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The First Sunday After the Epiphany, 01/10/2016
The Baptism of Christ
Sermon on Luke 3:15-22, by Hubert Beck
As the people were in expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Christ, John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people. But Herod the tetrarch, who had been reproved by him for Herodias, his brother’s wife, and for all the evil things that Herod had done, added this to them all, that he locked up John in prison.
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version,
© 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
THE BELOVED OF GOD
What a hobglob of characters and events are all thrown together in the eight verses serving as the basis for our consideration this morning!!! Contrasts and comparisons abound, not to speak of the broad generalization serving as the context for the baptism of Jesus. Just think about some of them!
The power of a governmental authority seated in the center of power is pitted against the weakness of one serving God in the wilderness around the Jordan River. The moral corruption of Herod opposes the purity of God’s servant John. The anger of this arrogant politician results in the imprisonment of a man willing to publicly name the sin of Herod, calling him to repentance. The hopes of a people eager for a display of messianic power are dashed by the one on whom they are pinning their hopes when he says that this task belonged to another who would come after him – one who would bear a fire for justice where it is called for while gathering the righteous into his barn. A simple earthly prayer is interrupted by an opening in the heavens and a voice declaring this man praying to be the beloved Son of the one who spoke, confirming the pleasure of the one speaking through that opening in the heavens. A dove, one much like the one that had once ratified the re-emergence of dry land after the ancient flood, lights upon this one being authenticated as God’s chosen one, bearing a physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
You surely get the idea. In a mere eight verses Luke has gathered together a cast of characters and events that is not unlike the world in which we all live daily. Nothing makes sense, in a way, for everything is turned topsy-turvy. Every evidence points to evil overcoming good through the presence of Herod, but into the midst of that strange mix God unveils one who will bring his will to pass in spite of all appearances to the contrary.
Everything Depends on Where You Keep Your Eyes Focussed
Jesus’ baptism, of course, has many sides to it that are not recorded here, although we find them in the other three Gospels – sides such as the notation by Mark that Jesus, himself, saw the heavens open up before his eyes when the pronouncement of his divine sonship was made, all this taking place as he was coming out of his baptismal waters, but leaving the reader unsure about whether others saw and heard what Jesus saw and heard or if it was purely a private vision and confirmation.
Or, on another level, Matthew’s account of how John wanted to beg off baptizing Jesus, saying, rather, that he, John, should be baptized by Jesus. In retort Jesus insisted, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness,” at which point John consented to baptize Jesus. In this way Matthew suggested that in this moment Jesus made it plain that he, who was without sin, was taking up the sin of the world into his own body and John’s baptism would signal the call for universal repentance.
On still another level the apostle John tells us that it was this moment when John the Baptizer identified Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” the one of whom he had said would come after him and “who ranks before me, because he was before me.” Each of these other accounts are in agreement with what we hear in today’s text, but they add dimensions and insights into this moment, any and all of which should be explored at greater length than we shall do here, for they are texts that carry a weight of their own.
The one thing that unites them all is this single, simple fact – they all direct our eyes in a most immediate and intense way to the one who stands front and center in our text for today, namely, Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Mary, Son of God, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” All other events or persons are purely secondary to the intention of these texts.
The Burden of Carrying Such a Glorious Name
One would expect a man so identified by God as “My beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” to have been immediately set on a grand and glorious journey of self-acclamation. It is hard for us to deny that, if we were suddenly elevated to an equally majestic position of some kind filled with such remarkable promise as that which was suddenly and publicly bestowed upon this man, a “nobody from Galilee” up till now, we would quite actively busy ourselves with establishing that newly acquired status in some unmistakable way so that others would recognize us as holding such a distinctive station in life. That we would proceed that way makes it difficult for us to understand why the new designation should remain “hidden,” relegated to obscurity for the moment, so to speak.
Whether that was a temptation for Jesus is not known. What is known, however, is that he was not given such an opportunity even had he wanted to flaunt that name and title. The Father saw to that. The very next thing we hear following this vaunted moment was that “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil,” as Matthew tells us. This text from Luke uses the same language when it speaks of his being led into the wilderness, but Luke pauses to give his readers a genealogical notation concerning Jesus. Mark, however, tells us about what took place following this dramatic moment with extreme abruptness, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” “Drove him,” mind you. That honorific title was immediately put on trial, as though to say, “Now that you have been affirmed in such a remarkable way, what are you going to do about it – or with this glorious title? Are you going to spend it on yourself in some way or another . . . or will you use it in such a way that others will be benefitted by it? Now that you have been recognized as someone very special, you must make some fundamental decisions about where to go and what to do from here.’”
