What Did The Baptism Of Jesus Mean And Do?

Feast of the Baptism of Jesus 2026

In this account from St. Matthew’s Gospel, John the Baptist is getting into what looks like an argument with his cousin, Jesus. “Why are you coming to me for baptism? I should be asking you to baptize me!”

St. Luke records that when John’s mother and the Blessed Virgin Mary met during their pregnancies, John leaped in his mother’s womb when Mary and Jesus came close. It’s like he was aware of being in the presence of the Divine Child, who was only days or weeks old in Mary’s body. With that background, we can easily believe that John sensed that Jesus, his cousin, was uniquely holy, and that he did not have any need to repent sin and show that repentance through baptism.

Jesus had another reason for desiring the rite. He told John, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” St. Peter Chrysologus wrote “Today Christ enters the Jordan to wash away the sins of the world. John himself testifies that this is why He has come.” Christ’s baptism is the first act in His divine ministry that will climax in His Passover, when the Passover supper will lead to His passion, death, Resurrection and Ascension into heaven. When we profess our faith and submit to our own sacramental baptism, we obtain physical and spiritual contact with Christ’s Paschal mystery. We go into the waters to die to sin and rise as members of His Body, prepared to make progress toward our own Resurrection on the last day. This is the fulfillment of righteousness in all who follow Christ.

There’s a lot to that progress. Remember that God became man so that man could become God. Not by nature—only Jesus is the begotten Son of God—but by adoption. We are, we hope, becoming day by day more an image of Jesus. But at His Baptism, what happened to Jesus? Was it all a demonstration, a holy show?

The theologians of the Church spent about five centuries working out who Jesus was, and that was a drama like none other. Was Jesus real, or just a hallucination, as the Gnostics claimed? He was certainly real, or the Gospels were not the Word of God. He was human, but in what sense was He divine? Arius and his followers said He was a human person raised, probably at His baptism, to be “kind of” godlike. But if Jesus was like that, a kind of superman without full divinity, how could His Passion and death serve as satisfaction for our sins? That took over a century to work through. The Council of Nicaea gave us the words: Jesus is God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, consubstantial with the Father. We profess that every Sunday. It was a close-run thing, too, for there was a time when most of the Church was Arian, not Catholic.

But what did happen at Christ’s Baptism? The patriarch of Constantinople, a really big wheel in the Church, taught that Mary gave birth at Christmas to the human person of Christ, and then sometime, probably at His Baptism, the Son of God, a divine person, came down and merged with the human person, Jesus. So Mary would be mother of Jesus, but not mother of God, Theotokos. The Church came together at the Council of Ephesus and confirmed that Jesus was and is one divine person, but with both divine and human natures. And in mid-century, the Church convened the Council of Chalcedon, which accepted all the prior councils and condemned a third heresy, that the human nature of Jesus was sort of overwhelmed by the Son’s divine nature. They taught clearly that Jesus was one divine person, and the two natures, divine and human, remained distinct, unmingled.

What then happened at Christ’s baptism, and why should we care? What meaning does it have for our own maturation into images of Christ?

The Scriptures tell us that up until the Baptism, Jesus appeared to be a normal young man of Galilee, rather better schooled in Torah than most, but a devoted son to Mary and a journeyman carpenter. But after the Baptism, He went out for forty days of fasting and prayer into the desert, struggled with Satan, and returned to the Jordan, where He gathered some disciples and went to Galilee. John had pointed Him out to his followers as someone special, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Jesus and His few disciples followed His mother to a wedding celebration in Cana, and when the couple ran out of wine shortly into the feast, He somehow converted a large amount of water into what tasted like incredibly good wine. This guy was working miracles like the Messiah was supposed to do.