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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. (Amen.)
The shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flocks the night of Jesus’s birth, heard a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, as the English Standard Version translates, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!” (Luke 2:14). As the shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem to see the thing that had happened, which the Lord had made known to them, they may have wondered, as we may wonder: who are those with whom God is pleased? Or, to use the Small Catechism’s question, “Was ist das?”, that is, “What does this mean?” The Divinely-inspired evangelist St. Luke does not leave his hearers or readers wondering about that meaning for very long, as roughly a chapter later, when Jesus had been baptized, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, God the Father’s voice came from heaven, saying that Jesus was His Beloved Son, with Whom He is well-pleased. The Father’s good‑pleasure with His Beloved Son would not do us any good, if Jesus did not make clear, as He does elsewhere in St. Luke’s Gospel account, both that the Father was well‑pleased to hide the things of salvation from those who think of themselves as wise and understanding and instead to reveal them to little children (Luke 10:21), and that it was the Father’s good‑pleasure to give the little flock of His Church the Kingdom (Luke 12:32). So, as we this morning consider today’s Gospel Reading, I pray that the Holy Spirit helps you realize that “In His Beloved Son, God the Father is well-pleased with you”.
Today’s Gospel Reading picks right up after, and even has an option to overlap with, the Gospel Reading for the recent Second Sunday in Advent (Luke 3:1-14 [15-20]), which focused on the work of John the Baptizer. Although, with today’s being The Baptism of Our Lord, we are especially interested in today’s Gospel Reading’s last two verses, which verses deal with John’s baptizing Jesus. Those two verses tell of the only time, arguably other than Mary and Jesus’s visit to Elizabeth and John (Luke 1:39-45), that we know from Holy Scripture that the two men had direct contact (Plummer, ad loc Luke 3:21-22, p.98), and the baptism narrative in some sense serves as the Gospel account’s transition from the work of John to the work of Jesus. And yet, even in those two verses, The Baptism of Our Lord essentially is mentioned only as the time when it happened that the heavens were opened, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form like a dove, and God the Father’s voice came from heaven identifying Jesus as His Beloved Son, with Whom He is well‑pleased.
Of course, by nature you and I are those with Whom God the Father is not well‑pleased. By nature, we even need God’s Word to reveal that displeasure to us, but, if we are already believers, we may frequently feel the shame of our sin. We are like children who disappoint their human parents, not doing what we should, and doing what we should not. The Lord does not take pleasure in those who love to wander from Him (Jeremiah 14:10) and who do evil in His sight (Malachi 2:17). God’s Word confronts us not only with our original sin, which we inherit from our parents, but also with our own actual sin: the thoughts, words, and deeds that we should not omit; and the thoughts, words, and deeds that we should not commit. On account of our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, we deserve nothing but both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity. But, out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, God calls and so enables us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us. God forgives all the things about you that displease Him. For, “In His Beloved Son, God the Father is well-pleased with you”.
From today’s Gospel Reading and from other passages like it, we usually understand—as we confess in today’s hymns—that one of the reasons why God the Father is well‑pleased with Jesus is because, in His baptism, Jesus identified Himself with all of us who displeased God. Does that unexpected pairing of good‑pleasure and dis‑pleasure not seem ironic? Jesus essentially turns God’s displeasure into God’s good pleasure—good pleasure not only with Jesus but also ultimately with us! Today’s Gospel Reading makes clear both that God is a Holy Trinity and that Jesus is the Son of God in human flesh. As that Son of God, Jesus was perfectly holy. Jesus had no sin or unbelief of His own that He should need to repent and believe, but He took on our sin and unbelief; He became our substitute. Jesus’s baptism in a sense anticipates His death on the cross for us and for our salvation (for example, Luke 12:50). On the cross, through God the Holy Spirit, God the Son offered Himself to God the Father. Jesus not only lived a God‑pleasing life, but He made up for our failures to live God‑pleasing lives. As St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Jesus, and so to reconcile to Himself all things by the blood of His cross (Colossians 1:19-20; confer Schrenk, TDNT 2:741). Jesus actively obeyed God, and He passively suffered for us, and, when we repent, then we receive His righteousness—we receive His righteousness through His Word and Sacraments.
We might say, since the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form like a dove and the Father spoke from heaven at Jesus’s baptism, and since there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind and divided tongues as of fire when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, that we should expect the Holy Spirit to be given to us both with the reading and preaching of God’s Word to us as a group and with the application of His Gospel to us as individuals with water in Holy Baptism, with touch in Holy Absolution, and with the bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood in the Holy Supper. The Triune God is not far from us but is present in all of these ways in order to forgive our sins and so to save us and to give us eternal life. For example, in Holy Baptism, in the words of today’s Old Testament Reading, when we pass through the waters, we are called by name and redeemed (Isaiah 43:1-7). As today’s Epistle Reading put it, we are baptized into Jesus’s death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:1-11).
That newness of life includes both our at least trying to do the good works of God’s Commandments according to our various callings in life and our living in God’s forgiveness of sins with daily sorrow over our sin and trust that God forgives us for Jesus’s sake. The devil, the world, and our own sinful nature will tempt us to reason falsely, from the seemingly bad things that happen to those we love or to us ourselves, our suffering and afflictions—they will tempt us to conclude that God is not pleased with us but is displeased with us, as if, perhaps, He has not forgiven our sin but is punishing us for it. Yet, we look not to our own internal subjective thoughts and feelings, but rather we look to God’s external objective Means of Grace, His Word and Sacraments, which assure us that we are those of His good will, those whom, St. Paul writes to the Ephesians, God in love has predestined for adoption to Himself as children through Jesus Christ, according to the good‑pleasure of His will (Ephesians 1:4). You hear God’s Word. You are baptized. You are absolved. You eat Christ’s Body and drink His Blood. Do not doubt that, as you are in Christ, you are among those with whom God is well‑pleased.
The antiphon to today’s Introit is a verse from Isaiah that commentators usually think is at least partly behind what God the Father’s said to God the Son as the Holy Spirit descended on Him: “Behold My servant, Whom I uphold, My Chosen, in Whom My Soul delights” (Psalm 2:7-11, 12c; antiphon: Isaiah 42:1a). As we this morning have considered today’s Gospel Reading, I pray that the Holy Spirit has helped you realize that also “In His Beloved Son, God the Father is well‑pleased with you”. As the Introit’s psalm excerpt concluded, blessed are all who take refuge in Him.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +