Bible Text: Matthew 3:13-17 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Epiphany 2022 | The Baptism of Jesus, on the face of it, is probably the strangest thing Jesus does. His miracles aren’t surprising. Despite the modernist insistence that miracles can’t happen, miracles are precisely what have to happen once God invades His creation and becomes a man. Jesus is a walking miracle, God become man, and so miracles are bound to come from him. Jesus’ death, on the other hand, was so strange an occurrence that St. Peter scolded Jesus for saying it would happen, and none of the disciples understood what Jesus was saying when he insisted that the Son of Man must suffer and die and rise again the third day. But we can at least imagine an innocent man dying, no matter how much the thought bothers us. The Baptism of Jesus is different. It’s strange because everything we know about Jesus and everything we know about Baptism seem to suggest that Jesus has no business at all getting baptized. John the Baptist stresses this conflict in his reaction to Jesus: he tries to prevent him, tries to say no – which by the way never works with Jesus; he gets what he wants, he always wins the argument – but John tells Jesus exactly what anyone would think is the truth, “I need to be baptized by you, and you want to be baptized by me?” And this is exactly the natural objection because of the nature of Baptism, the nature of John, and the nature of Jesus. John has been preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He’s calling sinners to confess their sins and receive forgiveness in Baptism. But Jesus isn’t a sinner. He is the righteous one. He needs no forgiveness. He is its source, its cause, its ground. John needs forgiveness, we need forgiveness, not Jesus. So this is why I’m calling it the strangest occurrence, because Jesus insists on precisely this, that he the sinless one be baptized with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
And it may be the strangest but in being the strangest it is the most wonderful. And this we see by God’s reaction to it – the Son insists on it, the Spirit comes down to rest on him, the Father speaks His approval from heaven: this is my Son in whom I am well pleased. This is what I want, God says emphatically, my Son baptized into a sinner’s baptism. And we are reminded once again that God has chosen the foolish things to put to shame the wise, the weak things to shame the strong, the low and despised, even things that are not, so that no one can boast in his own reason or strength but must bow to the strange and beautiful work of God, taking every thought captive in obedience to Christ.
The strange and beautiful thing is that Jesus joins us in Baptism. He acts the sinner. St. Paul will say that the Father made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Let it be so now, Jesus says, let me take the sin of the world on myself, let me be identified as the sinner, the one who bears all sin, for thus it is fitting to fulfill all righteousness. It’s Jesus saying, Someone has to bear them, someone has to pay for them, and I don’t want that to be you, my Father doesn’t want it to be you. So I will take it. Mark me the sinner, drive me into the wilderness to face the devil, and when the time comes drive the nails into my flesh. And so I will remove your sins, so I will cleanse you, so evil and despair and hostility with God will be drowned in my blood. I will join you, and so you will join me. That’s what it means to fulfill all righteousness.
St. Paul will say that this strange wonder, that God the Son bears our punishment as the sinner, this makes it possible for God to be righteous and at the same time make us righteous. God is of course righteous in Himself, which means he’s completely good, and that complete goodness requires him to punish sin. Just as we wouldn’t consider a judge a good judge if he refused to punish the murderer, we’d call him a bad judge, and just as we blame parents for not disciplining their children, so we would have to consider God a bad god if he refused to punish evil. But God is love and the first impulse of love is not strict justice but mercy. So God, who must be righteous, must punish the sinner, does this strange thing, this unthinkable thing, he becomes the sinner, not in himself, but in his judgment, and now God punishes sin to its fullest extent, nothing held back, total justice, but it falls not on us but on Himself, on the Son who insisted on being baptized by John, to be marked as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And so God is both righteous and the one who makes us righteous. He punishes sin and forgives it in the same strange and beautiful act.
There is an added strangeness to the Baptism of Jesus. And it is the same strangeness we have today. It is water and a few words. That’s it. It is so easy to despise. But Jesus doesn’t despise it, just as he doesn’t despise the little children, or moms and dads, or marriage, or honest poverty, or humility. The ordinary things turn out to be the extraordinary. I don’t determine the value of my children by my eyes or by my senses, but by my God’s word to me that they are precious, gifts from Him, created in his image, created for heaven. The ordinary humdrum of daily life with them becomes the extraordinary when God’s word runs the show. It is as the Psalmist says, “As we have heard, so we have seen,” that is, it is only after God tells us in His Word what is beautiful and worthwhile and extraordinary that we see it with our eyes. I was sitting in the waiting room of the urgent care yesterday and saw a commercial on TV pushing the outrageous lie that the greatest aspiration of our young girls or of our racial minorities should be to become the CEO of a major company, a great moneymaker who can compete with the boys and the whites, as if for either girl or boy or white or black or any race on this earth our goal should be power and prestige and money. What silly nonsense. God’s word puts taking care of the little children so far above the pomp and wealth of this world. God’s word makes us see money and power as base things, things only to be used for God’s glory, but the little children are embraced by God’s own hands.
So with marriage and family, I don’t determine the value of marriage by how much happiness or pleasure I can gain from my wife, but by the fact that the Creator gave this woman to be mine and me to be hers. In fact you can’t assess the value of life itself by your eyes, because then it would be worth some 80 years, and it would be more or less valuable depending on your money and your health and your personal enjoyment, and then death would confirm its meaninglessness, full of toil and trouble as Moses tells us. No, we know the value of things by the value God places on them. It is blindness not to see the value of the little children and of marriage and of family. It is blindness too not to see the value of Baptism. What does God say about it? Jesus joins Himself to it. The Holy Spirit descends on it. The Father shouts his approval from heaven. The apostles say it saves us, is our rebirth as children of God, the washing that washes away our sin, the act of God that joins us to Christ’s death and resurrection, that makes us share in everything Jesus is and gives, in divinity itself, in the life of God.
Your eyes object and your reason retorts, but it’s just water – and the Father thunders, this is my beloved Son, listen to Him! Take your reason captive and see what God sees. God has taken the foolish things, the weak things, the despised things, and He exalts them. He does it with Baptism, water and word, and he does it with you. Here is your worth. You magnify Baptism and you let God magnify yourself. You of yourself are a sinner. Your end is death. You have not loved God as you should; you have obsessed over useless things, you’ve stained the body and the soul God gave you. That’s you in yourself, and unrighteousness will not inherit the Kingdom of heaven.
But your Baptism takes all that unworthiness away, not by silly papist magic, not by a spell, but by giving you Jesus your Savior, in whom you trust, and who has become your everything. He’s become your everything not in some sappy, sentimental sense, but in a mystical union that began with His Baptism and continued with yours. Your sins became his and he buried them in his death. His righteous he gives to you – he said it himself, let it be now so that we can fulfill all righteousness. That’s your righteousness, because it’s Christ’s and you are his and he is yours. His name is yours, you bear it just as he bore the name of sinner for you. So the Father now calls you His son in your baptism. He is well pleased in you because He is well pleased in His Son. And this worth is beyond compare. God determines worth. What greater worth can there be than being children of God – as St. John says, Beloved, See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! What a strange thing! As strange as Jesus insisting on being baptized. And as beautiful. We sinners are children of God. And so we are. So let’s act like it. We are children of God! Let’s value what God values. Let’s fill our homes with prayers to Him and songs to Him and reading His Word. Let’s battle against the devil and fight our sins. Let’s look forward to the day we see our Savior face to face and let’s treasure for ourselves treasures in heaven, where Christ our Lord is. Let’s think of our Baptism every single day and call on our Father in sincerity and truth, for Jesus’ sake, by His Spirit. And all other things will be added to us, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.