We all know, of course, both the outcome of that first trial in his ministry as well as the whole of the ministry that followed that demanding phase as he carried his intensified self-awareness out into the world. Luke wastes no time after informing us of this initial trial before he tells us that Jesus was filled with a deep consciousness of being an heir of – no, more than an heir of – rather, that he, himself, was the one through whom the unfolding of a long period of prophetic preparation for his coming was now taking place. He even spoke of his instituting a new era of divine renewal of the very old and, sadly enough, deteriorating recognition of what it means to be a citizen of the kingdom of God. The earliest teaching of Jesus that Luke records is when he unrolled the scroll in the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town, and publicly read the words of Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Having set these words before the congregation he calmly said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
His feet were set on the path for which the Spirit had first enlivened him in the womb of Mary – the path of reconciliation between God and his human family. That it would not be an easy path was quickly made clear as those who heard him make such a claim for himself “were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.”
The path upon which he was now set led directly to another hill just outside another city, Jerusalem, where he would be secured to a cross. That was the noble task appointed for him!
That, then, was the burden he carried from this day of his baptism – the burden of being God’s “beloved Son with whom the Father was well pleased,” which affirmation was confirmed by the dove of the Holy Spirit descending and resting on his shoulder. A title of the same sort was nailed over his head on the cross.
To be sure it hardly measured up to what one would expect of a person named by God as his Son, his Beloved.
But it revealed the heart of the one who so claimed him, for it revealed the willingness on the part of God to repair the breach that sin had made between the human race and the God who had first made them – and from whom they had separated themselves in a most ungraceful and inelegant way! It was the task of this Beloved Son to stand in the breach, to suffer there in the breach, and to die as the means by which that breach was bridged. It could not be built by those who had made it. If it was not bridged by the one from whom humanity had estranged itself it would never be bridged. The body of the crucified and risen one became itself the overpass from this sin-filled world into the righteousness of God.
It was hardly a task that had any appearance of glory. In fact, it was a task that, on the surface, was very shameful. But it was the task that only this “beloved Son with whom the Father was well pleased” could take up – so take it up, he did. And now he stands as the one whose death was stamped as successful in accomplishing its purpose by virtue of his rising from the dead. .
His name was vindicated! That for which he was born was carried to its conclusion through the burdensome task of carrying the human name and body of Jesus to its intended end as the Christ, the Anointed One, he whom the Father crowned with glory and honor and now sits once again at the right hand of the Father, testified to by the Holy Spirit who comes as the dove hovering over the ark of the church in which waters are regularly poured age after age as the regenerating miracle of baptism echo in a different, yet similar, way to those waters in which John baptized the one greater than he. In this ark we are regularly nourished by the body and blood of the crucified and risen one as the same Spirit lingers over the bread and wine in which the one named as God’s Son in this text are received by those who have been overcome by the grace and mercy of the God who opened the heavens in this text in order to reach down into our world, giving us new names as he gave that wonderfully glorious name to the one who is front and center of our text today.
Back to the Beginning
So all the works of God are joined together in a most remarkable way right in the midst of this “mess” we call our present home. Here the palaces of power seem to reign supreme. Beheadings are by no means unheard of to this day. It is in the very midst of this “mess,” however, that one appears who is named by his Father as a Son in whom the Father is well pleased.
Just as Herod proposed to have the last word in imprisoning John the Baptizer because he had dared to challenge the “right” Herod had in mind to claim as his own, another voice sounds through an opening in the heavens, declaring a new and alternate reality to be the last and ultimate word.
Just as the Father broke into the moment when Jesus rose out of the waters of baptism and was praying with a new and never-before-heard word over his Chosen One, naming him with a name above all other names, so the Father breaks into the moments when water is poured and bread and wine are received by his children with words spoken through the break in the heavens, claiming those over whom the waters are poured and who receive the bread and wine as his own children. It is truly remarkable, is it not?
Never to be forgotten, therefore, is this simple truth: You also are his beloved. You also are the ones whom he names as those with whom he is well pleased, for you are bundled up in the heart of this one who is Beloved above all, Jesus Christ, the son of Mary and the Son of God, the Savior of the world. In that heart of hearts you are safe from the assaults of any and all enemies.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit, the words spoken when the waters were poured over you in your baptism. Amen.