Good Samaritans

In this past week, we have witnessed two very different types of response to crisis and emergency. On Monday, through the actions of Paul de Waard and Brendan Keilar, we saw a modern-day re-enactment of the Good Samaritan story. Seeing someone in danger, both men responded with bravery, compassion and selflessness. At the end of the week, we saw a completely different response to a very different sort of crisis. The Howard Government has at last decided to tackle the endemic problems of sexual abuse and alcoholism within indigenous communities.

But there is nothing ‘Good Samaritan’ in this response. No one can doubt the severity of the emergency. It is, quite simply, a national disgrace and the Government is right to act. Like Paul de Waard and Brendan Keilar, John Howard has rightly chosen to not ‘pass by on the other side of the road.’ But whereas de Waard and Keilar, and the original Good Samaritan in Jesus’ story, acted immediately, Howard has delayed his response. He has ignored report after report that have each stated how bad the situation in remote Aboriginal communities has become. And in the process of delaying, he has helped perpetuate the emergency which he now abhors.

As I have said, the Government needs to act. But a response of genuine compassion and bravery would have happened far earlier – not six months out from a federal election.

Dalai Lama and inter-faith dialogue

Over the past week, a rather heated discussion has taken place between various Baptist pastors throughout Victoria concerning what our response should be to the visit to Melbourne of the Dalai Lama. A number of people have expressed the view that there is little, if any, difference between him and the prophets of Baal or Satanists. According to this view our response should be straight-out condemnation and a prophetic call to 'no holds barred' evangelism.

I have to admit that I have been extremely disturbed by such an attitude. It seems to me to lag way behind the advances that have been made in both ecumenical and inter-faith relations over the past 50 or so years. After proudly proclaiming our progressive character, maybe Baptists are in fact, at least on this issue, 40 years behind Rome?!

Let me try to explain what I mean...

In 1965, as part of Vatican II, the Catholic Church issues Nostre Aetate ('In Our Times') - quite probably, the most significant document in inter-faith relations for the past 100 years. IN that statement, the Church explicitly stated that while:

"she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ as 'the way, the truth, and the life' (John 14:6), in whom men [sic] may find fullness of religious life, and in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself," nonetheless she "rejects nothing that is true and holy in [other] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men [sic]."

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/

In other words, Rome issued both a clear acceptance of the historic faith, and yet als oan acknowledgment that not even the Church has a monopoly on the truth.

Similar Karl Barth (my theological hero!) has had some insightful things to say on this topic. Significantly, for such a thoroughly Christocentric theologian, Barth himself argued that we can expect to see evidence of diviine truth even in non-Christian religions. In CD IV/4, Barth says that we may expect to hear "true words even from what seem to be the darkest places..." There are "signs and attestations of the lordship of Jesus Christ, true words which we must receive as such...to be found with satriking frequency extra muros ecclesiae (outside the walls of the Church)."

Now I'm not suggesting that us Baptist pastors should become either Catholic or 'Barthian'! What I am suggesting is that we are in danger of tending towards an all-too uncritically dogmatic repudiation of all things 'non-Christian' (whatever that means!), that leaves us a generation and a half behind current inter-faith and ecumenical discussion.

This is not something we can afford to let happen.

I for one hope and expect to learn things - even spiritual things! - from those who do not profess Jesus as Christ. This is not to say that I take Jesus' claims of uniqueness lightly. Do I profess my own faith in Christ publicly and without reserve? Yes! Do I take my life of Christian discipleship seriously? Yes!

Do I think that those who 'in good faith' believe something else are not thereby 'saved'? I don't know...And it's precisely in that 'not knowing' that I believe we need to exercise a greater degree of humility.

Shameless self-promotion!

Hope that got your attention! Just a quick note to say that my latest book, Barth, Israel and Jesus, has just been published by Ashgate in the UK. It has had some very kind pre-publication reviews, and so I hope that you might check it out.

Take a look at the Ashgate website, www.ashgate.com for further details.

God bless,
Mark.

The Sign of the Cross

Most Protestants have long been suspicious of using the sign of the Cross in prayer or worship, and yet the practice of using this sign extends back to the earliest days of the Church's existence. There is a very interesting article in the February edition of Christianity Today which discusses this question - and which comes fairly firmly down on the side of recovering the use of this sign in our personal and corporate prayer life.

