Chapter 3 of Matthew gives us out first glimpse of the grown-up Jesus. The Bible doesn't give his age but both tradition and scholarship suggest he was about 30, the age a Jewish man of the time completed his training and set out to make his way in the world. As a preparation for his ministry, Jesus went to another holy man of the day, John, who was called the "Baptist" or "Baptizer" because of his habit of ritually washing away people's sins in the Jordan River.
John the Baptist was a colorful and charismatic figure who had a large popular following. UCC pastor and musician, Bryan Sirchio has a great children's song about his habit of eating "Bugs for Lunch."
John chose his primitive clothes, his odd diet, and the way he lived his life to make a point. He was a simple man who followed the Laws of Moses and kept himself ritually pure (locusts are mentioned in Leviticus as being a pure food.) He was living like one of the ancient prophets of Israel, who had also lived simple and pure lives. He wanted people to see the difference between that kind of a life and the way so many of the priests and other religious leaders in Jerusalem were living. They dressed expensively, ate expensively, and were not (in John's eyes) righteous or pure at all.
He was following in the tradition of the prophets he modeled himself after. They would come to the religious and political centers to criticize the priests and the kings when they became corrupt. You can see how corrupt John believed religious practices had become by the way he called out the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
I'll say more about these two groups in a later blog. For now, I'll just say that the Gospels speak really harshly about them, and this has been the cause of a lot of unnecessary bad feeling between Christians and Jews. Historically, the most influential Pharisee was Hillel the Elder whose ethical teachings are very similar to those of Jesus. What we read about Pharisees in the Gospels shouldn't prejudice us against Jews, or even the Jews of Jesus' time. It should help us be aware of how easy it is for religious people, and especially religious leaders, to become arrogant and hypocritical, something that happens all too often in Christianity.
So, why was Jesus baptized by John? Even John seems puzzled by this and says that it should be the other way around. But Jesus insists and John baptizes him.
I think it's Jesus way of letting his followers know that, while he's doing something new, it's not 100% new. One of the biggest criticisms of the first Christians was that they had turned away from the Laws of Moses and the witness of the prophets, in effect; they were accused of abandoning the Hebrew Scriptures.
Jesus' baptism is his way of demonstrating that this was not the case. What he was doing wasn't abandoning what we call the Old Testament; it was just the next step in the work that God had started in ancient times. To show this, he got the blessing of Mr. Old Testament himself, John the Baptist.
What happens next has a lot of symbolism in it. The heavens open up, the voice of God affirms who Jesus is, and the Spirit of God comes and rests on him.
The way people thought of God before Jesus was as a distant ruler who watched over us and judged us from a long way off. Ordinary people couldn't approach God; if you wanted to talk to God you had to go through channels. It was all about following the laws, and following all the rituals, and getting the blessing of the priests, and visiting the Temple. Getting to talk with God was harder for them than getting to see the President would be for any of us. The best you could manage is talking to someone who could talk to someone who could talk to God.
Jesus changes all that. That's why the heavens open up at his baptism. It's the first of many signs that there aren't going to be any more barriers between people and God. The way of Jesus is the way of having a close and loving relationship with God. It's a way of living that is defined by the presence of the Holy Spirit, which binds us together and brings out all the best qualities in our lives. The kind of relationship God wants is revealed in what the voice from heaven says:
"This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life."
That relationship: loving parent and beloved child, is the relationship God wants with all of us. Sometimes we look at this passage and we imagine that it is telling us that Jesus is different, he's more powerful than us, God loves him more than us, but that's all backwards. In Jesus' baptism we see the same thing we're going to see in the rest of Jesus life, and that's how to live as a child of God.
That's why the Christian baptism is different from John's baptism. John's was about washing bad things out of opus lives; Jesus' is about filling out lives with good things; John's was about making ourselves acceptable to a God we feel far away from, Jesus' is about getting rid of the things that separate us from God and realizing that God loves us just as we are no matter how we are; John's was about being righteous to avoid the wrath of God, Jesus' is about doing the right thing because we love God and each other so much that's what we want to do.
John's way isn't bad; in fact it's a lot easier for many people to understand. But it can't ever bring us the joy and the freedom and the richness of life that Jesus' way can. That's something we'll see over and over as we move through this Gospel.
