Baptism of Our Lord – Matthew 3:13-17
In his baptism, Jesus became, in a very clear and decisive way, the friend and companion of sinners. The baptism that John the Baptist had been sent by the Lord to administer, and that Jesus also wished to receive, was a baptism for sinners.
But of course, Jesus himself, in his own person, was not a sinner. And this is why John hesitated to administer it to him. In today’s Gospel, St. Matthew reports this exchange between them:
“And John tried to prevent Him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?’ But Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he allowed Him.”
God’s Son was not sent into the world to live a sanitized existence, never having to see or deal with the pain and suffering of the world, or with the wickedness and evil of the world – which was the cause of that pain and suffering. During his time on earth, Jesus was, instead, right in the middle of all of that.
To be sure, he himself never sinned. He never partook of the wickedness that surrounded him. But he came to be the friend and companion of many who had in the past partaken of it in one way or another, and who had been victimized by it in one way or another.
He came to be their Savior: to deliver them from the judgment and condemnation that they had earned for themselves before God’s bar of justice, and to deliver them from the inner pain and grief that had been inflicted upon them by the cruelty and callousness of others.
But, while Jesus was indeed the friend and companion of sinners – which was demonstrated clearly in his willingness to receive a baptism that was for sinners – Jesus was not a friend and companion of sin. He was an enemy of sin. He was the most severe and deadly enemy that sin would ever encounter.
And God’s Son did not come into the world only to deliver people from the eternal consequences of sin in the next life. He came to deliver them from the power and mastery of sin in this life.
Jesus loved the human race, and therefore he hated that which had corrupted the human race and filled it with misery and death. He hated sin.
He hates sin now. He hates your sin, not just because it is an offense against his holiness, but because it is your enemy, and is harming you.
Some people misconstrue and misapply the truth that Jesus is the friend and companion of sinners, by thinking that this means that they, even as Christians, can willfully continue in sin, without trying to change or resist temptation, and without seeking to grow in faith and in the fruits of faith.
Jesus forgives all manner of wickedness, selfishness, laziness, and pride, it is thought. And so all manner of wickedness, selfishness, laziness, and pride can be freely indulged in, with impunity.
There are many who think like this, or at least they act as if this is the way they are thinking. The rhetoric of the Christian religion may be learned and repeated. But the essence of the Christian religion is absent – or nearly so.
Is this the way you act? Is this the way you think?
This kind of thinking is not actually an acknowledgment of Jesus as the friend and companion of sinners. Instead, it seeks to turn him into a friend and companion of sin. But that is not what he is.
That is not what he was for you, on the day he was baptized. And that is not what he became in you, on the day you were baptized – when you were baptized into him, and into a relationship with him.
In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul both encourages and warns us, and all Christians:
“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!”
And further on in the same Epistle, Paul continues this thought:
“Be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.”
“For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”
If you willfully and knowingly decide to disobey and defy God, and to embrace what God forbids, Jesus will not be your friend and companion in such a thing. You will walk that pathway, into the darkness, alone.
In your baptism – which unites you to his baptism, and to everything that his baptism means – Jesus does not become like you. But you, by his redeeming and regenerating grace, do become like him. In his Second Epistle, St. Peter writes:
“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”
“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.”
In the new nature that Christ’s Spirit births within you, you, like Jesus, become a hater of sin. You become one who hates your own sin, because of the harm it does in your relationship with God, in your relationships with other people, and inside of yourself.
According to who you are in Christ, you will always fight against sin. Now, you may not always win. Indeed, in this life, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But you will always fight.
In your new nature, which bears the image of Christ, you will always hate your sin, even as Jesus hates it. And you will always love him, even as he loves you.
Jesus was baptized, with you and for you, because of his love for you – and indeed because of his love for all men. On account of that love, he became the friend and companion of sinners: penitent and hurting sinners; weak and struggling sinners. He became your friend and companion.
Under the mystery of God’s righteous demands, and of God’s redeeming mercy, Jesus took your sin – your damnable and miserable sin – off of you, and allowed it to be hung upon himself. He did this in his baptism: in a way that pointed forward to his coming death and resurrection; and in a way that was mystically connected to his coming death and resurrection.
In a sermon that Martin Luther preached on today’s Gospel, the reformer offers a deep and thoughtful explanation of the saving work that was accomplished for all of us, by and through the baptism of Jesus our substitute.
He explains why it was indeed “fitting” for the righteous Jesus to be baptized with a baptism intended for unrighteous sinners, in order to fulfill all righteousness. Let us listen:
“Isaiah 53 says: ‘The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ For since we…‘all like sheep have gone astray,’ God found this remedy: He took the sins of all human beings and hung them around the neck of Him who alone was without sin. He thus becomes a great sinner – indeed the greatest sinner of all and the only sinner on earth – so that there is no other. …”
“Because He has become the Sinner who has all of our sin placed upon Him, He truly does need Baptism, and must be baptized for the forgiveness of sins – not with respect to His own person, which is innocent and spotless, but for the sake of us, whose sins He bears. He plunges them into His Baptism and washes them away from Himself (that is, He washes them from us, since He has stepped into our person), so that they must be drowned and die in His Baptism.” So far Luther.
In his baptism, Jesus was humanity’s substitute and Savior – even as he was humanity’s substitute and Savior in his death and resurrection.
Jesus earned, and in himself established, an objective forgiveness of all the human sins that he carried into the waters of his baptism, and that he plunged into those waters – leaving them there as he arose from those waters.
And he now distributes the blessings of that plunging and that arising – and the transforming reality of that forgiveness – to the world, and to you, in his Word and Sacrament.
Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world, and therefore also your sins, and drowned them in his own baptism. And this lays the foundation for the personal drowning of sin that happens again, and at another level, every time a Christian is baptized today, is called to faith today, and becomes a new creature in Christ today.
In his own baptism, Jesus drowned your sins. In your baptism, which he administered to you through the hands and lips of one of his called servants, he drowned your sins yet again.
And he drowns them still, whenever the power of baptism – his and yours – is manifested in the daily repentance to which your conscience impels you, and in the daily faith to which God’s Spirit calls you.
From one perspective, you might think of your baptism as a “re-enactment” of Jesus’ baptism. And from another perspective, you might think of Jesus’ baptism as a “pre-enactment” of your baptism.
Through your baptism, you are drawn up into Jesus’ baptism, and into everything that was done there, for you and for everyone. And through your baptism, by God’s design, Jesus is drawn down into you. As St. Paul writes to the Galatians:
“For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
There is a reason why the divinely-given formula of Baptism is repeated at the beginning of the Rite of Confession and Absolution in which we participate every Sunday, pretty much before we do anything else in the service.
It is indeed “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” that we presume to approach God, in humility, and with sorrowful hearts to implore his forgiveness.
It is because of Baptism – the baptism that Jesus received for us, and the baptism that Jesus administered to us – that sins can be forgiven here and now, and are forgiven here and now.
This is what we yearn for, when we, in shame and fear, admit that we need Christ’s pardon and peace. And this is what we receive, when we, in joy and hope, trust in his Word, and by faith have his pardon and peace.
And then, with renewed gratitude for his compassion toward us, and for his desire to be a part of our lives, we welcome Jesus once again to be our friend and companion.
We do not welcome him as a friend and companion of our sin. But we do welcome him as the redeemer who has once again lifted from us the guilt of sin, and who has once again crushed within us the power of sin.
We together welcome him into our midst, and greet him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, also as he comes among us in his Holy Supper. As the crowds at the Jordan River welcomed him into the company of the baptized, so too do we welcome him: to be our strength and our wisdom, our teacher and our guide, our protector from Satan and our justifier before God.
Within the Jordan’s crystal flood, In meekness, stands the Lamb of God,
And, sinless, sanctifies the wave, Mankind from sin to cleanse and save. Amen.