That annoying little question is, “Why did Jesus get baptized?” In my evangelical tradition, I’ve heard a number of answers thrown out—“He was using it as a sign of radical, full-hearted commitment to God the Father,” or “He was using it as a way to mark the beginning of his ministry,” or “He wanted to be a model of baptism for the generations of Christians to come.” There is, likely, some truth to all of these propositions, but it still doesn’t really break through the dissonance of this act, which John the Baptist sees as glaringly obvious: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matt. 3:14) The inherent problem in this situation is that John was clearly preaching and practicing a baptism of repentance—that is, the act of baptism signified a turning away from one’s sins and toward God, and the symbolism of the water was to denote the way in which God would honor such repentance by washing us clean of our sins. Jesus, according to orthodox Christian theology, had no sins from which to repent, so it was exceedingly odd that he would choose John’s baptism as the marker for the beginning of his ministry. And it doesn’t just seem odd to us; it clearly seemed odd to John the Baptist as well. Jesus’ answer, which appears rather vague, doesn’t offer much explanatory power at first glance: “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” What could this mean? Was Jesus saying that he was in need or righteousness, or that the act of his baptism would somehow bring righteousness to something else?
One thing that’s worth pointing out
at the very beginning is that Matthew (who gives us our most extensive account
of Jesus’ baptism, being the only Gospel that mentions this dialogue between
Jesus and John) often chooses to depict the acts of Jesus as enacted
fulfillments of Old Testament stories, in order to show that the whole plan of
God, from the beginning of the world until that moment, was being summed up
entirely in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus, for instance, Matthew shows Jesus
fleeing to Egypt and then returning, just as the ancient Israelites did between
Jacob’s time and Moses’; and he portrays Jesus as “the new lawgiver,”
surpassing Moses in his Sermon on the Mount. So when Matthew records Jesus
saying “it is proper for us to fulfill…”, it’s worth noting that Matthew only
ever uses the word “fulfill” when he is specifically noting an aspect of the
Old Testament that is being fulfilled in Christ. (“Fulfill” is a word he uses a
fifteen times—a fairly high count for a single verb in a single book of the
Bible; the only other time English translations of Matthew might use “fulfill”
in reference to something other than the OT is Matt. 5:33, but in that case
it’s an entirely different Greek verb that is used). So, since Matthew appears
to be viewing the baptism as a fulfillment of something from the Old Testament,
the next question is, What? The answer to this is probably twofold. One aspect
of fulfillment can be seen merely in the structure of Matthew’s narrative. The
immediately previous story about Jesus (Matt. 3:19-23) showed him going down
and sojourning in Egypt, and the immediately following story (Matt. 4:1-11)
shows Jesus spending forty days in the desert. So, what story in the Old
Testament fits between the sojourn in Egypt and the wanderings in the desert?
The answer is: the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea. It is likely that
when Matthew presents the story of Jesus’ baptism, he sees it (at least in
part) as a recapitulation and fulfillment of Israel’s experience of God’s
salvation in the waters of the Red Sea.
But that’s not all. I’m actually
going to suggest that that story, though probably in Matthew’s mind, isn’t the
primary one being referred to here. To press on, we need to understand the
meaning of Jesus’ quote: “it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all
righteousness.” We’ve seen that “fulfill” likely signifies a nod to an Old
Testament reference, but what is meant by “all righteousness”? We tend to think
of “righteousness” in terms of individual moral purity, and thus Jesus’ quote
becomes even stranger, because then his reference to “righteousness” would have
to be referring to his own condition; but we know that Jesus was not in need of
any further righteousness than he already had. The problem is that we’re not
quite reading that word, “righteousness,” correctly. In Greek, as in Hebrew, it
has a broader and deeper scope than its English parallel. The Greek term is the
same as the one used for “justice,” and includes the idea not just of
individual moral righteousness, but of all-encompassing “right-ness” in
oneself, or in a whole society, or in the totality of creation. When used in
Scripture, “righteousness” may not have in view just the individual believer’s
moral status, but rather the work of God in “making things right” in a whole
society or in the whole world. The clue in the Matt. 3:15 text is probably that
Jesus says “all righteousness.” That
is to say, Jesus might just be referring to “making things right” not just in
himself or in that one spot, but everywhere and for all things. “All
righteousness” might be a reference to God’s plan to restore everything in the
created order, to make right what had gone wrong in creation. If that’s the
case, then the Old Testament text which is fulfilled in Jesus’ baptism would
have to be the very act of creation itself, from Genesis 1.
Let’s see if this holds up. We can
note a number of similarities right off the bat. First, it should be clear that
both the creation and baptism accounts are theophanies of the whole Trinity
working in concert. Second, the way the Father and the Holy Spirit are shown
working is similar in both cases. In Genesis, God the Father is not portrayed
spatially (that is, in reference to a place), but the story seems to assume
that when he is speaking creation into existence, he is in that
place-beyond-all-places where he resides, and which the New Testament usually
refers to by the non-spatial sense of the term “heaven.” Likewise, God the
Father is portrayed as speaking from heaven at Jesus’ baptism. The earth below
is represented in both accounts by the symbol of water (in Gen. 1:2, “the
deep,” or “the waters,” and in Matt. 3:16, the water of the Jordan River). In
both accounts, we have the presence of the Holy Spirit, described in some
manner of flying-motion above the waters (in Genesis, the Spirit of God hovers
over the waters; in Matthew, the Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a
dove when he comes up from the water).
But the parallels don’t just stop
there, or else one might be tempted to call it a coincidence. No, in the
Matthew account God is quoted as speaking forth the two parts of the divine
post-creation assessment which are repeatedly portrayed in Genesis 1:
identification and affirmation. In most cases, after God had created some
element of the physical world, he would identify it (i.e., “God called the
light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night’) and then there would be an
affirmation (“and God saw that it was good”). Similarly, these are the two
things that God the Father does at Jesus’ baptism: first he identifies (“This
is my beloved son”), and then he affirms (“with him I am well pleased”).
The other clue that Matthew has the
moment of creation in mind when he describes Jesus’ baptism is that he has
Jesus instruct John to baptize him by using a fairly gentle form of command:
“Let it be so.” The Greek here is an imperative form of a word that can mean
many things, but here probably means “permit.” Jesus says to John, “Permit it,”
a word-choice that invites consent and participation. Conceivably, Jesus could
have used a stronger word, since John clearly recognizes Jesus’ greater authority;
he could have simply said to John, “Do it now.” The fact that he uses a word
that invites John’s consent and participation calls to mind the way that God
speaks in the act of creation: instead of shouting out into the nothingness
like a divine dictator, “Be!”, he chooses a way of commanding creation that
carries more of a gentle quality, an invitation for creation itself to respond
to him in its moment of becoming: “Let there be…”
With all these pieces lined up,
then, it appears that Matthew might indeed have had the creation account in
mind when he showed us Jesus’ baptism (in addition to the parallel of Israel
crossing the Red Sea). If so, then the baptism of Jesus is a re-enactment of
the moment of creation. It is the divine announcement of the New Creation,
begun in Christ. The new creation, God’s great work of setting all things right
through Christ, begins with the re-creation of a new humanity in Christ, and
through his death and resurrection we too can join this new humanity, this new
creation of God, which ultimately will encompass and renew the entire created
order when Christ comes again. Seen in this light, Christ’s baptism may not be the
head-scratching puzzle that John the Baptist took it to be; it might very well
be the public proclamation that God was beginning his great work of calling
into being the new creation in the person of Jesus Christ.