Take a look at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/februaryweb-only/109-22.0.html

Why the Cross?

Ephesians 2:11-18
What does the foolish Cross of Christ actually achieve? What is the purpose of it? Why did Jesus have to die? At some level, many people are beginning to ask these questions in the lead-up to Easter.

My fairly strong suspicion is that these are questions to which we all think we know the answers. And yet the Christian doctrine of the Cross has been one of the most hotly-debated subjects in the whole history of theology. Theologians as famous and as influential as Augustine, Peter Abelard, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, even Luther and Calvin, all disagreed on the nature and purpose of the Cross. And so if we’re not perhaps as sure of the answer to these questions as we’d like to be, then we’re in pretty good company.

In fact, I actually suspect that we have grown up with some misconceptions about the purpose of the Cross; misconceptions which have skewed our understanding of Jesus, our understanding of ourselves, and our understanding of the relationship between Jesus and ourselves.

When Mel Gibson released his film The Passion of the Christ in 2003, it was received with a fair degree of controversy. Jewish groups, quite rightly IMHO, argued that it perpetuated the stereotype of Jews as ‘Christ killers’, and in doing so served to reinforce two thousand years’ worth of Christian-sponsored antisemitism.

On the other hand, though, the film was greeted by many conservative, evangelical and Catholic churches around the world as a major boost to the cause of the Gospel. Churches from widely divergent theological positions found themselves coming together in agreement on this film. Here at last, it was argued, was a mainstream Hollywood film that did not shy away from the graphic horror of the crucifixion. The death of Jesus was depicted in gruesome realism, so much so that it was not uncommon for people to have to leave the cinema after fainting or vomiting: the violence of this depiction of Jesus’ death was simply too great for many people to cope with.

And yet, this thoroughly bloodthirsty film was hailed by many churches and church leaders as a brilliant innovation in evangelism. Why? Because, so the argument went, now the whole world—not least of all, the cynical world of pop culture—would be confronted with the full and awful reality of what God was prepared to do in response to humanity’s sin. Here at last, in high-definition cinematography, was a realistic presentation of just how much our human wickedness cost God. Here are just a few quotes from influential church leaders:

Billy Graham: ‘Every time I speak or preach about the Cross, the things I saw on the screen will be on my heart and mind.’

Darrel Bock: Professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, has argued in favour of keeping the film’s graphic violence, because it ‘causes everyone to reflect on what His death was.’

Cardinal George Pell: ‘a spiritual masterpiece.’

Max Lucado: ‘The images and the authenticity left our congregation spell-bound. The message went right to the heart…’

Cardinal Hoyos: ‘This film is a triumph of art and faith. It will be a tool for explaining the person and message of Jesus…It will bring people closer to God…’

All this fits neatly into what is probably the most familiar view of Jesus’ death: that he died ‘for our sins’, as a perfect and necessary sacrifice. Have you ever heard anyone say, or perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, that when Jesus went to the Cross he bore in himself the punishment for every sin that every human has ever committed, from Adam and Eve through to the present day, and in fact to the end of human history. And more than that, his death had to be so horrifically violent, in order for the just and rightful punishment for every sin to be properly accounted for. Does that sound familiar?

In other words, the implicit message of The Passion of the Christ, as well as the implicit message that lies behind many of our own theologies of the Cross, is that Golgotha is primarily the place where God expressed His anger; it is the place where God displayed His wrath against the sinfulness of humanity. And why did He do that? Because, so the argument goes, God is a completely righteous and just God who cannot bear for any violation of His honour or law to go unpunished, and so He had to ensure that every sin ever committed—yours, Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s—was dutifully punished to its full and proper extent. And knowing that in ourselves, we can never make appropriate restitution, or pay the necessary compensation for what we have done, God allowed the punishment for all these sins to fall upon His own Son, indeed to fall upon God Himself. And so the story of Jesus becomes primarily a story of sin, guilt and punishment. The whole of his life is seen as being merely a prelude to the main event, his sacrificial death on the Cross. His teachings, his miracles, his way of discipleship…all these things are regarded as being of merely secondary importance; of having value only in the light of his death.

