Baptism of the Lord, 2024

All four of the gospels tell the story of Jesus’s baptism by John in the Jordan. The three synoptic gospels record the details of the story (Matthew 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22). The gospel of John made reference to it (John 1:29-34). This unified witness speaks of the significance of the event.

The details of the baptism communicate its significance for Jesus. They affirmed for him his sense of identity—his understanding of who he was: the Messiah.

The baptism was a mystical as well as a physical experience for Jesus. As he was baptized by John, Jesus saw a vision and heard a voice. Both the vision and the voice reflected Jesus’s understanding of who he was.

The vision was of the Spirit descending upon him in the form of a dove (Mark 1:10). In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Spirit was given to select individuals who had been chosen by God for a special calling—prophets and kings. The vision of being anointed with the Spirit confirmed for Jesus that he was God’s chosen Messiah. (As you know, the word “messiah” means “the anointed one.”)  

The voice Jesus heard reinforced the vision. What the voice said was composed of two parts. Each part was a line from a song in the Hebrew Scriptures. The first part of the affirmation—“You are my Son, the Beloved”—was from Psalm 2, the coronation psalm. This psalm was sung in the coronation of a new king. It declared the special relationship the king had with God as a beloved son. This line reinforced the message of the vision—Jesus was the Messianic king, the son of David. The second line—“with you I am well pleased”—was from one of the four servant songs of Isaiah (Isaiah 42:1). This line indicated that Jesus was the suffering servant of Isaiah—the one who would suffer and die on behalf of the people (Isaiah 52:13-53:12).

These two lines reflect Jesus’s unique understanding of the Messiah: the Messiah was the suffering servant of the LORD. Rather than being a warrior-king, the messianic king was a servant who would suffer and die for his people. Jesus was the first person in Hebrew history to combine these two historic roles.

His baptism was Jesus’s commitment to embrace and live out of his identity. Immediately after his baptism, Jesus experienced a period of testing in the wilderness—what we commonly call his temptations. This time of testing was based upon his self-understanding. From there, Jesus began his public ministry, proclaiming “the kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:14-15).

While each synoptic gospel tells the story of Jesus’s baptism, each used the story with a different purpose in mind. Mark’s gospel used the story as the central feature in the introduction of his gospel.

The opening statement of the gospel established the theme of the introduction (Mark 1:1-15). “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). The original audience would have understood the opening words as a political statement. “The good news” (or gospel) was a phrase used throughout the Roman Empire when a new edict from the emperor was proclaimed: “the good news of Emperor Tiberius.” “The Son of God” was a title used in reference to the emperor (as were the titles Savior, Lord, Prince of Peace). The gospel of Jesus offered an alternative to the ways of the Roman Empire.

In the final lines of the introduction, Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15). The reign of God “has come near.” The word means here, now, in your midst. A new way of life—one at odds with the ways of empire—was available for all to experience, participate in, and contribute to.

How the kingdom was different from the ways of the empire is reflected in Jesus’s baptism. As the Messiah, Jesus used power to serve—i.e., as a servant—embracing every person as a beloved child of God and seeking their good. As the suffering servant, Jesus sought the other’s good at great cost to himself. By contrast, the Roman Empire was hierarchical. In it, power was used by those in positions of authority over, down against those in lower positions in the hierarchy. Power was used for personal benefit at the other’s expense. The contrast between the two—the empire of Rome and the kingdom of God—was clear.

Jesus came to proclaim and establish the kingdom of God—a world that lived the grace-based, servant ways of God. He called all who heard his message to follow him, learning from him this new way of living. The gospel tells the story of the followers of Jesus as they moved from the ways the world trained them to think—“the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod” (Mark 8:15) —to thinking shaped by the character of God and the ways of God.

Jesus’s baptism marks the beginning of his ministry. Similarly, the Baptism of the Lord Sunday begins the liturgical calendar’s march toward Easter. It calls us to remember our baptism, reaffirming our identity as the beloved children of God and as the followers of Jesus. It calls us to live the alternative ways of the kingdom through the power of the Spirit.

Remember your baptism. Embrace your identity as a beloved child of God, called to be a follower of Jesus. Knowing you have been anointed with the same Spirit that anointed Jesus at his baptism, live out of this identity by learning and living the ways of God that Jesus taught.