13 January 2008
My servant, my son
“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my
chosen, in whom my soul delights;”
“This is my Son,
the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
When you look at our two readings together, as I
did while sorting out this service, you can’t help but be
struck by those two statements.
They
echo off one another:
my servant, my son;
my chosen in whom my
soul delights;
the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.
This Sunday,
the Church celebrates the baptism of Christ.
I’ll come back
to the servant thing in a bit,
but for now we remember how Jesus
came to John to ask for baptism.
For
Jews, baptism was really a matter of washing.
They had –
and
still, as far as I know, have –
a way of washing in their
ritual baths,
which made them no longer unclean.
But it was
not, I believe, until the time of John the Baptist
that baptism
was linked with repentance.
John had one or two things to say to
people who wanted baptism without repenting,
baptism without
tears, if you like,
calling them “a brood of vipers”,
and
reminding them that just because they were children of Abraham didn’t
mean they were excused from bearing “fruits worthy of
repentance.”
In other words, they had to show their
repentance by the change in their lives, and their baptism was to
mark this fresh start.
Now for me, at least, this raises at least two
questions.
Why, then, was it necessary for Jesus to be baptised,
and, secondly, what about our own baptism?
Why Was It Necessary For Jesus To Be Baptised?
Why did Jesus have to be baptised?
He, after
all, was without sin, or so we are told,
so he, alone of all
humanity, did not need,
and never has needed, to repent.
But
when John queried him, so our reading tells us,
he said “Let
it be so now;
for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all
righteousness.”
In other words, let’s observe all the
formalities,
don’t let anybody be able to say I wasn’t
part of the religious establishment of the day.
Apparently the Greek rather implies they had a bit of a barney about it.....
And, of course,
one other very good reason is that it was an opportunity for the
Father to proclaim Jesus to the crowds thronging the Jordan.
John
probably baptised hundreds of others that day, I shouldn’t
wonder, with Jesus waiting his turn very patiently.
But it was
only when Jesus rose up from the waters of baptism
that God sent
the Holy Spirit upon him in the form of a dove, and said, out
loud,
“You
are my Son, whom I love;
with you I am well pleased.”
God proclaimed Jesus as his beloved Son.
And then what?
No triumphant upsurging
against the occupying power,
no human rebellion.
Not even a
triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
No, what awaited Jesus after his
baptism was forty days in the desert,
and an almost unbearable
temptation to discover the depths of his powers as God’s Son,
whom God loves,
and to misuse them.
And it was only then, after
Jesus had wrestled with, and conquered, the temptation to misuse his
divine power,
that he could come back and begin to heal the
sick,
raise the dead,
restore sight to the blind
and preach
good news to the poor.
And gather round him a band of devoted
followers, of course, and all that.
And eventually to die.
To
die on the Cross.
It goes to show, doesn’t it, that sometimes there is little difference between sonship and servanthood.
“This is
my servant, whom I uphold;
the beloved in whom my soul
delights”.
Jesus was God’s only-begotten Son, but he
still went to his death on the Cross and he had no proof, no
more than we have, that God would raise him.
As we know, God did
raise him, but Jesus had no way of knowing that this would happen.
Well, so much for Jesus’ baptism;
what
about ours?
For many Christians, baptism does seem to be
very similar to John’s baptism, a baptism of repentance, of
changed lives,
a signal to the world that now you are a
Christian, and plan to live that way.
But for a great many more
Christians, baptism is something that happens when you are a tiny
baby, too small to remember it.
That’s usually the case for
Methodists and Anglicans, so it applies to us.
I was baptised as a
baby and so, very probably, were you.
Now, some folk say that being baptised as a baby
is a nonsense,
how can you possibly repent when you are an infant
in arms,
and how can other people make those promises for you?
I
think it depends very much on whether you see baptism as primarily
something you do, or primarily something God does.
The Anglican
and Methodist churches call baptism a Sacrament,
and you may
remember, from your Sunday School days,
that a Sacrament is the
outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace.
