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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the beginning, the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, and God through the Word spoke creation into being (Genesis 1:1-3; John 1:1-3). When Jesus had been baptized, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on Him in bodily form, like a dove, and a voice came from heaven. When you and I are baptized, the Triune God speaks through the pastor’s voice, and, through him, as it were, God washes us into heaven. In my preparing to preach on the Gospel Reading for today, the Baptism of our Lord, I was especially struck by the similarities between the three events I just mentioned and by the words in the antiphon for today’s Psalm: “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord over many waters” (Psalm 29; antiphon v.3). And so, this morning we reflect on the Gospel Reading under the theme “The Voice over the Waters”.
Today’s Gospel Reading reports the Baptism of our Lord, what one commentator considers to be the third‑most‑important event in Jesus’s ministry, after His crucifixion and resurrection (Just, 159). Yet, the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke—who, in his account of the Lord’s Baptism, uniquely mentions Jesus’s praying, the Spirit as the “Holy Spirit”, and the Spirit’s “bodily form”—like St. Matthew (3:13‑17) relegates the fact of the Baptism itself to an adverbial clause, focusing instead on what happened after the Baptism. That focus is not to say that the fact of the Baptism is not important, for the Gospel writers essentially treat Jesus’s birth and death the same way, but that focus is to say that what happened after the Baptism is to some extent more important, if nothing else interpreting the Baptism and explaining the Baptism’s significance, giving the Holy Spirit’s and God the Father’s testimony that Jesus is the anointed Messiah “for whom the infancy narratives and John’s preaching prepared” (Just, 158). As we go this morning, we will sort of take what the Spirit does and what the Father says in reverse order.
Echoing a number of Old Testament passages (for example, Psalm 2:7), God the Father’s voice over the waters said to Jesus, “with You I am well pleased.” God’s pleasure, His delight, is not in evil or faithless people (Malachi 2:17; Schrenk, TDNT 2:740-741). The Gospel Reading certainly tells how John the Baptizer expressed God’s displeasure with Herod the tetrarch, whom John reproved for both divorce and an adulterous remarriage to his brother’s wife. Yet, apart from faith in God, we are no better than Herod the tetrarch! By nature we are evil and faithless. We sin against our sexual purity; we sin against our parents and other authorities whom God places over us; and we sin in all kinds of other ways. Ours sins deserve death now and torment for eternity. More than we are not pleased with ourselves, and more than others are not pleasedwith us, most of all God is not pleased with us.
And yet, on those He speaks against, God desires to have mercy (Jeremiah 31:20). Then John the Baptizer called to repentance and faith Herod the tetrarch and all the people, and so us he also calls to repentance and faith now. John warns us of God’s separating the wheat from the chaff, His gathering the repentant and believing wheat into His barn but burning the unrepentant and unbelieving chaff with unquenchable fire. When we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to do better than to keep on sinning, then God forgives our sin. God forgives our sin against our sexual purity, our sin against our parents and other authorities, and our other kinds of sin, whatever they may be. God forgives all our sin for Jesus’s sake.
Somewhat echoing the Old Testament’s account of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:2; confer vv.12 and 16), God the Father’s voice over the waters said to Jesus, “You Yourself are My beloved Son”. God the Father’s special love for His Son Jesus the Christ separates and calls Him to be a sacrifice, like Isaac, only for all people (Stauffer, TDNT 1:48). God the Father elected His beloved Son for that purpose of saving us and appointed Him to the Kingly office of Savior (Schrenk, TDNT 2:740-741; confer SD XI:65). God loved you and me, while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), by giving that especially loved and pleasing Son, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but be pardoned and so have eternal life (John 3:16). Sinless Jesus was not baptized to take away His own sin, but He was baptized to put on our sin. For that purpose, as prophesied (Isaiah 42:1), God the Father in a special way put His Holy Spirit on Jesus, Who had been conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), and the Holy Spirit remained on Jesus (John 1:32-33), participating in Jesus’s offering of Himself so that His blood could purify us from our dead works to serve the living God (Hebrews 9:14). Jesus was the One Coming mightier than John the Baptizer. As we believe in Jesus, we do not fear, as we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading (Isaiah 43:1-7), we are precious in His eyes, honored, and loved. As the angels sang the night of Jesus’s birth, on earth there is peace between God and those with whom He is pleased, those of His gracious favor on account of Jesus’s sacrifice for us (Luke 2:14). Although in a different way than the way God the Father loves and is pleasedwith Jesus, nevertheless God the Father loves and is pleased with us who believe insofar as we are in Christ.
Some think that in the beginning the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters in bodily form like a dove. Wee know that a dove was involved with Noah and the receding of the floodwaters (Genesis 8:8-12), and the olive branch that the dove then carried has been connected to Christ (Zechariah 3:8; 6:12). Other Old Testament references to doves came to be interpreted as references to the Holy Spirit (for example, Song of Solomon 2:12), and in the New Testament the flood in which Noah was saved was connected to Baptism (1 Peter 3:20-21). (See Greeven, TDNT 6:66‑69; confer Marshall, 153, and Just, 161.) At the Baptism of our Lord, heaven opened and the Triune God revealed Himself (confer Ezekiel 1:1): the Father’s voice, the Son in the water, and the Holy Spirit in bodily form like a dove.
At our baptisms, the pastor’s voice over the water Names the Triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and we are forgiven our sins, rescued from death and the devil, and are given eternal salvation. The Son Who received John’s baptism transformed it (Scaer, CLD XI:104). The Son Who from the Father received the Holy Spirit in a special way at His own baptism now gives the same Spirit in our baptisms. Jesus’s baptism is not for us a mere pattern or a law or an ordinance, but it is a gracious gift. At the Baptismal Font, we are re‑created or re‑formed and made God’s children. As we heard in the Old Testament Reading, we do not need to fear, for God has redeemed us and called us by name and is with us when we pass through the waters. As we heard in the Epistle Reading (Romans 6:1-11), as we are baptized into Christ Jesus, we are buried with Him and baptized into His death, and, St. Paul writes elsewhere, in baptism, we also are raised with Him through faith (Colossians 2:11-14).
Lutheran theologians also point out something else about the Holy Spirit’s descent in bodily form on Jesus at His baptism. They say that as the Holy Spirit could be completely present in the form of a dove, so Jesus can be completely present with His Body and Blood in the forms of bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Altar (Chemnitz, Lord’s Supper 52, 56; confer Buls, 14). More than Jesus’s blood is present in Baptism, as described in our Hymn of the Day (Lutheran Service Book 406:7), Jesus’s blood is present in the Sacrament of the Altar. Jesus is really, physically present here with His Body and His blood, in order for all who are baptized to receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, to be strengthened and nourished in body and soul to life everlasting.
Until that final deliverance from this Valley of Sorrow, we heard St. Paul in the Epistle Reading say that we do not go on sinning. Our old self, our sinful nature, was crucified with Christ, and we are no longer enslaved to sin. We are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, and so, with daily repentance and faith, we walk in that newness of life. As we will sing in the first Distribution Hymn, that we are baptized allows us to boldly rebuke sin, Satan, and death, saying “I am baptized into Christ!” (LSB 594:2-4) As at Creation and the Baptism of our Lord, so at our baptisms: “The Voice over the Waters” has spoken. As we prayed in the Collect, our Triune God will make all who are baptized in His Name faithful in their callings as His children and inheritors with Christ of everlasting life.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +