Sermons
13th January 2008 - Baptism of Christ
New Year is often a time for new beginnings, of turning a new leaf. The parks are full of joggers, the pubs probably less full of drinkers than normal, dieting takes up many pages in the Sunday papers, there is a even a rumour abroad that the vicar has taken up Yoga. The gyms and the diet inventors and the stop-smoking fanatics know this is a good time of year for them to prey on our innate sense of normally getting things quite wrong, an innate sense, particularly in religious people, of our sinfulness and they hold out the prospect of putting things right of feeling better about ourselves. The very murky area in our minds that slips into guilt by suggestion has perhaps never before been more exercised. We are told how we should behave, what we should look like, how much we should weigh, what we should and shouldn’t eat. And it soon becomes easy to associate pleasure with guilt, to get that only sinful things are really pleasurable and that we only really enjoy our true animalistic selves when we are breaking some taboo. This murky area of thought is particularly hazardous territory for religious people who tend to assume anything that they feel is right is also Godly or God-directed. It might even start to feel as if not going jogging is sinful. And if you want to test that connection between sin and pleasure let me ask you a little question to make it more real. What is your favourite sin? Bring it into your mind...and now, is it also pleasurable? Quite probably. There is a little complex of emotional problems about pleasure and sin that has been one of the central difficulties of being both Christian and a normal human being for as long as the two notions have been around.
The church has often looked to baptism as being the place where we begin to solve that conundrum, the place where we receive the gift of the Spirit and are washed clean from our sins. The trouble is of course, just like the joggers who won’t be jogging in a month’s time and the dieters who will be feasting in a few weeks, sinning doesn’t end at baptism it ends at death, so what are we to do in the mean time?
The baptism of Christ [which the church commemorates today] complicate things no end for the early Church. Jesus, who knew no sin, goes to be baptised by John who preaches a baptism of the repentance of sins. There is a holy puzzle here which bothered the early Christian communities in which the gospels were formed, and it is a puzzle which is worth examining. Why does Jesus go to John to be baptised and, if an answer might be suggested for that, what might it mean for us today?
The event is significant enough to appear in all three synoptic gospels, Mark recounting the apparent facts with little theological nuance but focussing on the descent of the spirit on Jesus, Luke adding that the spirit came as Jesus prayed, descending in bodily form like a dove. Matthew’s version [which we heard today] tells us the most about how puzzling the early church was finding this story. Matthew inserts both John’s reluctance to baptise Jesus ‘John would have prevented him saying I need to be baptised by you and do you come to me?’, and also Jesus’ answer, which is in effect the answer that Matthew had come up with to solve the riddle; Jesus says he comes to be baptised ‘to fulfil all righteousness’. Now this phrase for Matthew means to fulfil the scripture. He wants us to see Jesus in a world informed by Messianic prophecy, he wants us to imagine Jesus becoming aware of his role in the words of Isaiah and of the psalmist, so Jesus stands in the water of the river Jordan, is submerged at John’s direction and arises to hear the voice from heaven declaring that the words of prophecy have been fulfilled, ‘this is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.
And the imagery of the descending dove entangles us further in the world of Hebrew religion, it reminds us of the brooding presence of the spirit over the waters in the creation, and it reminds us of Noah’s dove, returning to him as a sign of deliverance from the flood in the ark, and in Matthew’s story as a sign of deliverance from the death of sin through the new life which Jesus brings; Jesus, whose body will become the new ark, the church, through whom salvation will be available to all who repent. So, Jesus identifies himself with the sinners he has come to save, he has come to be numbered among the transgressors, so he comes to John to affirm John’s calling of Israel to repentance. And by coming to John, Jesus legitimises what John has been crying out in the wilderness, the axe is indeed laid at the root of the tree, judgement has come upon Israel in the person of Jesus, Israel must repent and be baptised into the truth.
By the time the story of the baptism of Christ had come to be written up in Matthew’s community there would have been a much fuller awareness of Christ’s freedom from sin than there could have been at the time of the event, and Matthew’s insertions of John’s reluctance to baptise and Jesus’ insistence that all righteousness must be fulfilled, are an early attempt to reassure Christians that Christ’s baptism, unlike every baptism since, is not a baptism of personal repentance. Several passages of the scriptures we now call the new testament had taught Christ’s sinlessness; St Paul writing to Corinth calls Christ ‘him who knew no sin’, the letter to the Hebrews says Christ is ‘as we are, yet without sin’, and the first letter of John says ‘in him there is no sin’. And the general thrust of the early church’s thought about Christ quickly and irreversibly moved in the direction of proclaiming Christ as sinless, for he alone can take our sins upon himself. Matthew’s development of the story is the legitimate record of the Christian community wanting to express its belief in the fact of the sinless redeemer.
It is the fact of the sinless redeemer that makes the conundrum of the baptism of Christ worth pondering for ourselves, for each of us has in common a nature that is suffused with sin and deathliness yet is capable of redemption. All have fallen short of God, but all are called to the possibilities of redemption, the way of sin is our way and we are born into it, the way of redemption is the way Christ offers us and we may be born again into that way.
So what about your jogging and New Year resolutions, is all that really connected to this big picture stuff of sin and redemption? Maybe a little. So persevere, but bear in mind that you are working with flawed material (yourself), but that that material is utterly loved and encouraged by the God who comes to us in human flesh to show us that we are capable of redemption. And what about all those lovely sins you’ve given up? Well, keep them at bay as much as you can, knowing that they are likely to return in one form or another, and when they have overtaken you and those waves of guilt wash through your life once more, remember you have got somewhere to turn, someone in Jesus Christ to turn to, who though utterly untouched by sin, is able to draw you gently away from it, someone who offers you a different way out, a way out that doesn’t mean relying on your own will-power, but on the power of his love for you.