Its the stuff of Hollywood: in torn clothes a bedraggled huddle of escaped slaves come to the mighty river Jordan. It parts before them and they enter the Promised Land. This is the founding story of the Israelite people - slaves in Egypt rescued from slavery by God’s mighty hand, crossing both Red Sea and Jordan to enter the promised land.
Now if you did not hear that story when Irene read the Gospel this morning, then perhaps you were not listening hard enough. No - I’ll be fairer to you - perhaps you did not know what to listen for. At first sight our Gospel reading doesn’t contain anything about the Exodus or slaves entering the promised land. “Surely that stuff is to do with Judaism - our Gospel reading was about John the Baptist, the baptism of Jesus, Christian baptism and indeed Christianity?”
Yet I say unto you - this story is about the Exodus and slaves entering the promised land, and we cannot understand John the Baptist and what happens to Jesus in baptism and what happens to us in baptism without understanding that story of how God rescued slaves from Egypt.
The baptism of Jesus is one of those rare events that occurs in all four Gospels and we learn different things about it from each of the Gospels. For example we learn from John’s Gospel (3:22) that John was gathering people for baptism on the far side of the river Jordan. ie the Pagan side. The side that was not in the Promised land. You see John the Baptist did not invent Baptism. In the first Century AD many people from Pagan backgrounds actually would become Jews. If they were men they would be circumcised. But whether male or female they would also have to undergo something else - Baptism. Baptism had many layers of meaning: remember the pagan leper Naaman who Elijah tells to wash 7 times in the Jordan? When he does so the uncleanness of his leprosy is washed away. So when the convert is washed in baptism, the uncleanness of his gentile state is washed away and he becomes part of God’s covenant people. And entirely this baptism is performed at the Jordan, so that the convert can enter the river on the foreign side of the river, and like the rest of the Israelite people centuries before, pass through the waters of the Jordan to enter the Promised Land. Now he or she too is an Israelite, a member of the chosen people.
So John the Baptist does not invent Baptism. He reinvents it. He calls Jews to be baptised. Now hang on - that doesn’t make any sense - he calls God’s Chosen people to go through the process of becoming …. God’s chosen people. But that is the whole point. He calls people to a fresh beginning to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. Has he says in Matthew’s Gospel “Do not presume to say to yourselves “we have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I say to you God is able from these stones to raise up children of Israel.” He calls the people who had seen themselves as God’s chosen people to recognise that like the leper Namaan they too need to be washed clean of their sin. They have to enter a new relationship with God by symbolically re-entering the Promised land.
Jesus’s ministry begins with baptism - and it ends with a Passover meal. The meal that commemorates the Exodus. You know the story. God sends Moses to tell Pharoah “let my people go”. Pharoah says yes then changes his mind. So God sends a plague then sends Moses back to ask again. So it goes on ten times until the death of the first born. Finally the Children of Israel are allowed to go - but they have to leave so fast that they have to grab their bread that has not even had time to rise. So each Passover the Children of Israel remember this by taking bread that has not risen - unleavened bread. And one Passover an unusual rabbi called Jesus takes this unleavened bread and changed this meal so that instead of celebrating God rescuing his children from slavery in Egypt the celebrate God rescuing his children from slavery to sin. And instead of eating the Passover lamb sacrificed in the Temple, through the bread they eat Jesus who will be sacrificed the next day on the cross.
At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry - Baptism, and the story of Exodus redefined. At the end of Jesus’s ministry - the Mass and the story of the Exodus redefined.
During the 1930s, the Nazis tried to remove all traces of Judaism from Christianity. Old Testament readings were banned in churches and all sorts of other references to Christianity’s Jewish heritage were minimised or deleted. They weren’t very successful - in fact their main achievement was to force people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth to leave to the state church and form the Confessing Church, on the principle that the church should never “get with the Project” and do what secular society demands, but rather should do what God requires.
The Nazis were not the first people to try to edit away Christianity’s Old Testament roots. Over the centuries several people have tried to do so. The first recorder example was a priest called Marcion living about 120 years after the resurrection of Jesus. Marcion took the Gospel of Luke and rewrote it to remove all references to Christianity’s Jewish roots, supplementing it with 10 letters of St Paul, again edited to remove any positive references to a Jewish heritage. Yet even Marcion’s best efforts could not succeed because take your scissors and cut away every reference to Old Testament in the Gospels, and you end with mainly hole, and no Gospel. Even Jesus’s most famous commandments “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind” and “love your neighbour as yourself” are quotations from Deuteronomy (6:5) and Leviticus (19:18). Communion and the Mass can only be understood in their Old Testament context.
Indeed Jesus himself can only be understood in Old Testament context. The Angel tells Mary what to call her baby. Because the Gospels were written first in Greek, and our Old Testament has been translated directly from the Hebrew - we miss the fact that name Mary is told to give her baby is in hebrew “Yeshua” - like Yeshua son of Nun (known to us as Joshua) who was the man who after Moses died led the children of Israel across the river Jordan into the promised land.
In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus’s baptism is followed immediately by the temptation in the wilderness in which Jesus wrestles with the Devil about the meaning of Old Testament Scriptures. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s baptism is followed immediately by a genealogy linking him back to David, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham and Noah. In both the message is clear - Jesus is not a rejection of the Old Testament Message, but a reimagining of it - a new building on foundations stretching down from the book of Malach at the top to the book of Genesis at the bottom.
John the Baptist (according to Matthew) is shocked that Jesus comes for baptism. “I need to be baptised by you and do you come to me?”( Matthew 3:14) Surely the Messiah doesn’t need baptising? Surely we are baptised to prepare ourselves for relationship with the Messiah? But no - much to John’s shock, Jesus comes to baptism, not because he needs forgiveness of sins, but so he can be the new Joshua - leading us through the Jordan into the promised land of relationship with God.
And as Jesus comes out of the water - God gives us another link with the foundations laid in the first Testament. As Jesus comes out of the water, the Holy Spirit descends on him like Dove. Where else do we encounter a Dove in the bible? In the story of Noah. And so Jesus is the new Noah safeguarding the human race - bringing us through the waters of death to the dry land of relationship with God.
So this morning as we celebrate Jesus’s baptism, let us picture that bedraggled band of escaped slaves in torn clothes, hungry and starving as cross through the Jordan into the promised land. And let us think afresh what it means to cross through Baptism from the slavery of sin to the promised land of relationship with God the Father. Amen.
