The four gospel writers introduce their accounts of God coming to be with us as a human being in four completely different ways. If you knew nothing of this story and picked up each of the gospels individually, you could easily think they were totally different stories – at least to start with.
The place where they all come together is with John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus. And then they diverge again, to a greater or lesser degree, until the climax of the crucifixion. It’s almost like four authors describing a trip down a great river, which has many headwaters, and divides over different channels before reaching the sea. You can’t describe every branch in parallel, and that’s not the way anyone would experience the river. But it is a single river. And there are two shared points in every account: baptism and death.
So why is it that they all take the baptism of Jesus as a common starting point for their very distinct accounts of his life? This question is compounded by another – why is Jesus baptized at all? Matthew in his account actually raises the question himself by putting it in the mouth of John the Baptist, who says to Jesus “why am I doing this, you should be baptizing me!” (Matt 3:13)
We might not find the answer Matthew provides very satisfying. It seems rather legalistic and reminiscent of ‘well we need to create the right impression’. Luke’s version (Luke 3:15-16, 21-22 which we hear today) acknowledges the same question, by having John the Baptist note that baptizing Jesus is topsy-turvy, but doesn’t make an issue of it.
So what is going on when Jesus is baptized? And how does it relate to our baptism; to the baptism of those people baptized by John alongside Jesus; and to the baptism of the early Christians (with both water and the Holy Spirit)?
We are used to thinking of baptism as something individual. Typically parents will bring a child to church for an individual baptism. Even when a group of people are baptized together, as may well happen for adults at Easter as part of the RCIA process, the focus is on the distinct relationship between each individual and God – baptism initiates our individual, personal, relationship with God.
John’s baptism was very different. He was baptizing large groups of people. Luke references “the people”, very much in the same way as Isaiah talks about “the people” – the people of Israel, the whole community. In a way somewhat similar to early kings being converted to Christianity and being baptized along with “all their people”, this was a communal act, not an individual one. So the first point being made here is that Jesus was joining in a communal act – he was “one of us”, doing the same thing as all the people alongside him.
But there is something different for Jesus. It is at this moment that God explicitly acknowledges the unique status of Jesus – “my beloved son”. So the relationship between Jesus and the Father is different from that of all the people alongside him, being baptized with John’s baptism of repentance.
But what about the baptism that Jesus inaugurated, the baptism not just with water but with the Holy Spirit – the baptism that we received. In that baptism we are also claimed and acknowledged as children of God. In the baptism service the priest says: “My dear child, the Christian community welcomes you with great joy. In his name I claim you for Christ, our Savior, by the sign of his cross.” So we do have the recognition that this is a community act, not just an individual in their own relationship with God.
Despite the drama of God’s recognition of his Son in the baptism stories, the status of Jesus as child of God is not unique to him. That is something shared by all believers, as Paul and John particularly emphasize. There is indeed a tension between recognizing the unique nature of Jesus in his relationship to the Father, and understanding how our own relationship with the Father is similar to that of Jesus. This is something for a lifetime of reflection.
For today we can note that baptism is the central and common point in every relationship between man/woman and God, and we share that with Jesus. All the gospels make this point. Whatever path we may flow along the river of life, we all join at and pass through the blessing of baptism, along with Jesus.