Why does Jesus get baptized?

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

15 As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16 John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

21 Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22 and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Tomorrow evening we’re going to have a discussion - possibly the first of multiple discussions - about baptism, the goal of which is to help us discern how we as church should practice baptism.  All Christians practice baptism, but they differ widely about the mode of baptism and its meaning.   Who gets baptized?  What conditions, if any, need to be met?  Why do we do this?  How do we do this?  It’s quite unusual for a community to face these questions, either because the answers have already been given by some denomination, or because the answers seem obvious.  The answers might seem obvious to you, but I suspect that within this community we would answer these questions differently, and indeed I’m certain that some of us were baptized as infants, and some of us were baptized by communities who had us wait until we made a profession of faith past some undefined age of personal responsibility, some of us were baptized after we became a Christian as adults, and some of us haven’t been baptized at all.  Given that we have divergent experiences and, presumably, understandings, how do we settle on a single practice? Or is that even necessary? 

I’m aware that this might not seem as important or interesting to you as it does to me, but how we practice baptism both reflects and informs some questions that I sure hope you find important and interesting, questions like, How are we brought into relationship with God?  Who is part of God’s family?  Who is in the body of Christ?  What is salvation?  And while I’d argue that both infant baptism and believer’s baptism have a solid basis in Scripture and/or tradition, they each tell quite different, even irreconcilable, stories about what baptism is and what it means.  

One of the core convictions of incarnation is that faith is not just about believing the right stuff, but rather than faith is something we do, and doing it requires practice, it is founded upon practices.  I’m less interested in getting us all to believe something about baptism as I am helping us commit to a practice that defines who we are and who we hope to be.  

In preparation for this discussion I’ve been reading a book which presents three views of baptism by three different theologians along with their responses to the chapters of the other authors.  One noteworthy aspect - especially during a week in which the calendar instructs us to consider Jesus’ baptism - is that Jesus’ own baptism barely features within the discussion of what baptism means and how it should be practiced.  This is not unique to this particular book, either.   Jesus baptism seemingly presents many more questions than it answers.   

That Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan is one of only a couple of events in his life (his crucifixion the other) that scholars - including those who seek to discredit Christian doctrine - agree definitely happened.   You can imagine that the Gospel writers would invent or exaggerate Jesus’ miracles, but it’s hard to imagine that they would invent him having been baptized.  In fact, this is exactly the sort of thing you might’ve expected them to leave out.  John proclaimed a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, and yet an essential aspect of Christian belief is that Jesus was sinless, so why would he submit to an act of repentance when he requires no forgiveness?  And, in any case, doesn’t this look like an act of submission to John?  One low-key theme in the Gospels is that many people apparently that John himself was the messiah, and Jesus being baptized by John - instead of the other way round, as John himself argued in Matthew - is just the sort of thing that creates confusion.  So if Jesus really is the sinless Son of God, why does he seek baptism? 

I’ve only just learned that it’s long been part of Christian tradition to remember Jesus’ baptism during the season of Epiphany, the season in which we celebrate Jesus’ manifestation to the world.  Last Sunday we recalled his appearance to the magi, those foreigners who come to worship Jesus, brining their gifts, and now we see the manifestation of Jesus as the voice from heaven declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”   These episodes early in the Gospel reveal Jesus’ identity even though, as the story continues, his identity will be less than obvious to just about everyone he meets, and even those who understand who he is still fail to grasp what that means.   Not until Jesus rises from the dead will the truth about the Son of God come into view, and in it’s only this light that truth about God comes into view as well.  

We’ve just celebrated at Christmas that God is Emmanuel, that is with us, that God assumed our humanity and entered our broken world as one of us, that he is intimately acquainted with our sorrow and pain.  God, in Christ, condescends to our situation, but he comes as not at the greatest, but as the least.  That he arrives lowly in a manger very much sets the course of his life.  Christ comes humble, not exalted.  

And this fundamental aspect of Jesus’ identity - which reveals the very character of God - shapes how we should understand his baptism.  God comes to earth in Christ not because God needs something; God comes for us and for our salvation, that we might be restored and redeemed.   God saves us by becoming one of us, by taking on the human condition.  It is precisely this identification with us that allows him to be our savior.  

I realize that the language of “identification” is distinctly of this age, and yet I think it captures well a core truth of the Gospel, a truth revealed in Jesus’ baptism as he, the sinless one sent from above submits to the same baptism as sinners, becoming like us in every way.  He did not stand apart from the people but rather becomes like them so that they might become like him.  As the church fathers said, “That which the Son did not assume he did not redeem”.  In his baptism, Jesus identifies with those who need salvation, he becomes like a sinner to save sinners. he even, in the language of Paul, became sin itself so that we might become the righteousness of God.   Jesus doesn’t need to be baptized for his own sake; he does it to identify with us.  And this reveals the essence of God’s character.  

There is just one God, but there are many ways of conceiving of who God is, and some of them are better than others.  Scripture provides many different themes and motifs to describe God, so it’s easy to latch on to something secondary or subordinate and make it the way of thinking about God.  And regrettably sometimes we end up with a picture of God who is more like an enemy than a friend.  But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is one who is most definitely for us, not against us.   And because we take God to be revealed as a unity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we might take this passage, where all three appear together at once, to be an especially clear depiction of God.  Here as Jesus is baptized, the Holy Spirit descend as the Father’s voice declares from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  

So how does Jesus’ baptism inform our own baptism?  The two are distinct and yet inseparable, a single movement in parallel directions.  Christ descends so that we might ascend, Christ dies so that we might live, in the ancient formulation, “God became human so that humanity might become God.”  In his baptism Jesus identifies with us, and in our baptism we identify with him - or perhaps, better, we are identified with him, his story becomes our story, we find our lives hidden in is, united in death that we might also be united in his resurrection.   It is no surprise that, just as the Trinity is present at Jesus’ baptism, he instructs us to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.  

One way of framing the distinction between the two primary baptismal practice is to say that believer baptism emphasizes that we personally need to identify with Christ, that the truth about him needs to be claimed, embraced and lived out, while infant baptism emphasizes that the Gospel is true irrespective of our recognition, that it’s a truth that we can proclaim over the life of another, that our understanding adds nothing to who God is and what God has done.  Or put differently, this is the difference between our subjective experience of the Gospel in our lives and the insistence that it’s objectively true whether or not we agree or understand.  Both are worth emphasizing, which is why the church has multiple practices.  The question for us is, what do we want to emphasize?  What do we want our practice to be?