Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. This Feast lies at the transition from our Christmas season, focused on the Nativity, to the rest of our Liturgical year, based around the adult life of Jesus. The baptism of Jesus obviously links to the grown man – it occurs as Jesus is about to start his public ministry, those brief three years in which he completed the revelation of God (which had been in progress via the Jewish people for the previous 2000).
The link back to the Christmas season may be less obvious. Sometimes this feast is described as the “Second Epiphany”. Matthew uses the story of wise men from the East coming to Jesus at his birth to demonstrate how Jesus was made visible to the world. Similarly Jesus’s baptism by John is not a private event. Luke has the Holy Spirit descending in visible form and the voice of God speaking out loud (Lk 3:15-22). This is an epiphany, a manifestation, much more dramatic than having Jesus shown to a few wise strangers from a far-off land.
There is another clue as to just how important the baptism of Jesus is in the fact that it is included in all four Gospels. We usually don’t tend to notice how little is common between all four gospels – but apart from the passion and death of Jesus, one of the very few incidents that appears in all four accounts is his baptism. So it was clearly central to the understanding of the early Church and what was said about Jesus.
Which leads to the obvious question – why? And the maybe related question, at least for us – why did need Jesus need to get baptized anyway? Jesus was the Son of God, he already had a perfect relationship with God, he was sinless – what was the point of him being baptized?
One answer to this question is: “of course Jesus didn’t need to be baptized, but he chose to do so to demonstrate to us that it was a good idea.” This seems to me a little bit like the broccoli argument – the mother who who says to the child, yum, yum, this broccoli is lovely, you should really try some too…
Of course we don’t know what was in Jesus mind when he decided to get baptized, and the fact that he did so could carry a different message for each of us. Without doubt the early Church thought baptism was absolutely central to becoming and being a Christian. And that would be a reason to emphasize Jesus’ baptism. But I don’t find the broccoli argument very convincing, because it doesn’t seem to reflect the way Jesus relates to us, or tries to teach us in other cases. He may tell us there is a value in being childlike – but he doesn’t treat us like children.
There are other ways to look at what the baptism of Jesus means for us. One important lesson, even correction, is that baptism isn’t something that puts us into a relationship with God. We tend to look at sacraments as acts that have an effect – not surprisingly – that’s the way we tend to think about the world in general – causes and effects. But there is another way to think about sacraments – they show us an underlying reality. They don’t change anything except in our awareness and understanding. They make visible something we don’t otherwise see.
This applies to baptism – we don’t need a sacrament, or any human action, to put us in a relationship with God – God already has a relationship with us, from the moment of conception, in fact from the beginning of time (‘before we even came to be’ Jer 1:5). Baptism “just” allows us to acknowledge that fact, it makes it visible, it shows our true nature as beloved children of God. And we can extend this approach to other sacraments – marriage doesn’t create the relationship between husband and wife – it acknowledges it and sanctifies it. Reconciliation doesn’t cause us to be forgiven – God already forgave, before we even asked – it acknowledges our forgiveness and gives strength to persevere.
Jesus in his baptism is accepting and acknowledging his relationship with God. And that relationship is made visible in the appearance of the other two persons of the Trinity – one visually as a dove, the other aurally with the Father’s statement of acknowledgement. And the reason, I suggest, that the early Church thought this was so important was that it wasn’t just saying something about Jesus – it says something about us. In baptism the Spirit descends on us, and the Father acknowledges us as His children. We are in a relationship with God – baptism shines a spotlight on that fact.