The
other Sacrament that both Anglican and Methodist churches recognise
is, of course, Holy Communion.
The Catholic church recognises at least five
more,
but as I can never remember all of them, I won’t start
listing them now!
The point is, that a Sacrament is a place where
we humans do something and trust that God also does something.
When
we make our Communion, we believe that we are meeting with
Jesus,
communicating, if you like, in a very special way
during
the taking, breaking, blessing and sharing of the bread and wine.
And
in baptism, we believe that God comes and meets with us in a very
special way, filling us with the Holy Spirit.
Yes, even babies
–
do you really have to be old enough to be aware that you
are doing so in order to love God?
I don’t think so!
You
certainly don’t have to be aware to be loved by God,
and
that’s really what it’s all about.
You see, baptism, like Communion, is one of
those Christian mysteries, where the more deeply you penetrate into
what it means,
the more you become aware that there’s more
to know.
You never really get to the bottom of it.
St Paul goes
off in one direction, talking about baptism being identifying with
Christ in his death.
I’m never quite sure what he is getting
at, when he says in the letter to the Romans,
“Do you not
know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were
baptised into his death?
Therefore we have been buried with him
by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the
dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of
life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we
will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
I may not have totally understood Paul there
–
who does? –
but it’s nevertheless part of
what baptism is all about.
Another part of it is, indeed, about repentance
and turning to Christ.
For those of us who were baptised as
infants,
someone else made promises on our behalf about being
Jesus’ person,
and we didn’t take responsibility for
them until we were old enough to know what we were doing,
when we
were, I hope, confirmed.
We confirmed that we were taking
responsibility for those promises for ourselves,
we became full
members of the Church and, above all,
we received, once again, the
Holy Spirit through the laying-on of hands.
And so it goes on.
But it’s all very
well me droning on about baptism and what it really means, but what
is it saying to us this morning?
For some of us, our baptism was
five or six decades ago, or even more, after all!
Well, first and most importantly is that baptism
is important for Christians,
as important as the Sacrament of Holy
Communion.
So if for any reason you never have been baptised,
and
you know that you want to be Jesus’ person,
do go and talk
to Cameron or someone.
The same applies if you were never
confirmed;
again, go and see someone about being.
But for the rest of us, for whom our
confirmation is nothing more than a memory, and baptism not even
that, so what?
What does it mean for us today?
I think that, like so much that is to do with
God,
baptism is an ongoing thing, not just a once-for-all
thing.
Yes, we are baptised once;
St Paul reminds us that there
is one baptism,
just as there is one faith, and one Lord.
But
when Martin Luther was quite an old man,
and the devil started
whispering in his ear that he was a rotten human being and God would
cast him out, et cetera, et cetera,
Luther threw his inkpot at the
spot where he felt the voice was coming from, and said:
“Nonsense!
I
have been baptised,
and I stand on that baptism!”
Even
though that baptism had been when Luther was a newborn baby,
he
still knew that its effects would protect him from the assaults of
the evil one.
As, indeed, it does for us.
There are times
when life seems to go very pear-shaped, aren’t there?
Times
when it feels that God has forgotten us, that we are stumbling on
alone, in the dark,
totally unable to see where we are
going.
Whether that is true for us as individuals, or as a church,
these times are very hard to deal with and to understand.
All we
know is, they happen to all of us from time to time, and we simply
can’t see the reason from this end.
As I said earlier, Jesus
had no way of knowing, not with one hundred percent total certainty,
that God would raise him from the dead.
He knew what must happen,
and look how he dreaded it, sweating great drops of blood:
“Let
this cup pass from me!”
But he knew that he was the Servant, to whom
those songs in Isaiah applied:
the beloved, in whom God
delights.
He knew, too, that he was the beloved Son, with whom God
was well pleased.
And we, too, can know that we are God’s
children.
We can know that we were created for his delight.
We
can know that we are loved.
We can say, with Luther: I have been baptised, and I stand on that baptism.
Amen.