from earth, but the renewal of life on earth. That is how they understood salvation. With this conception of salvation, it is much easier to see how Jesus’ life does in fact bring salvation to the people. He heals the sick, restores the crippled, feeds the hungry, liberates the demon-oppressed, raises the dead, welcomes the outcast and returns dignity to the despised. He proclaims the kingdom of God, where all things will be made new and is in himself, the “Kingdom-of-God-in-person.” Jesus is the presence of God’s future salvation for the world in many diverse settings and applications. If we get over the medieval shackling of the concept of salvation to a disembodied, anti-earthly heavenly escape, we can see the vast continuity between Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Old Testament concept of salvation and the prophetically declared future for the world in God’s Kingdom.
How does this relate to Jesus’ baptism? Several happenings within the larger episode demonstrate the salvific significance of the baptism of Jesus. First, Jesus submits to John’s baptism. John is often called the last of the Old Testament prophets. By Jesus own words, John was the returning of the spirit of Elijah as prophesied by Malachi (Malachi 4:5-6; Matthew 11:14). As Jesus submits to John’s baptism, he puts himself in direct continuity with John’s ministry and the entire Old Testament history of promise and expectation related to his ministry.
Second, the Spirit descends on Jesus and thereafter becomes the determinative principle of his life. Third, the Father speaks from heaven saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17). Taken together, these show the baptism to be Jesus’ sending forth in his Messianic mission. Growing out of Biblical expectation, at the time of Jesus, hope for salvation was increasingly focused on the person called the Messiah. The Messiah would be a person who would lead the people of God in triumph over all their enemies, liberate them from oppression and be a conduit through which God would lead the entire world into a new age of peace, justice, freedom and joy.
The word Messiah comes from the Hebrew word for anointing, specifically with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, which was understood as the agent of the restoration of Israel (Ezek. 36:25ff; 37:14; 39:29) and the entire creation (Isa. 32:15; Joel 2:28ff; Ps. 104:30), was also understood to rest specifically on one person, the Messiah. When the Father spoke over Jesus, He was alluding to two Old Testament passages. In saying “this is my Son,” he is alluding to Psalm 2 and the commissioning of the Davidic King, which was a type of the Messiah. In saying “in whom I am well pleased,” he is alluding to Isaiah 42:1, which speaks of the Messianic figure, endued with the Spirit who will bring justice to the entire earth. In the midst of this declaration, the Spirit descends on Jesus, in very fact anointing him as the Messiah.
The moment of Jesus’ baptism is not merely Jesus honoring John, or giving us a model for us to follow, therefore “fulfilling all righteousness.” This is the inauguration of his mission as the Messiah. His reception of the Spirit is the beginning of the Messiah’s mission of life in which he will set captives free, restore the dead to life, and bring forth justice all over the earth. Here we understand Jesus as the one who will restore the earth, liberate us from all our enemies and free us to live before Him without fear all the days of our life (Luke 1:74). On this day, Jesus emerges out of thirty years of complete obscurity, rises from the waters of baptism anointed with the Spirit and begins to bring forth the new creation of all things. On this day, a door opened that will expand wider and wider into eternity filling the earth with justice, eradicating the curse from the planet and flooding creation with love, truth and joy. This is the Jesus we love and this is what we celebrate on this day.
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