At that time Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan River so that John would baptize him. 14 John tried to stop him and said, “I need to be baptized by you, yet you come to me?”
15 Jesus answered, “Allow me to be baptized now. This is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.”
So John agreed to baptize Jesus. 16 When Jesus was baptized, he immediately came up out of the water. Heaven was opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and resting on him. 17 A voice from heaven said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love; I find happiness in him.” (Common English Bible)
Baptism of the Lord 2021
I grew up with a very strong sense of calling—I have probably told some of y’all that when I was around nine, I told an auntie of mine that I wanted to be a Biblical prophet when I grew up (this was, naturally, before I understood the hairshirt dress code, or that your career was often ended through execution rather than retirement).
I also grew up absolutely terrified of that calling. Not because of the aforementioned way prophets met their end, but because I could see, even as a boy, that my Christianity did not quite fit in with the culture around me. I did not share the prejudices I saw against, say, women in church leadership, or same-sex couples. I did not think I would read my Bible the way they did, or necessarily vote the way they did. I was told, repeatedly, that my Christianity was not Real Christianity. Eventually, I believed them. I believed that a Christian like me was not supposed to ever become a pastor.
So I ran. I decided I would be a lawyer, a publicist, anything that would let me use my love of the written language without going into professional ministry.
Even after my dramatic weekend of preaching before my childhood congregation after a childhood friend had died overnight in a car accident, I still hadn’t fully stopped running. But I had at least slowed to a walk. I took a couple of summers at my mother’s former law firm to make super-duper sure that I wanted nothing to do with the legal profession, and after that, I declared a religious studies major at college, applied to seminaries a couple of years later, and never looked back.
In a word, I had consented. I had finally consented to the call God had for me. God had already called me, but like Jonah, I was looking for a time for any reason to avoid going to Nineveh. He had three days in the belly of a fish; I had two summers at a law office. I’ll let you decide who got the better end of that deal!
The Sunday after Epiphany traditionally commemorates the Baptism of our Lord, which the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke all document, and which John hints at, but does not say explicitly. John’s Gospel concurs in the testimony of John the Baptist, and he expands on it at points, but he does not document the baptism itself the way the Synoptic Gospels do.
The accounts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke are largely unanimous—Jesus seeks to be baptized by His cousin John the Baptist, and so ventures out to the Jordan River, where John keeps his ministry. John baptizes Jesus in the river, the heavens open up, and a voice from above confirms Jesus’s status, saying, “This is my Son, with whom I am well-pleased (or in whom I find happiness).”
That is the basic gist that Mark, Matthew, and Luke all agree upon. But Matthew adds a detail that is unique to his telling of the event—it is found nowhere else. In Matthew’s retelling, the Baptist initially refuses to baptize his cousin saying that, if anything, it is he who needs to be baptized by Jesus, so why is Jesus coming to him?
Jesus persuades the Baptist, though, by saying that being baptized by him is a necessary act for the fulfillment of all righteousness, and Matthew’s version of the baptism then rejoins the arc of Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels.
This is necessary, Jesus says, to fulfill all righteousness. Not, I believe, solely the righteousness that is to follow in the Gospel, and Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, but the righteousness that came before this in the Gospel as well—the Christmas and Epiphany stories we have spent the past few weeks reading. Jesus’s baptism is a continuation of that righteousness as well.
But Jesus and John were babies, and then children, during those stories. And the Baptist, at least, as a mere man and not as God-made-flesh, would not have been able to fully assent to that righteousness. So, it is important for him to do so now, as a confirmation of sorts of his own divinely-called role in the grand scheme of the Good News.
Our tradition in the Disciples of Christ is to, whenever possible, practice believer’s baptism—that baptism should only take place upon a believer confessing their faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the one true Son of the living God. We make exceptions for life-and-death circumstances, of course, but baptizing people who use their personal agency to make that confession has long been our norm.
But what Matthew’s version makes clear is that the act of agency, of giving consent, is shared by both John and Jesus. Jesus shows agency by proactively going to be baptized by John, just as we went to be baptized by our own ministers of years and decades past. Yet in Matthew’s Gospel, the Baptist is moved as well, spiritually if not geographically, and gives his consent to fulfilling God’s call for him, to be the one to baptize God’s Son.
The Baptist wasn’t ever running like Jonah was, but he still needed to be brought fully and wholly 100% on board with what God would have him do, and so it is with us. Even if we are not running in the complete opposite direction of God’s will for us, we may be veering off in one direction or another. We may be moving in the general direction God wishes for us to go, but we may not have a plumb line on the exact path God has laid out for us.
That is where the Baptist found himself the day his cousin arrived seeking baptism. John was never a Jonah, running in completely the opposite direction from God, and throughout his public ministry was in fact doing what God called him to do, and saying what God called him to say. But in this moment, he was not completely, fully 100% aligned with God’s direction for him and had to be set upon it by Jesus.
But once he was, he consented. John said yes to Jesus, and in doing so, he said yes to God, and yes to God’s path for him, which as Jesus said, was to help fulfill all righteousness.
The Baptist’s path is our path, his call is our call. No, we are not the ones to baptize the only Son of God, but like the Baptist, we have been called by God through Jesus to fulfill righteousness.
And we do that by aligning ourselves with the path that God
would have for us. God wants you and your life fulfilled because God authored
it so, and God does not settle for merely what is acceptable. And God most
certainly does not settle for what is unacceptable. There is no divine satisfaction
to be had in what we all witnessed in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, the Day of Epiphany.
None. And to say there is would be for us to bear false witness to ourselves
and to the world. Doing this puts us in the path of running opposite of God, not just a few degrees off.
But what we can choose, what we have always been able to choose, is what to do now, and what direction to go in. We can choose whether and how to seek accountability and then reconciliation and then unity, and when we do, God is most satisfied when our aims and God’s are in harmony. In Jesus, the voice from the heavens says, I (God) am well pleased (or find happiness). God found happiness in Jesus as a parent seeing their child begin fulfilling their promise, potential, and purpose.
But I think God also was well pleased with the Baptist that day. God found happiness in the Baptist consenting to fulfill this righteousness of baptizing Jesus. And God finds happiness in each of us fulfilling righteousness today. God is well pleased with us consenting to be God’s instrument and vessel for love, peace, justice, democracy, and truth. God finds happiness in our pursuits of these.
As we begin 2021 together, already the news is extraordinary, but God is inviting you as God has always done to follow fully the path the Holy Spirit has laid before you. A new year has meaning to us, and it should, and we witness history unfold, our call remains the same throughout—to follow God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The year is new, and the events surrounding us uncommon, but the invitation is as old as time. We should welcome that invitation with the sense of personal responsibility that we can make a difference in dismantling hatred, bigotry, deceit, senseless violence, and all other fruits not of the Spirit we saw this week.
We can choose today to recommit ourselves to that divine invitation, to that holy and sacred calling of the path of God, rather than the path of Herod. We can consent to being the church, the Body of Christ in this world, and we do consent to being church, each day when we wake up and decide to do what God would have us do, and not simply what we would want to do for ourselves only.
Our agency, our choices, our free will all can bring glory to God, but because it is ours, we must choose it rather than run from it, embrace it rather than hide from it, and live into it rather than sun it. And we can do all these things, beloveds, we are fully capable of these things and always have been. After this week, recommitment to our Christian ideals, our better angels, is needed, and I extend to you God’s invitation to own your agency, to own your choice, and to choose to live up to and into the Bible’s highest ideals of love, justice, and worship. That is God’s invitation to us.
One day in the Jordan River, John the Baptist consented to fulfill all righteousness. So, too, may we.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
January 10, 2021