The Baptism of the Lord
Rod Sprange

Mark 1:4-11

This week, as I was reading Mark’s account of John baptizing people in the River Jordan and watching out of the window, I thought, it was a good job John didn’t live in Winnipeg! My thoughts are often irrelevant, unlike Mark’s Gospel.

Mark’s Gospel is understood to be the earliest of the Gospels and possibly the basis of Matthew and Luke’s. It is the shortest of all four Gospels. Mark does not waste time or words with anything irrelevant. He get’s straight to the important news he needed to share. It is quite easy to read the whole of Mark in one sitting - but it does leave you breathless, as Mark makes it clear that Jesus’s mission is urgent.

Mark tells us nothing of Jesus’s nativity or early years. He begins with quotations from the prophets Malachi and Isaiah. He understood these prophesies to have been fulfilled in John the Baptist. He quotes:

’See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight”’

John was preaching the urgency of a baptism of repentance and for the forgiveness of sins, and people were flocking from all over Israel to come and hear him and to be baptized. Mark tells us that Jesus also came from Nazareth and was baptized by John. Jesus would have been in his late twenties or early thirties at that time. Mark doesn’t feel it necessary to write about his life before that moment. Some have speculated that the stories of Jesus’s birth and early life were so well known Mark didn’t feel the need to include them. The critical thing for Mark is that we know about Jesus’s mission. His baptism was a turning point in Jesus’s life, where he began his activities as teacher, healer and Messiah.

John’s baptism was about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Repentance means turning around and going in a new direction, not just being sorry for our sins. In John’s baptism there was a ritual cleansing of sin, a purification, but it was also a commitment to dying to the old life, the old ways, and committing to following a new life in right relationship with God.

As the one without sin, Jesus did not need to have his sins washed away, but he was turning away from his old life and following the life God intended for him. Jesus, at this critical moment was also demonstrating that he was to be a different kind of leader, a different Messiah than the people expected.
By submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus shows how he will humble himself throughout his short life. It shows he did not take advantage of who he was.
Jesus was leading by example.

Jesus is the Messiah, and the early church understood that the Messiah represented his people. In Jesus’s life, death, resurrection and ascension, he makes what is true of him, true of his people. What happened immediately after his baptism is, for Mark, the true beginning of the Good News.

As soon as Jesus came up out of the river, he saw the Heavens open and the Spirit descending on him. N.T. Wright describes this opening of the heavens to be more like a veil lifted between this earthly realm and God’s reality. At that moment for Jesus, it was like an invisible veil being pulled aside and a whole different reality was revealed to him. Like the curtains on a stage opening and revealing a whole other world where we will be transported throughout the performance.

Here is the wonderful thing - Jesus heard God’s voice say “You are my son, the beloved. In you I am well pleased. N.T. Wright translates that sentence as “You are my wonderful son; you make me very glad’. Doesn’t every child long to hear that from their parent? The even more wonderful thing is, because Jesus is Messiah, what God says to him is true for Jesus’s people. Let me repeat that. What is true for Jesus, the Messiah, is true for his people. It may be hard for us to absorb or perhaps accept these words. But God says to each of us, “You are my wonderful child, you make me very glad”. Tomorrow morning, when you get up, when you look in the mirror (after the initial shock), say out loud “you are my wonderful child, you make me very glad”. Feel God’s love and affirmation surrounding you - then go and live your day.

The thing is, we don’t earn this love, it is the unconditional, unbreakable love of the perfect parent.

John baptized with water. As John tells the people, “one is coming…who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”. Christians receive this baptism of the spirit when they are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It was at our baptism that we received our identity. No longer defined by our work, or our status or gender or ethnicity, but defined by our belonging to Christ, as a member of Christ’s own family, as a vital part of Christ’s body.