The Cyber Kazbá

Ever sit and wonder about the baptism of Jesus? Ok, I understand you’re probably not like me and you sit around filling your brain with theological ambiguities and exegetical equivocations; but I am inviting you now into my path of thinking.

The first obvious question for me is what is baptism, what does it mean, and why do we do it? But I think at first these questions are too big to grapple and any answer I give would never really satisfy me. So I went to the source: Jesus. Jesus was baptized…why?

First let’s examine John the Baptizer (or Dipper). He was sent to prepare the way for Jesus and he was in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance. There are two things about John’s actions that are interesting. 1) If we relate the idea of baptism to the Jewish practice of ceremonial washing, John is doing a very peculiar action. I think there is good reason to believe that many who were baptized understood it in the context of Jewish ceremonial cleansing. Since there is no mention of Baptism in the OT and since there really isn’t any explanation as to why John is baptizing we may assume that this practice was somewhat common. Our closest resemblance to such an act is Jewish ceremonial cleansing. This is the cleansing required in order to make oneself clean before entering the temple or even the community. For instance if you get a disease (Lev. 14:8); or if someone contacts a woman who has her period (Lev. 15:21); or if you eat some dead animal (Lev. 17:15) you are required to bathe yourself. The interesting thing about John’s baptism is that he is pairing the ceremonial cleansing with the moral purity as well. Making an interesting link that also appears in the writing of the Qumran community. 2) It is believed by many that Jews practice proselyte baptism. That is, the Gentiles who wished to convert to Judaism were required to not only get circumcised (ouch!) but also get washed with water (ahhh). If John’s baptism is seen as similar to proselyte baptism then John is inaugurating a new community that even Jews were eager to join….

So then we also know for sure that John’s baptism was characterized by repentance. Repentance, that is turning away form sin, was one of John’s main themes in his teaching. So the question now comes…If John is preaching a baptism of repentance, why is Jesus getting baptized? Did Jesus sin? What is he repenting from? Well I think there are clues in the text that would show the answers to this and I think this might astound some.

I am focusing my concentration on the Matthew account (chapter 3), even though all four gospels record this event, I think Matthew serves my purposes the best. The narrative sequences are very important in order to understand what is taking place. It’s not enough just to do a word study on baptism and repentance and then sum up what is happening here in the text. So Jesus goes to John and gets baptized, essentially encountering water; then a voice comes from the heavens and declares that Jesus is God’s Son, and then Jesus is led into the wilderness for 40 days. These three acts alone should be triggering some OT buttons. First let’s do the most important, but maybe not the most obvious: The declaration of Jesus as God’s son. Did God ever call anyone else His Son? Yes! In Exodus 4:22, God calls Israel his firstborn son. And let me back up for a moment; let’s not forget that in Matt. Ch. 2 Jesus flees out of Egypt, in chapter 3 he passes through some water, he is called God’s Son, and then spends 40 days in the wilderness. Kind of sounds like Israel’s history doesn’t it?

So what’s going on? Jesus is assuming the role of Israel, not overtaking the role, but rather fulfilling the role, completely, the way God originally intended. So many times we get caught up in thinking that fulfilled prophecy is fulfilling some utterance about future events, but the NT authors saw Jesus’ life as fulfillment of Israel’s history and not just history but future as well. Jesus becomes the New Israel, and those who are in Christ are apart of this New Israel.

# posted by Velmer @ 3:15 PM 4 comments