A Homily for the Baptism of the Lord
Readings: Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7  Acts 10:34-38  Matthew 3:13-17

What was he thinking? Why did Jesus request baptism from John? 

This could be a reckless question. Consider how frequently we fail, even in daily life, to know the minds of others. And they are in front of us, not separated by two millennia of history! But our Lord explains himself. When the Baptist protests, Christ speaks his mind. He tells us his intention.

Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
to fulfill all righteousness (Mt 3:13).

But what does this response mean? After 30 years, why does Jesus abandon the world in which he has lived so silently? Beyond his birth, we have scarcely a scene before Jesus appears at the Jordan River to enter, suddenly and irrevocably, a new world, one destined to last only three years. 

Now his life becomes public fodder, though admittedly, we will know nothing of the day-to-day routines and human preferences of Jesus. We only know what Scripture deems essential to proclaim Jesus as the promised Christ. 

Why does Jesus cross this frontier?

This much is clear. Jesus appears on the banks of the Jordan as a faithful Son of Israel. And that says much. Indeed, it says everything that needs to be told. So many today like to enter public morality debates with the line, “Jesus never said anything about…” This is a senseless strategy. Jesus never disavows his Israelite heritage, and when he radically reinterprets it, he tells us so. 

Still, if we take seriously St. Paul’s teaching that Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,/ coming in human likeness;/ and found human in appearance” (Phil 2:7), we see at the Jordan River a young man who had to be asking himself who he was. Why? Because to be human is to gradually grow in consciousness, and Jesus—fully divine and fully human—possessed all the characteristics each of us do in our humanity. Jesus must have pondered what God—the one whom he called Father—was doing in his life and in the life of his beloved people. What did this “Father” want of him? 

And here we must only admire the Holy Spirit’s masterpiece. We cannot dissect it. Jesus clearly felt some urgency, one tied to his very being, to act on behalf of his people. 

Remember, the Gospels are manuals of discipleship. They teach us how to imitate our Lord. So, what are we to learn from this leave-taking, from the taking up of a public ministry? 

At least this: Jesus understood that he had to go where he was being called so that he might comprehend what God wanted, what God had already begun. The demands of his faith are also ours. We want God to explain and then—we say—we will do, but God insists upon the converse: Do, and you will understand.

The Father asks the Son to abandon the silence in which he has lived. And whatever its poverty, that life was rich in love. 

And as in our lives, however fearful it may be, the path forward is not occluded. Jesus knows what his cousin John is doing. He is preaching a call to repentance in preparation for the Messiah. If the Spirit is telling Jesus that it is time to act, where else should he go?

So Jesus comes to John “at the Jordan to be baptized by him” (Mt 3:13). 

We are told that John, the greatest of Israel’s prophets, senses that something is wrong. The ocean would pour itself into the pail. 

I need to be baptized by you,
and yet you are coming to me? (Mt 3:14).
And then we hear that enigmatic response of Jesus.
Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us 
to fulfill all righteousness (Mt 3:15).

Again, what does this mean? Whatever else it signifies, it is surely a statement of absolute solidarity with his people. With his own prophetic acumen, Jesus knows that the God of Israel is summoning, gathering his people, calling them to ready themselves for a new and decisive action of God on their part. 

Jesus is a faithful Son of Israel. If his people are summoned, then so is he. What will become a basic pattern of our spiritual lives first plays itself out in his: Do what God asks, act upon what you know, and the rest will be made clear. 

Here at the Jordan, as in our lives, fidelity to what is known and obedience to embrace the unknown reveals God’s will, God’s presence, God’s action on behalf of his people.

After Jesus was baptized,
he came up from the water and behold,
the heavens were opened for him,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
and coming upon him.
And a voice came from the heavens, saying,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 16:17). 

In one sense, we have our identities before we know them. They are God’s dreams for us before we were conceived. In another sense, they do not become our own until we embrace them. To be human is to grow in consciousness. Jesus was born the Christ, but he had to grow in his grasp of who he was. As Scripture says, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature” (Lk 2:52).

And that raises a question we can never close, except by way of what is fitting. 

Was this the moment that Jesus in his humanity definitively learned that he was the Christ? That he was the promised Messiah of Israel and, more than that, the very Son of God, God’s own presence amid his people?

The Gospels support this reading, that all was revealed when Jesus, as we are called to do, acknowledged what he knew and embraced what he could never have known, never have been, without this act of obedience. 

Can we say that in a way, at the Jordan, Jesus became the Christ?

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.