An easy question you would think, and it probably should be. I’ve seen it treated very vaguely very often though, there’s a depth and complexity here which people like to skate over the surface of.
Jesus is baptised (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3) with John’s baptism which is clearly stated to be a baptism of repentance (e.g. Luke 3.3). Which seems odd because Jesus is the one person in history who has no sin (2 Corinthians 5) to repent from. Matthew highlights the oddity for us, where John exclaims about the fact that Jesus should be baptising him (Matthew 3.14). Jesus responds by saying they must fulfil all righteousness and John duly baptises him.
The explanation that I most commonly hear is that Jesus was identifying with us in his baptism. Which seems a little odd because in baptism we ‘identify’ with Jesus, being baptised into his death and resurrection (Romans 6). Is it just a circular identification spinner? I don’t think so.
Jesus does identify with us; the incarnation is a beautiful and deliberate identification of God with humanity. He physically became one of us. However, I don’t think that’s what’s going on in his baptism.
If baptism is a part of Christian initiation—and I believe it is—or if we confess with the church through history that baptism is a sacrament, then it is strange if we suggest that something real is happening for us in the waters but Jesus was not partaking of that same reality. If he was play acting to show us the way, then is what we’re doing really real?
I suspect that much of the confusion and soft-pedalling comes form an evangelical nervousness about sacramental language and our modern (and not very evangelical) insistence that symbols cannot be things. Our dualism makes it hard for us to describe what’s going on.
What is going on? I think at least four different things, in order of ascending strangeness.
The Fulfilling of Righteousness
Jesus chooses to submit to the will of the Father and undergo an act of ritual repentance. Did he need to repent because of his sin? No, but he does so as an obedient act to the Father in order to show us the way and to live the idea righteous life.
This is a slightly nuanced version of the typical explanation. It’s true but it’s only the beginning of what we should say about baptism.
To Recapitulate Israel’s Story
Jesus’ life is a deliberate recapitulation of Israel’s and the World’s. That means that he deliberately redoes various events of the life of Israel to identify with Israel—here’s the identification, not with us but with Israel, then in baptism we become Israel in Christ—all those parallels between, for example, Adam and Christ are not just near parallels but a deliberate rewriting of the story. For St Irenaeus recapitulation is the way salvation works: Jesus rewrites the world’s story and in so doing rewrites our story.
We could also notice the deeper structural clues, for example the way that Matthew is structured as the story of the entire Old Testament. Jesus’ baptism here is crossing the Red Sea and precedes his testing in the Wilderness. Hopefully when we baptise people we’re talking about Noah and about Moses, because these are the parallels the New Testament draws, but Jesus is deliberately redoing these stories so that he is Israel.
This plays out in lots of directions as his life and ministry continues but here we particularly notice the parallels to the Red Sea crossing: the place of God’s victory over his enemies by the passage through water.
To Slay the Dragons
Please talk about dragons at baptism services, thanks. Extending the previous point, God’s snakelike enemy Pharoah is drowned at the Red Sea while his people pass through on dry ground.
Chaos dragons live in the sea. Job describes a dragon that draws up Jordan into its mouth (Job 40). St Cyril of Jerusalem explained that in his baptism Jesus ‘went down into the waters’ to ‘break the heads’ of the dragon into pieces. Jesus was baptised to defeat the dragons in the sea. Perhaps we could mention this with St Athanasius’ explanation that Jesus was crucified ‘in the air’ in order to defeat the prince of the air.
There’s a death and resurrection pattern to baptism that Paul draws out in Romans 6, but there’s also a Christus Victor pattern to it. This explanation is uncommon in the West. It’s pretty common in the Eastern Orthodox church’s iconography even today and can be found in the Fathers. The Lutheran writer Chad Bird would suggest that we should teach that in Christ’s pattern we emerge from baptismal waters carrying the corpses of dragons slain for us by the Lord. Which since he’s a paedobaptist is quite the image.
I imagine most readers think this is in some fashion a little silly. What I need you to consider is why you think that. If it’s that its too strange and even if it’s true you’d never consider saying it in church, I think that’s a problem. Perhaps we think of baptisms as evangelistic events, for all there’s nothing wrong with inviting others in that’s not what they are, they’re household events. This is as ‘in house’ as it gets because someone is joining the house.
If it’s that it’s too farfetched, I fear your modernism is showing. Christianity is a lot weirder than you think.
To Remake the World
To move to the strangest thing that I think is happening in Jesus’ baptism, this is a creation story. To separate water from water with the word of God is the essence of creation (Genesis 1). John’s gospel account is very deliberate in explaining that Jesus’ resurrection is the first day of the new creation (John 20), the eighth day of the week. The synoptic gospels don’t foreground the idea but there is creational symbolism in Jesus’ baptism.
After all, what do we have here? This is the word of God separating water from water—in this case by his body passing through it—this is the stuff of creation. Then the Father speaks and the Spirit hovers over the waters (Genesis 1). I think we can, at the very least, read this as a dramatic declaration of intent on Jesus’ behalf: he will remake the world like he did the first time around. I think we can probably go further; he has begun his act of doing so all the way up to his declaration that it is finished.
I haven’t attempted to map the creation week onto any of the gospels—and I think this would be a theological endeavour, I’m not sure the writers scoped this for us literarily like Matthew has with Israel’s story—but it would be worth considering.
Baptised
Jesus was baptised in water for us in order to obey his father, to recapitulate Israel’s story, to slay the dragons, and to recapitulate the world’s story—remaking it in his wake.
Why not preach that at your next baptism?
Photo by Geetanjal Khanna on Unsplash
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nuakh 