The Baptism of Our Lord

The Baptism of Our Lord (B)

January 7, 2024

Text: Mark 1:4-11

            When our Lord Jesus stepped into the waters of the Jordan to be baptized by St. John, it was an act of New Creation.  The Old was coming to an end.  It was passing away.  The New had arrived in the flesh of this Man from Nazareth.  The whole affair is an echo of the Genesis Creation account.  Or, better, it is the fulfillment.

            Where are the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity to be found at Creation?  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1; ESV).  Here is God the Father as the Origin and Source of all that is, who out of nothing, ex nihilo, creates (בָּרָ֣א, a Hebrew verb that can only ever have God as its subject) everything that exists, seen and unseen, material and spiritual.  And He does it by the agency of His Word, His λόγος, as John has it in his Gospel (1:1, 14, etc.).  “And God said…” (Gen. 1:3).  He speaks.  He speaks into being.  And His speaking, His Word, is His Son.  “In the beginning was the Word,” John says, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 3, 14).  The Father speaks… the Son.  And by His speaking, the Spirit now acts.  There is the Spirit of God, hovering, brooding, gently moving, even cherishing, this formless and void mass of material God has created, called “the waters” (Gen. 1:3).  The Father, in speaking forth His Son, will by His Spirit give form to the formless, and fill the void.  And that accounts for the rest of Genesis 1. 

            Where are the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity to be found in our Lord’s Baptism?  The Son, the eternal Word, having been sent by the Father into our flesh, for our redemption, manifestly appears in the waters of the Jordan.  Jesus is in the water.  Firmly planted.  The heavens are torn open (σχιζομένους, σχίζω in Greek, from which we get the words schism, or scissors), and the Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove.  Hovering, brooding, gently moving over the face of the baptismal waters.  And, once again, the Father speaks, the reality of His Son: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).

            What is happening?  Creation, which through sin was in the process of devolving once again into the formless and void, would now, in Christ, the Father’s Eternal Word, be rescued from such devolution, redeemed, restored.  And the critical point where the whole action takes place is Holy Baptism.

            When we witness a Christian Baptism, what do we see?  Our eyes, having devolved under the curse, are blind to the grand reality.  We see only water poured upon a squirming and squealing infant, or perhaps the odd and unimpressive adult, and by a rotund and rambling reverend.  But what is actually happening?  What happens to every one of us when God brings us to the font?  There is Jesus Christ, the Son of God made flesh, planted firmly in the water.  Heaven is torn open to us, and the Spirit of God descends to hover, to brood, to gently move the cherished child of God now covered by the waters.  And the Father speaks the reality of His Son upon the baptized: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”  It is justification.  And it is regeneration.  It is the drowning of the Old, which now comes to an end in Christ the Crucified.  It is the emerging and arising of the New: New Birth, New Creation, New Man in Christ, who is risen from the dead.  When you, infant or adult, are plunged into the baptismal deluge, it is an act of New Creation.  What happens at Jesus’ Baptism is what happens at our own.

            Now, when our God finished His work of Creation, it is not as though He became bored with it, and left it to spin itself out and devolve until it fell apart.  The devolution of Creation is a result of our sin at the instigation of Satan.  We know that the only answer for that is the saving work of our Lord Jesus Christ.  But note this, and believe it, and cherish it: God is no deist.  In spite of our sin, and even in the throes of the curse, God sustains His Creation, and is intimately involved in its every aspect.  Right down to the minutia.  “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22).  “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.  You open your hand; you satisfy the desires of every living thing” (Ps. 145:15-16).  He sustains Creation in the same way He created it… by His Word.  He speaks.  His Son.  The λόγος.  “For by him,” the Son, says St. Paul, “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16, 17).  “He is,” says the writer to the Hebrews, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3).  He does it by His Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who rides in on the wings of His creative breath (which is to say, His Word): “The Spirit of God has made me,” Job says, “and the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4).

            See, what He does cosmically, He does for each one of us, individually, right down to our atoms, and our infinitesimally smallest components: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  The Greek poets came up with that, but St. Paul quotes them approvingly.  Every breath, every beat of our heart, the functioning of our bodily systems, and every one of our cells, everything about us, depends upon our Father, who numbers the very hairs of our heads (Matt. 10:30), and His Son who redeemed the very hairs of our heads, and the Spirit who is the breath of life God breathes into us.

            So, too, New Creation.  God doesn’t just bring us to new birth and then leave us to ourselves.  He sustains us in the death and life of Jesus Christ.  The Old is in its death throes as it passes away.  But as you know, it will not go quietly.  We are assaulted on every hand by the Old order of things.  The curse touches us all.  Thorns and thistles.  Pain in labor.  Strife.  Fear.  Death.  Satan tempts and accuses, and we still sin.  Simul iutsus et peccator.  At the same time righteous and a sinner.  That is our situation this side of the veil.  If the peccator is to die, and the iutsus make it out alive, God must do it.  He does it by keeping us in our Baptism. 

            Even as God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, and to this day we live in His Creation, so He created us anew in the moment of our Baptism, and that is now the ongoing reality of our New life in Christ.  Baptism is not a past event.  It is a present reality that carries us into the future, and into eternity.  It is not that I was baptized.  It is that I am baptized.  I am grounded in it, as firmly planted in the water as is the Lord Jesus Christ.  Only my own unbelief could uproot me.  And so, this now is my baptismal life: My daily death and resurrection in Christ.  The daily death to self in repentance, the daily death of the Old Adam, my sinful flesh, the old sinful nature.  And the daily emerging and arising of the New Man in Christ, the New Creation, Faith.  It is what St. Paul describes in our Epistle: We who have died to sin in Baptism no longer live in it.  For we who have died with Christ now walk in newness of life, and in the hope and expectation of the resurrection of the body in holiness and glory on the Last Day.  So we now consider ourselves dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6:1-11).  Baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, it is as good as done. 

            And what is true for us individually in Christ, is also true cosmically.  The Old is passing away.  The New has come in the Man from Nazareth who steps into the water.  All that is dying and dead is destined for fire and destruction, even as it once perished in the Flood (2 Peter 3:6-7).  Then will the New be raised up.  Even as the Lord Jesus is risen.  Even as He will raise us anew, bodily.  New heavens.  A New earth.  It all begins there in the water, in the Father’s speaking, the Spirit’s brooding, the Son, God-enfleshed, making in Himself all things new.  Including you.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.