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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.
The Baptism of Our Lord sometimes can be hard for people to understand. As we heard the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew uniquely report in today’s Gospel Reading, even John the Baptizer at first did not understand why Jesus needed to be baptized, for John said that he needed to be baptized by Jesus and rhetorically asked if Jesus was coming to him. John the Baptizer had prophesied of the One coming after him, Who was mightier than him. Who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:11), and, although John had not yet received the sign of the Spirit’s descending and remaining on the Messiah that God told him to expect (John 1:31-33), John nevertheless knew Jesus. John the Baptizer recognized both his own sin‑fulness and Jesus’s sin‑lessness. But, Jesus commanded John to permit Jesus’s baptism, for, Jesus said, doing so was fitting for them in order to fulfill all righteousness. As we this morning consider today’s Gospel Reading, we realize that “Jesus is baptized to fulfill all righteousness for us”.
To be sure, there was a need for righteousness to be fulfilled. John the Baptizer had need to be baptized by Jesus, and he was not the only one. All of the Old Testament people of Israel as God’s children had failed to produce their own righteousness, and that is not even to mention those outside of the people of Israel. The same is true of all of the people of the New Testament people of Israel, the Church, including us, by nature. We are filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. We are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. We are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though we know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, we not only do them, but we also give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:29-32.) The unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9). Our hearts and lives violate God’s holy law, and so God rightly reveals His wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).
But, “Jesus is baptized to fulfill all righteousness for us”. For our sake, God made Jesus, Who knew no sin, to be sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). Sinless Jesus stepped into the water fouled by our sin, as it were, and there He took‑on our sin. He identified with us sinners! So, the made-holy water of baptism cleanses all who receive it with sorrow over their sin and trust in God by means of baptism to work forgiveness of sins, to rescue them from death and the devil, and to give them eternal salvation. As Jesus said elsewhere, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned (Mark 16:16). When, led by God, we repent and believe, then, through means such as Holy Baptism, God forgives us our sin, all our sin, whatever our sin might be.
Interestingly, today’s Gospel Reading is more about the purpose of the Baptism of Our Lord and what happened afterwards, than it is about the Baptism itself, the fact of which is reported in passing in a subordinate clause, which tells when the two striking things that followed occurred. Behold, St. Matthew says, the heavens were opened to Jesus, and He (and others like John the Baptizer) saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on Him; and, behold, a voice from heaven said that Jesus was His beloved Son, with Whom He was well‑pleased. The prophecy of today’s Old Testament Reading about the Lord’s putting His Spirit on His Servant was fulfilled at the Baptism of Our Lord (Isaiah 42:1‑9), and there, as recalled from creation and arguably prophesied by today’s Psalm (Psalm 29; antiphon: v.3), the voice of the Lord was over the waters, perhaps even pointing out that fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy (so Jeremias, TDNT 5:701).
Of course, the Baptism of Our Lord does not fulfill all righteousness alone; it is only one of the necessary parts of Jesus’s fulfilling all righteousness for us. But, the God-man Jesus still did everything in order for us to be righteous. He is the Christ, the One anointed in His baptism as our Prophet, Priest, and King. Out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, Jesus lived the perfect life that we fail to live, and in our place He suffered and died on the cross the death that we deserved for our failures to live that life. Even when forsaken by God, Jesus remained the Father’s beloved Son with Whom the Father was well‑pleased (Pieper, II:313). As Jesus said elsewhere, the Father loved Jesus because He laid down His life in order that He might take it up again (John 10:17). And, take it up again Jesus did! Jesus’s resurrection showed that God the Father accepted Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf. The benefits of Jesus’s death for us God gives to us by His Means of Grace, such as Holy Baptism.
The Triune God manifest at Jesus’s Baptism Himself works as each of us is baptized with water and the Triune Name (Matthew 28:19). The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were present with the waters in the beginning when in their image they created humankind perfect (Genesis 1:1, 16), they were present at Jesus’s Baptism, and they are present as they with water now re‑create fallen humankind to be righteous in their sight and perfect at the last. Baptism is far more than a symbol! Baptism actually does things. For example, in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 6:1-11), we heard how baptism buries us with Christ, uniting us with Him in a death like His and also uniting us with Him in a resurrection like His. God honored Jesus’s baptism and so we honor Baptism (Large Catechism IV:21), recognizing Baptism’s blessings and living in our baptisms each and every day. Not only in the Word and water of Holy Baptism, but also in the Word and rite of individual Holy Absolution and in the Word and bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar, which are the Body and Blood of Christ, God Himself works in us so that we walk in newness of life.
So important is Holy Baptism, and under normal circumstances necessary, that Jesus says that, unless one is so born from above by water and the Spirit, he or she cannot enter or even see the Kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5). So, Christian parents bring their children to the Font or risk keeping the children out of the Kingdom, compared to which, Jesus says elsewhere, it would be better to have great millstones fastened around their necks and to be drowned in the depth of the sea (see Matthew 18:6; Mark 9:42; and Luke 17:2). Regardless of our age when we are baptized, the Holy Spirit given at the Font leads us to see Jesus as the Son and from Him to hear the Father speak. The Holy Spirit given at the Font leads us to cry out to God as His children and to be heirs of His Kingdom (Galatians 4:6).
Considering today’s Gospel Reading this morning, we have realized that “Jesus is baptized to fulfill all righteousness for us”. The Baptism of Our Lord is not so hard for us to understand when we let the Holy Spirit illuminate us! We are unrighteous in our hearts and lives, but, with daily repentance and faith, our sinful nature is drowned and dies with all sins and evil desires and our redeemed nature emerges to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. As we so live each day in God’s forgiveness of sins, He sees us as righteous for Jesus’s sake. Out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, He makes us who are baptized, as we prayed in today’s Collect, faithful in our calling as God the Father’s children and inheritors with Jesus of everlasting life. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, may the Lord give strength to His people; may the Lord bless His people with peace!
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +