A couple of weeks ago we had
the first day of summer. Summer is my
favorite time of year. I love the warm
weather. I love the long days, how the
sun does not go down until 9:30 or so and it does not get completely dark for
some time after that. I even like the
thunderstorms, as long as I’m inside a nice, secure building when one comes
along.
And of course, around here, what do most people do in the
summer? We go to the river, right? We go camping, we go boating, we go swimming,
we go fishing, we go water skiing or tubing or whatever. This time of year, there are lots of people
spending lots of time at the river. I’m
sure there are a lot of people out there right now.
In Bible times, people went to the river a lot, too. Not to go swimming or camping, of
course. People need water to live, and
there were not really efficient ways to get water from where it was to
somewhere you might wanted to be, so people tended to live near bodies of
water. Rivers, lakes, seas, whatever
body of water they could.
That, of course, means that a lot of significant events
in the Bible happened at the river. So
today, we start a new sermon series, “Let’s Go to the River!” We’re going to look at some of the important
events in the Bible that happened at rivers.
We’re starting today with John the Baptist baptizing Jesus at the Jordan
River.
Now, John had baptized lots of people before Jesus came
to the river. Obviously: that’s why he was called John the
Baptist. John had attracted quite a
following with his baptisms. He was
pretty well-known in the area at the time.
People from all over were coming to see him.
And as you heard, he was kind of a sight to see. This dude living out in the wilderness,
wearing clothes made of camel’s hair, eating locusts. Saying things like, “After me comes the one
more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down
and untie.” Telling people they needed
to repent and be baptized so their sins could be forgiven.
He was a sight to see, but people clearly did not just
come to see the show. Somehow, this
strange dude with the funny clothes and weird diet was really effective. We’re told that “the whole Judean countryside
and all the people of Jerusalem” went out to him, confessed their sins, and
were baptized by John. Even allowing for
the possibility that this is a generalization, that’s still a whole lot of
people baptized by John.
And then Jesus comes out to be baptized by John. And the immediate question that comes to mind
is: why?
Why would Jesus feel that he needed to go out to the Jordan River to be
baptized by John?
Remember, the point of John’s baptism was repentance for
the forgiveness of sins. What sins did
Jesus have to repent of? What sins did
Jesus need to be forgiven for? Jesus was
the divine Son of God. Why would Jesus
need to be baptized?
It cannot have been that he was being baptized for the
forgiveness of our sins. That was the
point of Jesus’ death on the cross. If
being baptized could’ve gotten forgiveness or our sins, Jesus would not have
had to be crucified. There may have been
times Jesus wished it could’ve been done that way, but apparently it could not
be. It appears that Jesus could die so
that our sins could be forgiven, but he could not be baptized so that our sins
could be forgiven. There had to be
something else going on here.
It was not simply to follow Jewish ritual and tradition,
either. Baptism was not a particularly
important or necessary ritual in Jewish culture. You can find some roots of it there, in the
cleansing rituals that Jewish people had, but there was no thought that people
had to be baptized so there sins could be forgiven and they could get right
with God. So that’s no answer, either.
Some have suggested that Jesus was baptized by John to
demonstrate that he and John were allies, that Jesus’ ministry was aligned with
and was in fact the fulfillment of John’s ministry. And of course, it does demonstrate that. The thing is, though, that’s only something
that really becomes clear when we look at it from a future perspective.
As we read the
story now, we can see it showing that Jesus’ ministry was the fulfillment of
John’s statement that “after me comes the one more powerful than I” and “I
baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”. We can see that now, but there’s no reason to
think people saw it then. Remember, at
this time, Jesus had not yet started his ministry. He was nobody special. There was no big deal made of it when Jesus
came to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. Nobody said, “Wow, Jesus is here!” He was just one of the crowd, another guy
standing in line, one of the many people coming to John to be baptized.
I looked at
several explanations for Jesus’ baptism as I was preparing this message, and
quite honestly I did not find any of them convincing. I’m not saying they were a bunch of baloney
or anything. Many of the explanations
people suggest may have been a factor in it.
But none of them seem to really answer the question.
The fact is
that we really don’t know why Jesus decided to be baptized by John. I think it’s possible that even Jesus did not
fully understand it. Did Jesus know what
was going to happen when he was baptized?
Did he know that, as Mark tells us, he was going to see “heaven being
torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove”? Did Jesus know that a voice was going to come
from heaven saying “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased”?
He may very
well have known all that, of course. He
was Jesus, the divine Son of God. He may
have known exactly how all this was going to play out.
But I think
it’s at least possible that he did not know.
I think it’s possible that Jesus, himself, did not really know why he
needed to go to John and be baptized.
It’s possible that he did not know what was going to happen when he was
baptized. He just knew, somehow, that it
was something he needed to do. It’s
possible that he just knew he needed to do this and he knew that something was
going to happen when he did it, even if he did not know exactly what.
And after all,
a lot of times that’s how we approach baptism today, too. We bring children to be baptized. Sometimes we wait until they’re teenagers for
them to be baptized. Sometimes we wait
until we’re adults to be baptized.
Sometimes we baptized by sprinkling, sometimes by pouring, sometimes by
immersion. We baptize at all kinds of
ages and in all kinds of ways.
And yet, we
cannot explain exactly what happens and how it happens when we do that. I’m the one standing up here doing it, and I
cannot explain it. People take some
vows, I pour some water into a basin, I say some words, I put some of the water
on someone’s head. Think about
this: suppose you had no knowledge of
what baptism was, and you walked in here and saw me doing that stuff I just
described. You’d probably wonder what
kind of weird people were in this place, right?
You’d think this was a really strange ritual of some sort.
But still, we
do it. We do it, and we expect something
to happen as a result of it. And
something does happen as a result. We
cannot explain how, exactly, but it does.
As United
Methodists, we believe, as do many other denominations, that baptism is one of
God’s “means of grace”. What does that
mean? It means baptism is one of the
ways God gives us grace, and it’s one of the ways we receive grace from God.
In other
words, when we are baptized, the Holy Spirit descends on us, just like it
descended on Jesus at his baptism. None
of us is the divine Son of God, obviously.
We do not have the same divine power and knowledge that Jesus had. But each of us is a child of God. Each of us is loved by God. And each of us has God’s Spirit in our hearts
and in our souls. And one of the ways
that happens for us is through baptism.
We may not
fully understand that. But that’s
okay. Nowhere in the Bible does God tell
us that we have to understand everything.
The Bible tells us to trust. The
Bible tells us to have faith. The Bible
tells us to love. The Bible tells us to
follow. It does not tell us we always
have to understand.
We may not
understand everything, but we understand enough. We understand, as Jesus did, that we need to
be baptized. We may not fully understand
why. We may not fully understand what
happens when we’re baptized. But we
understand that we need to be. And we
understand that when we are, somehow, in some way, the Holy Spirit is going to
descend on us. And then, even if we don’t
hear a voice, we will know. Somewhere
inside us, we’ll know that we are children of God, that we are loved, and that
God’s Spirit is in our hearts and in our souls.
And as long as we do our best to listen to God’s Spirit and to follow
God’s Spirit, God will be well-pleased with us.
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