All of this sounds very orthodox, thoroughly evangelical. But is it actually true? Is this actually what the New Testament teaches? Just have a think for a moment about what message this understanding of the Cross sends. Think about what sort of image of God is presented through this idea. Does Scripture in fact reveal to us a God who is primarily a strict disciplinarian? A God who more than anything else, is determined to make sure that every last ounce of restitution and justice is squeezed out of the system? A God who puts the satisfaction of legal and disciplinary requirements before everything else, as His top priority? A God who at the end of the day is actually pretty bloodthirsty, because only through the enactment of an extraordinarily cruel death penalty on His own Son is He finally satisfied?

If we view the Cross of Christ primarily through the lens of sin, guilt and punishment, then we inevitably end up with this sort of God. And what happens when we do? If this is the image of God we have, then we cannot but help feel as though we are now doubly obligated to him: first, by virtue simply of the fact that we sinned in the first place; and second, by virtue of the fact that he sacrificed His Son on our behalf. Far from liberating us from the burden of guilt, we now feel even more guilty and indebted. If it wasn’t for us, Jesus would never have had to die! What sort of guilt-trip does that put on us?

When we are constantly told that Jesus died ‘for our sins’; that he took the punishment that should have been ours; that it was our sin that nailed him to the Cross; that it was our fault that the Son of God was forsaken by his own Father…Then how can we be surprised when we feel even guiltier, and even more obligated to try to earn back the Father’s love and respect and pride? And so, the very thing that should liberate us from the burden of legalism actually makes us feel even more compelled to win back God’s favour. No wonder, that even though as Christians we know we live by grace, yet in fact we are so determined to live by law. More than that, it’s no wonder that we so often view God as someone whose default attitude towards us is stern disapproval; that He is a God who basically expects to be disappointed by us; who is constantly waiting for us to mess it up, yet again. Instead of seeing Him as a God who expects the best of us and yet who will also forgive the worst, we tend to see Him as a God who expects the worst, and who gets mildly surprised when we do anything much better than that. No wonder we work so hard to try to earn back His favour, as though we don’t already have it.

Is this really the God whom we serve and worship? Is this the God of whom Scripture speaks? Is this a God whom we would actually want to have a relationship with?

So how does the message of the Cross become truly Gospel, truly good news, truly liberating?

It’s here that I think the passage from Ephesians sheds some light. According to Paul, the purpose of the Cross was this: that those who were far away from God would be brought near; that those who were hostile towards God and towards one another would have that hostility dissolved. As Paul says in v.15 of today’s text, ‘His [Jesus’] purpose was to create in himself one new person out of the two, thus making peace, and in his body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace, to you who were far away and to those who were near.’

Now certainly the immediate context in which Paul is speaking is the age-old conflict between Jews and Gentiles. It’s very clear, from this passage and from others, such as Rom.9-11, that what he sees Jesus doing is this: not removing the Jewish people from their relationship with God, but now also bringing Gentiles into that same covenantal communion. And so, in Christ, the dividing-wall of hostility between the two is broken down.

But there is nonetheless more to Paul’s message than this. In Paul’s view, what Christ preaches, and what God expresses at the Cross, is not primarily judgment or anger, but…peace. You see, the issue here is not us but God; it’s not our character as sinners that determines the nature and purpose of the Cross, but it’s God’s character. And what the entire span of Scripture shows is that God is not, in His essence, a law-giver or a disciplinarian. Remember that the Law at Sinai came after God’s commitment to be Israel’s God. The promise of relationship was first; the Law came second.

It’s not for nothing that the Bible says that God is Love. It doesn’t say that God is Law.

In other words, from the moment of creation onwards, both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures reveal to us a God who is, first and foremost, lovingly, covenantally, freely committed to being with us and for us.

This is the impulse that lies behind the Cross; not so much the satisfaction of law or of legal requirements; not so much the holy expression of God’s righteous anger; but, first and foremost, that we will be brought near again to God.

That is to say, the Cross is good news, not because it tries to make us feel more guilty or more obligated to earn back favour with God, but because it tells us that we already have that favour with God, as His free gift to us.

The Cross is about the restoration of relationship; it’s about the proclamation of peace; it’s about the end of violence, not its consummation. That’s why The Passion of the Christ has it so wrong. The garden in which we are invited by the Cross to walk, is not the painful Garden of Gethsemane, but the re-created Garden of Eden. The Cross is about the re-integration of ourselves into communion with God, so that, as in Eden, we can once again walk with Him ‘in the cool of the day, unashamed.’
Amen.

