Most of you probably do not remember your baptism. I remember mine very well—not because I was a prescient newborn but because I was baptized in my sophomore year of college. My parents were both in show business, and when they moved to L.A. they fled from the religious upbringings they had separately received back east. When I was born they decided to let me decide my religion for myself. (I guess I showed them!) I never even entered the doors of a church until my freshman year of college. I was baptized a year later on a Sunday morning, standing in full view of the congregation next to a nice young family holding a screaming infant. Had I known what I was in for, I might have cried, too.
There don’t seem to be any children surrounding Jesus in today’s gospel account of his baptism [Matthew 3: 13-17]. All four gospels describe this event, and each in its own way tries to explain why Jesus submitted to a baptism by John. In Matthew’s words, “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” One possible explanation is that Jesus wanted to begin his public ministry in solidarity with the others who are flocking to John. Another has to do with the curious phrase that Jesus uses in response to John’s question: “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
An interesting phrase, “fulfill all righteousness”. What can Jesus mean?
In the Judaism which both John and Jesus practiced, righteousness was connected to obeying the Jewish law and its commandments—not only ritual requirements and food laws but also doing acts of justice and mercy. The rules for living that way were clearly spelled out in the Torah. Moral living consisted in understanding the law and applying it faithfully to the circumstances you were in.
Matthew’s gospel (which we will be reading together this liturgical year) often emphasizes the imperative for Jesus’s followers to live by a “higher righteousness”. As Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” [Matthew 5: 20]. Who said Christianity was going to be easy?
When Jesus comes to John and joins the crowd in baptism, he is both submitting himself to the traditional claims of righteousness and also staking his claim to a life based on a new kind of accountability to each other and to God. Living righteously, to Jesus, means living in a style which exemplifies the spirit of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not just a matter of getting things right. It’s a matter of doing things “righteously”: going the extra mile, loving your enemy, forgiving your adversaries, turning the other cheek, treating others as subjects, not objects. That’s human righteousness. There’s also divine righteousness.
The Hebrew word we translate as “righteousness” says something about God—God’s greatest attribute is the “saving mercy” offered to all. A righteous person knows themselves to be recipients of God’s continual care. To think of oneself as accountable to a “higher righteousness” means to ground your life in a sense of ongoing gratitude for God’s saving mercy. We usually translate the familiar first Beatitude as “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The New English Bible puts it this way: “Happy are they who know their need of God.” When I start from an acknowledgment of my dependence on God’s saving mercy, I know myself to be one who needs God and who strives in both gratitude and humility to find a way to live in the higher righteousness toward others that Jesus in his life and ministry exemplifies.
All this brings us back to the question posed by John the Baptist: , “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Why did Jesus himself get baptized? John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus clearly did not need absolution. Why did he step into the Jordan’s waters to be cleansed?
My attempt to answer this question comes only after having spent a lifetime in the life and work of the church. In the course of these many years I have come to know and love countless people across generations and races and various ways of identifying themselves who have given themselves over—sometimes in fits and starts—to the “higher righteousness” that Jesus proposes. In various ways they have dedicated their lives to the work of justice, mercy, and compassion. They have done so from a posture of humility and gratitude. They know their need of God and they realize that God has responded to that need with an abundant love that compels them to share it with others.
I believe that Jesus was baptized by John so that he could show us how to live as he did, to show us what the baptized life is like. From this moment on in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus will go on to do things that characterize the life and commitments of a baptized person: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, consorting with the less respectable people in the neighborhood. Living the life of a baptized person means standing with and for others, and it ultimately brought Jesus to the cross. And what happened there and on the Easter that followed had life-giving and life-changing implications not only for the world, but for you and me too.
Living the baptized life does not necessarily involve going to the cross, though for some people it will. Living the baptized life does mean reorienting one’s life and priorities in such a way that we can make common cause with others for the common good. Baptism is an entry into the community that gathers around Jesus, who himself was baptized in the community gathered around John. Living the baptized life means that we find our fulfillment not alone but with others. The hard news of Jesus’s teaching us “higher righteousness” is that the moral demands on us now will be high. The good news of this teaching is that it will not be solely on us to live up to them. The Christian life is a life lived in community, in solidarity not only with the poor and sick and bereaved, but also a solidarity of companionship with others who also seek faithfully to live it out. None of us is on our own. We are all in this together. That’s why we come to church for service and support.
On this First Sunday after the Epiphany, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus as one of the ways in which God’s glory is made manifest in the world. Jesus has shown us a way to live our lives in alignment with his, by seeing ourselves as recipients of God’s saving mercy and by extending that mercy to others. God’s glory is made real and visible in you and in the myriad ways you love and serve the world. And if that isn’t wonderful news in hard days like these, I don’t know what is. Amen.
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