Sunday Worship 25 January | The Man in the Water

Matthew 3:1-6 and 13-17

In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’”

John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.” Then John consented.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

This morning we are continuing our look at some of the stories that follow the Christmas story. We have heard the flight to Egypt and the presentation in the temple, and now we come to the baptism of Jesus by way of John the Baptist. I say this is a story that follows the Christmas story, but in fact the first half of this passage is often read during Advent, as John is presented as one of the figures who points the way to Jesus. That confuses the timeline however, as John and Jesus were the same age. John's mother Elizabeth was in the sixth month of her pregnancy when the angel visited Mary, so assuming both pregnancies went to term, he was only six months older than Jesus, who therefore was also a grown man by the time John set out for the wilderness. John was not announcing the coming birth of Jesus, but rather the coming ministry of Jesus.

There are only a handful of stories that we find in all four gospels, as the writers collected or chose different accounts, but John the Baptist makes an appearance in all of them. For all that, he remains an enigmatic figure, and his relationship to Jesus is particularly unclear. We know that their mothers were cousins, and held enough affection for each other that Mary not only visited Elizabeth but stayed with her for three months, presumably until John's birth. We also know that John's father Zechariah was a priest in the temple, so presumably he grew up in Jerusalem while Jesus grew up in Nazareth, so they wouldn't have grown up playing together, although surely the two families saw each other at least once a year, when Jesus and his parents visited the temple for Passover. We are also told that John leaped for joy in his mother's womb when she saw Mary, which seems to suggest that even before birth, he recognised the presence of Christ. And yet John does not seem to name the one he is preparing for, although he does seem to acknowledge Jesus as such when he says it should be Jesus baptising him. Why doesn't he tell the crowds that his cousin Jesus is the one he is speaking of? Does he fear people will take him less seriously if they know there is a connection between them? Does he understand that Jesus must reveal himself in his own time and his own way? We just don't know.

And John is not just enigmatic. He is downright strange. He spends his days out in the wilderness, wearing camel hair and eating locusts. He does not fit into the rest of society because he is speaking to an end and a beginning. We heard the essence of his message in the opening verses: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near". Jesus will also go on to speak of the kingdom of heaven, and here we find a interesting difference between Matthew and the other gospel writers, as they favour the phrase "the kingdom of God". It is clear that they are speaking of the same thing, so why the difference in language? It is most likely that the writers were adapting their language for the sake of their intended readers. There are lots of indications that Matthew was writing with a primarily Jewish audience in mind, and Jewish tradition avoids using the name of God, which would make the phrase "the kingdom of God" potentially offensive. The other gospels seems to assume a Gentile or at least mixed audience, who would quickly have noticed that the Greek word for heaven was also the name of the god Uranus, meaning the "kingdom of heaven" could easily be confused as suggesting something very different. Right from the beginning, the church has understood that we need to recognise who we are speaking to, and use the language that will communicate the message of Christ most clearly to them. 

Back to John's message now, and it is harsh and urgent, very hellfire and brimstone. Our reading missed out the longer section of his speech, but when he sees the Pharisees and the Sadducees he says this: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

And yet for all of John's hellfire and brimstone, people come to hear his message. Why? What drew them to the wild man in the desert? I imagine they knew that they - and the world - needed to be different. They knew they needed to repent, because to repent is to change. John is clear that if they want to truly live, inheritance isn't enough and ritual isn't enough, they need to live differently. They cannot simply say that Abraham is their father, just as we cannot simply say that Christ is our saviour. And their baptism with water is only a beginning, just as our baptism with water is only a beginning. What really matters is that they are changed by Christ and by the Spirit, that their lives bear good fruit.

Perhaps when we hear John talk of being baptised with the Spirit, we imagine that the good fruit must be very obviously spiritual, and some traditions do teach that speaking in tongues is the sign of this baptism, but I believe the Spirit is both more interesting and more practical than that. We know from Paul's letters that the early church recognised many spiritual gifts. And in Luke’s account of John's ministry, we find this encounter: "So the people asked him, saying, 'What shall we do then?' He answered and said to them, 'He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.' Then tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, 'Teacher, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Collect no more than what is appointed for you.' Likewise the soldiers asked him, saying, 'And what shall we do?' So he said to them, 'Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages.'" Bearing good fruit is really just being a good person.