Seeing Intently

Last week at our (new!) mid-week evening service, I spoke on Mark 8: 22-26, the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida. This is often interpreted as one of those rare occasions when Jesus' genuine humanity shows through, in the form of him making a mistake! That is, in this story, Jesus has to try twice before the man is properly healed.

You'll remember that the man who is brought to Jesus is blind; Jesus takes him aside, puts saliva on his eyelids, and asks him if he can now see. The man responds that, yes, he can see - but the people look like trees that are walking around. In other words, his sight has been partially restored, but things are still blurry. So Jesus has to touch his eyes for a second time, and it is only after this repeat-dose that the man recovers his sight completely.

The question is, though, is this really an example of Jesus getting it wrong, or at least, of not getting it totally right the first time around? Or is there a specific theological lesson Mark is trying to make?

The context, as usual, is helpful. Just before this event, Jesus and his disciples have been in the boat, trying to get away from the crowds. The disciples forget to bring any bread, and so begin to wonder where their next meal will come from. Jesus rebukes them for being so slow to understand. 'Do you still not comprehend? Do you have eyes but still don't truly see?' It seems that the disciples have been so focussed on the literal, physical question of lunch, that they have forgotten who it is they have with them! Their focus has shifted, away from Jesus and towards the more superficial (but more tangible) elements. This is exactly what the Pharisees have done earlier in their demands for a sign.

So, when Jesus and the disciples come to Bethsaida, the stage is set for a climax to this discussion of truly seeing what is really there to be seen - not just the physical, but the far more penetrating spiritual reality of who Jesus is.

In this light, it becomes interesting to read just what the blind man does. When Jesus first touches his eyes, the man looks around, to see what he can see. His focus is on the people around him - and, as he looks at them, he sees them as just blurry figures. But when Jesus touches his eyes for the second time, the text says that the man 'looked intently' - the word used here implies that he looked straight ahead. Instead of looking around him, he looked directly ahead - and as he did so, he would have seen...Jesus! No wonder, then, that Mark comments that, not only was his sight restored, but that he now 'saw everything clearly.'

The implication is that it was not just his physical sight that was restored, but indeed also his spiritual insight. All things - not just the world around him - now became clear. And they did so by him looking directly at the One through whom his healing had come, Jesus.

The blind man thus shows, not so much that Jesus got it wrong and had to have a second go, but that the restoration of true sight comes when we focus ourselves on the person of Jesus.

The Politics of Compassion

Last week, 'The Australian' ran an op-ed piece by senior La Trobe historian John Hirst, in which Hirst claimed that while compassion was all very well for churches and saints, it was precisely the wrong sort of quality we should want in our politicians. Compassion, he argued, is well-meaning, but altogether too trusting and naive. Public policy, on the other hand, needs to be somewhat more hard-headed. In defending his ideas, Hirst said that if compassion was used as a measuring-stick by politicians, then single mothers (for example) would have have no incentive to get off welfare, and would continue to chase after any 'passing blokes to father their next child.'

I decided to respond to Hirst's article, with the following:

"I MAY be hopelessly un-Machiavellian but, unlike John Hirst, I for one believe that compassion can and should be integral to effective public policy ("An unaffordable luxury”, Opinion, 31/1).

Quite aside from the utterly distasteful suggestions that single mothers are merely prowling around for “passing blokes” to father their next child, or that compassion is the sole preserve of “doctors’ wives and the Uniting Church”, I take issue with the notion that compassion is an “extravagance” that politicians cannot afford.

Such a view assumes that the quality of compassion is naive and wishy-washy. On the contrary, the truly compassionate person will resolutely stand up against oppression, tyranny and discrimination wherever they are to be found, and by whatever name they are being justified. Oh for more politicians who will do that!" (Letters, 'The Australian', 2 February 2007).

It seems to me highly appropriate that the hard-headedness of compassion become newsworthy, in the same week that we celebrated the birthdays of two remarkable people: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German Lutheran theologian and martyr, 1906-1945) and Rosa Parks (civil rights activist, 1913-2005). Both Bonhoeffer and Parks were committed Christians, who lived and died resolutely in their faith - and both of them exemplified the tough and uncompromising nature of compassion.

Theirs, not Hirst's, is the message we need to heed and articulate in our own day.

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to announce liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Is.61).

