My daughter was born late in the morning in our student
apartment at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley. That night, my wife and I swaddled our new
baby in a cotton blanket and lay down to sleep in the same room where she’d
been born. Meg was exhausted from 20+
hours of labor and significant loss of blood, so I lay on my back and put the
baby on my chest to sleep. And as she
lay there, pulsing with her new life, the warmth of her body spread downward
into mine and filled my heart. From
there it moved outward, a sensation of deep healing and peace that flowed to my
extremities and relaxed my whole body.
It felt as if the presence of this tiny stranger was opening a treasure
within me I didn’t even know I had. The
energy of bonding that circulated between us was like a key opening a locked
chest called “fatherhood”, full of emotional and physical and spiritual
treasures—joy and laughter, generosity, courage, sacrifice, patience, and love.
The story of the baptism of Jesus is also about an opening. The water opens to receive him, and opens
again as he rises up, and then the heavens open. And from that opening something comes down
and touches Jesus, the presence of the Spirit of God. Along with the Spirit comes a voice, the
voice of a Father who loves and is well-pleased. And so opens a channel of communication between
Jesus and the One he calls “Father.” So
Jesus discovers their deep personal bond.
And whatever the Gospel writers tell us about this moment, it has an intimate
aspect that is hidden from us. We can’t
know what this opening felt like for Jesus, except perhaps, by analogy, to our
own experiences of opening in love.
But that doesn’t matter, because this is also an opening of
the curtain on the first act of a play. So
far in Matthew’s prologue we have learned about Jesus, about his ancestors and
his parents and the dangerous circumstances of his birth, and the stage has
been set for him with the introduction of John the Baptist, but here at last he
himself appears on center stage. And
this opening scene, brief as it is, reveals something very important about
him. It gives us the key to
understanding everything that follows.
We can’t know what it was like to be
Jesus, but we can know why he does what he does. He does what he does because he is anointed
by the Spirit of God, to be an open channel of God’s communication, because his
heart is uniquely open to the Father’s love. As Jesus goes on from the River Jordan, to
preach and to heal, to cast out demons and challenge the authorities, all these
words and deeds will dramatize a single message—that this is how God speaks. This is how God acts.
But the purpose of this message is not simply to impress us
with the power and the uniqueness of Jesus’ spiritual genius. It is to open a way for our faith. It is to invite
us to share, through him, in the communication of the Spirit, and the bond of
the Father’s love. The Spirit of God is
not the Spirit of domination, but the Spirit of Love, and Love means
freedom. So Jesus is, not just God’s only
beloved Son, but also God’s servant, sent to share the freedom of life in the
Spirit with all who choose to receive.
He is not only our Lord and master, he is our brother, the truly human
person Jesus of Nazareth, who humbly and obediently subscribed to the mission
God gave him. It is God’s mission, but
it was and is realized through human beings, for the sake of human beings and
the created world in which we live.
All of this is implicit in this opening scene. After all, Jesus does not come to the Jordan
to have a private mystical experience, but to take part in a mass
movement. The baptism that John
proclaims is a dramatic act of communal repentance and renewal, and Matthew
says that “Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan” went
out to him to be baptized, confessing their sins. And Jesus joins them, caught up in the anguish
of his people, and the urgency of their desire to change. When he gets there, as Matthew tells it,
John recognizes him as his master, the one for whom his own work is just the
preparation, and he tries to insist that Jesus should baptize him, rather than
the other way around. But it is here
that Jesus speaks his very first line in the Gospels, saying to John, "Let
it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all
righteousness."
“To fulfill all righteousness”—in order to understand what that
means, I found it helpful to refer to a book about the Hebrew prophets by the 20th-Century
Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Heschel explains that for the prophets the concept of “righteousness” is
closely linked with the idea of “justice.”
The two are inseparable but also slightly different. Heschel writes, “Justice is a mode of action,
righteousness a quality of the person…Righteousness goes beyond justice. Justice is strict and exact, giving each
person his due. Righteousness implies
benevolence, kindness, generosity. .. Justice may be legal; righteousness is
associated with a burning compassion for the oppressed.”
The ministry of Jesus that begins with his baptism, is the
superlative expression of this benevolence and compassion that goes beyond
justice. Demonstrating and dramatizing
this kind of righteousness in the things that he says and does, he will open
the way for others to see that this is what God is also like. But to fulfill that purpose he must be not
just be a Son, but also a servant. With
a heart open to those who are oppressed, whose lives are not their own, but are
in thrall to the desires and ambitions of others, who struggle under the
collective burden of sin, he must surrender himself. In an act of submission that foreshadows the
cross that lies ahead, he allows John the Baptist to push him down into the
dark water.
What does all this say to us about our own baptism? And what, in particular, does it say about
the baptism of three-and-a-half-month-old Isabelle Magdolin Fraser, which we
celebrate here this morning? The first
thing I would say is that it pushes us beyond a merely protective notion of
what baptism is. A friend of mine once
told me that the birth of his twin sons opened him up to the possibility of
both the greatest joy and the greatest pain that he’d ever known. And that is what love does, whether it is the
love we have for our parents, or our friends, or our spouses. But it is perhaps especially true of the love
we have for our children. We know that
our capacity to protect them is limited.
We cannot always even protect them from ourselves, let alone a world
full of dangers and disappointments, false promises and outright lies. So it is only natural that we would commit
them to the protection of Christ, that through him God’s righteousness might
supply them with whatever is lacking in what we ourselves can provide.
This is natural and reasonable and yet it does not go far
enough. Because baptism is not just a
private gift that the Church bestows upon her children from her storehouse of
sacramental grace. It is the
incorporation of one more unique and irreplaceable member into a body that is
always open, the body of Christ. Baptism
opens a channel of communion, and forges a deep and irrevocable bond, but it is
a bond of loving communion that includes innumerable children of God from every
time and every tribe and nation. We
surrender Isabelle to the waters of baptism, as Christ surrendered himself, not
to be hidden away from the world in the depths of God, but so that she finds in the world a way that is open. Open, to the freedom and life of the Spirit;
open, to the sufferings of the oppressed and the active compassion of
righteousness; open, to the power of love and connection that is innately
present in her as in every human being; open, to the teachings and example of
Jesus Christ, who blazed this trail, and walks ahead of her, conquering every
demon, vanquishing every foe, removing every obstacle that stands in the way of
her playing her part in his great mission of salvation for the world.
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