I think we sometimes avoid talk of repentance because we associate it with street preachers with sandwich boards and megaphones trying to scare people into believing as they try to do their shopping. That is certainly not my style, but I do think we may need to talk more about repentance, because I am sure that people still know that they - and the world - need to be different. It is very easy to see that the world is not all it could be, and in our most honest moments we know that neither are we. I am wary of any theology that goes too hard on telling us that we are miserable sinners, because I think we also need to remember that we are wonderfully made by a God who loves us deeply, but none of us are perfect and we all need to ask “what shall we do?” from time to time.

I also think we may need to broaden our understanding of repentance, beyond the usual turning away from sin, because there are plenty of things in our lives that are not sinful by any traditional definition, but still need to change. The Greek work for repentance is metanoia, and when I put it into my search engine of choice, I happened across the Metanoia Institute, which describes itself as “one of the United Kingdom’s leading providers of specialist higher education in the disciplines of psychotherapy, counselling psychology, counselling and, more recently, coaching and organisational development." It got me thinking about the many ways in which we might change, and the many tools at our disposal as we seek to do so.

I think I gave away when I preached on Jacob wrestling with God that I was limping a little. This was because I had a significant flare up of anxiety manifesting as OCD at the end of last year. I want to be absolutely clear here that mental illness is not sin, and it is not a sign of spiritual failure, but it was something I needed to change, because it was not allowing me to live the abundant life God wants and Christ promised for me. And so I went to the doctor, and I was prescribed anti-anxiety medication and a course of CBT. Supported by prayer, they have helped immensely, and I am very glad that God has gifted people us with people skilled to make medicine and offer therapy. If it is not helpful for you to think about repentance in this way, then leave what I have said here, but I have found that it has helped me to take a more holistic approach, to understand the work I am doing on my mental health as a way of living into that abundant life.

We haven’t yet come to Jesus’ baptism. We have reflected on this together in recent years, as we have had the joy of baptising several members of the congregation, and you will be able to look up those reflections on the blog, so I wanted to focus more on John today, but we will touch on it before we finish. It seems both appropriate and ironic that we should come to this at end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, when baptism has been the source of so much disunity. Those traditions which first rejected infant baptism in favour of believers’ baptism were treated with such deep suspicion that they were persecuted. In its earliest days, the Baptist church in this country met in secret, building their churches to look like ordinary homes or farm buildings, and keeping fast horses tied up outside during services, in case the minister should need a quick getaway.

And yet Jesus’ baptism is often understood as an act of solidarity with us, and so surely it should also be an act of solidarity with one another, no matter what form it takes. I was christened as a baby, and baptised by immersion as a believer, and both were hugely significant. The first brought my family into the community of faith in which we grew, and the second was in some senses the beginning of my journey into ministry, and so while believer’s baptism is one of the reasons I have found my ecclesial home in the Baptist church, and I would encourage anyone who hasn’t to seriously consider it, I would not change or do away with my christening. Faith takes each of us on different journeys, and we answer the questions it poses differently, but if it is ultimately leading us to God as revealed in Christ and experienced through the Holy Spirit, then we are in solidarity with one another in all the ways that matter most.

There is one moment from Jesus’ baptism that I want to focus on in particular, and that is the voice from heaven. In the reading we heard earlier, it said: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” The Common English Bible translates it like this: “This is my Son whom I dearly love; I find happiness in him". And the New Living Translation has this: “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” What this says to me is that God loves him and he likes him. Perhaps the distinction does not seem significant, but as a child it was important to me to know not only that my parents loved me, but that they liked me too. Being loved felt like the default, but being like felt more personal. I needed to know they didn’t just love me because I was their daughter, but they also liked me because of some goodness in me. Hearing these words from God feels then like the perfect blessing, because I believe those words are for us too. God always loves us, and while God may not always like every part of us, God sees the goodness that is within us and likes us too. You are God’s dearly loved child, and you bring God great joy.