The Wedding in Cana. John 2: 1-11

If you think about it, this was an odd sort of miracle for Jesus to do as the first public expression of his power. To get six large jars of water, each jar holding about 100 litres, and to turn that into something like 600 litres of top-shelf, vintage wine! It seems a strange way for him to announce his arrival. Remember that John the Baptist had told his disciples that Jesus was the One for whom they had all been waiting; the One in whom and through whom the Kingdom of God would come. As we looked at last week, the coming of Jesus was, in John the Baptist’s mind, associated with the coming of God’s judgment. Yet now, when Jesus does arrive, he comes dressed not so much as a judge, but as some sort of divine bartender!

This miracle had nothing to do with healing the sick, or saving a life, or forgiving sins. On the face of it, it was a thoroughly self-indulgent miracle. Yes, he was making sure that the host of the wedding didn’t lose face by running out of wine. But Jesus wasn’t usually that bothered by social etiquette, nor was he usually that interested in someone’s standing in the community—so why would he have been interested here in propping up the groom’s community image?

We know that later in his ministry Jesus was roundly criticized by many of his opponents precisely for being too self-indulgent. He ate too much, he drank too much, he hung around the wrong type of people... And so it’s quite possible that his reputation for being a glutton and a drunkard can be traced back to this instance in Cana. In other words, maybe all he was doing here was making sure that he and all the other wedding guests could continue to have a good time. The ultimate party trick, in fact! After all, Jesus had just been in the desert for forty days, and so he must have been pretty thirsty!

Or alternatively, maybe this was just a piece of divine experimentation. If the Gospel records are correct, that the affirmation of his identity as the Son of God only happened at his baptism, then this knowledge of who he was was still relatively new to Jesus; he would still have been coming to terms with what that identity would mean for him; and so maybe turning water into wine was just a fairly innocent experiment, to see just what he, as the Son of God, could do.

Both of these suggestions are probably a bit too cynical. And yet, there is something comforting in the fact that this first miracle of Jesus was so thoroughly human. There was no dramatic demonstration of his authority over nature; there was no violent expulsion of demonic forces; just a quiet solution to a potentially embarrassing situation. It’s interesting, in fact, that Jesus doesn’t draw attention to what he’s done; at least initially, it’s only the servants who are privy to the miracle. Not even the chief wine steward, or even the groom himself, know about the miracle until after it’s all been done. There’s no attempt by Jesus to draw attention to himself. As a first miracle, it’s a very gentle one, it’s not self-serving, but it’s one that shows Jesus to be completely in tune with the needs and desires of the people around him. While of course this miracle demonstrates that he is indeed the Son of God, it also shows him to be thoroughly in touch with the simple pleasures of being human. Jesus’ baptism shows us that he was able to stand in our place before God because he identified with us—but that’s not just identifying with us in our frailty and failings, but indeed also in our joys and celebrations. And his actions at the wedding in Cana show him doing exactly that: joining in with the celebration of human relationships and human love.

There’s a lesson for the church in this. While the church throughout its history has been busy being puritanical, and insisting that it’s job is to be the moral guardian of society…here we see Jesus lavishly and expansively celebrating the vitality and the wonder of human sexual love. Far from being self-serving or self-indulgent, this miracle at Cana is Jesus’ own wedding gift to the young couple. Whoever the bride and groom were, Jesus was clearly overjoyed by the fact that they were committing themselves to each other in this way; committing themselves to love and to be loved.

There is, however, still more to the story than this. This miracle is more than just the kind-hearted action of a uniquely-gifted wedding guest. It is more than just the celebration of a marriage union. Let me ask you this: have you ever wondered why Jesus chose a wedding for the site of his first miracle? The raising of Lazarus would have been more dramatic; the calming of the storm on Galilee would have been more impressive; the healing of the crippled man who was lowered through the roof would have been more public. So why a wedding?

When we look through Scripture, it’s clear that marriage is a commonly-used image for the relationship between God and his people. Throughout the prophets, God is depicted as the husband, Israel as his wife. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea…are all full of this sort of marriage imagery. One of the other readings set for today, in fact, says exactly this: In Is. 62, we read that

‘No longer will the nations call you [Zion] Deserted, or your land Desolate. Instead, you will be called Hephzibah [‘My delight is in her’], and your land will be called Beulah [‘Married’]; for the Lord will take delight in you…As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you.’

And then in the Gospels, twice we see Jesus being referred to as the bridegroom; once in Matt.9, in response to a question from John the Baptist’s disciples; and once in Jn.3 when John the Baptist himself speaks of Jesus as the bridegroom and himself as the groom’s attendant. In both cases, the context is of being happy, full of joy, that the groom has finally arrived.

And that’s the point. That’s what the miracle at Cana symbolizes. Of course when Jesus turns the water into wine, he turns it into the best wine imaginable. Why? Because in Christ the best has now arrived. The groom is here. Now the celebration can really get under way! The wine that Jesus makes is the symbol of the union with God that finally reaches its consummation with the advent of Christ. And of course later at the Last Supper, Jesus again uses wine to symbolize the union, or the covenant, that he is about to seal with his own blood. The wine at Cana points ahead to all of that. This best wine that Jesus so miraculously produces is not just to help keep the party going in Cana; much more than that, it’s to celebrate the union of Jesus with his people, with us!, to whom Jesus has committed himself passionately and forever.

This is one of the things that we most need to grasp and yet most often forget. That God in Christ has committed himself passionately and forever to us. I suspect that we are generally happy to accept that God loves us in some sort of ethereal, transcendent, platonic way. But how well do we grasp the fact that God loves us with the passionate zeal of a new spouse? It’s harder for us to accept that he loves us in that sort of passionate way, because fundamentally we don’t believe that we deserve it. Of course we don’t deserve it. And yet, we need to hear that this is exactly how God loves us.

Why then did Jesus choose a wedding as the place of his first miracle? Because he wanted to state, right from the outset, what his intention was: to celebrate the fact that in Jesus, the bridegroom has arrived, and that the full intensity and wonder of God’s unending passionate love for us has come to its most perfect expression.

The only question left is this: given that marriage is a two-way street, that it only works when the love and the passion are mutual, and given the we always get the best of God…How often does he get the best of us?

Amen

The Baptism of Jesus. Luke 3:15-22

It’s an interesting little fact that the baptism of Jesus is one of the few events in his life that is recorded by all four evangelists. Sure, each Gospel writer records this event in slightly different ways, some in more detail than others, but they all include it in some shape or form. What is noteworthy about our text from Luke, though, is that here Jesus’ baptism is spoken of only in the most superficial way. Now this is noteworthy, because it’s not what we would normally expect from Luke. Luke was the first ‘Church historian’. He wrote a two-volume account of the early Church’s story; his Gospel being the first part, and the Book of Acts being the sequel. And at the start of his Gospel, Luke states quite explicitly that his aim is to write a careful, orderly account of Jesus’ life and ministry. And yet when it comes to the baptism, we don’t come close to any sort of detailed historical description of what happened between Jesus and John on the banks of the Jordan. Matthew is much more detailed.

There is no mention in Luke, for example, of the baptismal method. Nor, unlike Matthew, is he interested in the exchange that took place between John and Jesus before the baptism; he’s not interested in the fact that John initially refused to baptize Jesus. In fact, Luke’s record of Jesus’ baptism is over and done with in half a verse! All he says about is this; that when everyone else was getting baptized, Jesus got baptized too. For Luke, allegedly our first Church historian, at least in this instance, the details of what actually took place are not what’s most important. The important thing is simply this: that Jesus was baptized. That is to say, Luke’s aim here is to present a theological message, not an historical one.

So what is the theological point of Luke’s account, and what does it have to say to us today? In order to answer that, we have to first answer the question, why was Jesus baptized? Specifically, why, when he was the Son of God, did Jesus submit to a baptism of repentance, which was what John was performing? Surely, he had no need to repent of anything?

In Matthew 3, Mark 1, and Luke 3:3, we read that John was an itinerant prophet who went throughout Judea preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. His whole message was one of impending judgment, of the need for the people to turn their lives around and to get themselves ready for the coming of God’s kingdom. And, like the Old Testament prophets before him, he proclaimed the coming of this kingdom in language that was harsh, that was black-and-white, and that offered people a choice between returning to the path of righteousness or facing the imminent judgment of God.

That is to say, John’s message, and his baptism, were for sinners; for those who were facing judgment.

Strangely, this message is said to have been ‘good news.’ When Luke says (v.18) that John exhorted the people and preached to them the good news, the word he uses is the same word from which we get ‘gospel’. It’s not often that we take kindly to someone telling us to mend our ways or face the consequences. Our tendency is to get defensive, to make excuses for our behaviour, or even to flat-out deny that we have done anything wrong in the first place. We don’t often rush to hear the rebuke, or to think of it as ‘good news’ when we do hear it. And yet it’s clear that John’s audience took it in exactly that way. Crowds from all over the countryside—according to Matthew, from Jerusalem, Judea, and the whole region of the Jordan—came to hear him. They rushed to hear John’s message. They even thought that this ‘fire-and-brimstone’ preacher might be the long-awaited Messiah. It was what we would call these days a ‘revival’. And it’s into this scene that Jesus too arrives and asks to be baptized. Why? What need did Jesus have of participating in a religious revival? It’s easy to imagine him starting one, but why would he join in with a revival that had begun with someone else?

The key lies in John’s record of Jesus’ baptism. In 1:29 of John’s Gospel we read of much the same scenario that Luke presents: John the Baptist is baptizing the people in the Jordan and then, as he sees Jesus approaching him, he says to everyone who is gathered around, ‘Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ What is the Baptist saying here? He’s drawing on Old Testament imagery, whereby an unblemished sheep was understood fundamentally to be the thing you would offer to God as a sin or guilt-offering, in order to make restitution and to be forgiven. In other words, the man who comes to John asking to be baptized for repentance and the forgiveness of sins, the man whose sandals John is unworthy to untie, is the very one who, according to John the Baptist, is in fact going to take away the sins of the world; he is the one who is going to make restitution for the people and to win for them forgiveness for their faults and failings.

So we’re back to the same old question…Why was he baptized? Because he wasn’t doing it for himself, but for us. Like the lamb by which he is symbolized, Jesus is our representative before God. He carries the penalty for our sin and guilt, so that we don’t have to. But he can only do this if he also identifies with us. That’s why the Son of God had to become human, so as to carry the burden of humanity’s guilt; that’s why in the Letter to the Hebrews we read that Jesus was ‘tempted in every way, just as we are…’ And that’s why he received a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. By standing in solidarity with us; by identifying with us in our weaknesses (Heb.4:15); by joining the crowds in John’s baptism of repentance, Jesus was identifying with us so that he could then represent us, so that he could then stand in our place, taking our judgment upon himself.

In other words, when John the Baptist preaches an imminent judgment, he’s right; it comes, and it comes with Jesus. But, what John’s audience didn’t at first understand, and what we still often fail to understand, is that the judgment of God didn’t just come with Jesus but, more importantly, it fell on him. By combining the fact of Jesus’ baptism with the image of him as the redemptive lamb that pays the penalty for our sin and guilt, we can understand finally what Jesus’ baptism means.

It means that Jesus stands with us in our sin and guilt. Just as he entered into the waters of the Jordan, he also enters into our world of sin and pain.

I suspect that most of us have an image of God that goes something like this: that when we are doing the right thing, God is happy to be with us. When we have done something wrong and then confess it and ask for forgiveness, God is happy to hear from us—but only from a distance, and only after we have asked his forgiveness is he happy for us to join him again. But when we do the wrong thing, God abandons us. He moves away from us. His holiness can’t stand to be in the presence of sin or of sinners.

And yet the baptism of Jesus shows us precisely the opposite. The miracle of the Incarnation is not just that he entered our earthly, historical world. The greater miracle is that he came and stood in solidarity with us in all the darkness and mess of our sinful, mixed-up lives. Water, in the ancient world, usually represented chaos. And when Jesus entered into the waters of Jordan, that’s what he was entering into: he was entering with us into the chaotic and painful world of our own making.

That’s the miracle and the magnitude of God’s grace: that while we were still sinners, Christ came to die in our place; to join us, to stand by our side, in confession and repentance. Not because he had to, but because in his grace and mercy he chose to be there with us, and for us.

And he still chooses to be there with us. Most of us live our lives desperately trying to do the right thing, because we’re terrified that if we don’t, if we somehow fail, then God abandons us. He leaves us to our own devices. He leaves us to wallow, sad and sorry, in our sin.

That’s not what this text from Luke teaches us. The message of Jesus’ baptism is that God stays with us even in those messy places. More than that, he deliberately chooses to enter into those places to be with us. He would much prefer we didn’t go to those places of darkness, despair and death. But when we do, he walks there with us, to be with us, and to rescue us.

Amen