Isaiah 42:1-9;
Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew
3:13-17.
God’s Servant is empowered by the Spirit
for a mission to the nations.
The first Sunday
after Epiphany is traditionally celebrated as the Baptism of the Lord. In
all the Gospels, the baptism of Jesus is the time when the Holy Spirit comes
upon the Anointed One with power. This
event inaugurates Jesus’ mission of preaching, healing, and combating the destructive powers that afflict the people.
Isaiah 42:1-9.
The prophetic
reading is one of the most important passages of the Hebrew scriptures for the
development of Christianity. It is the
first of four passages in Isaiah 42
through 53 that present the “Servant of the Lord” as the key figure in
God’s plan for bringing justice to all peoples.
(The other passages are 49:1-6 [next Sunday’s prophetic reading];
50:4-11; and 52:13-53:12, the four often called the Servant Songs.)
In this
first passage, God speaks to the heavenly powers and through them to the kings
of the earth. God introduces the servant.
Here is my
servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my
spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the
nations. (Verse 1, NRSV.)
The larger
context of the passage, as well as the Greek translation, make clear that the servant
is Israel. The servant is Israel
in a complicated way, however. The servant
is an individual, and when the servant passages are complete it is clear that
the individual is a royal figure, a king.
For some ceremonial
and symbolic purposes, the king embodied Israel
and its destiny before God and the nations.
For example, in Psalm 2 the king is declared to be Yahweh’s son, an
identity occasionally assigned also to Israel
(Hosea 11:1; Jeremiah 31:9). Also, the
“one like a son of man” is installed as a royal figure embodying the destiny of
the people in Daniel 7:13-14, 22 and 27. Such a representative figure lies behind
God’s presentation of the servant.
There is
some strange language used to describe the servant’s character.
He will not
cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised
reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not
quench;
he will
faithfully bring forth justice. (Verses
2-3.)
The probable
meaning is that as one who brings justice, this powerful figure will be very
gentle. He will not resort to violent
behavior in the streets. Rather, he will
be very sensitive to the most delicate and damaged needy ones who depend on him
for support and the protection of their rights.
The
presentation of the servant concludes with a firm declaration that the servant
will persist in his mission “until he has established justice in the earth”
(verse 4). For guidance toward such an
outcome, “the coastlands” – all that later became the Greek and Roman worlds – “wait
for his teaching [torah].” (See
the same idea in Isaiah 2:3.).
Our
passage has a second part. A
prophetic voice declares that God the Creator speaks, and what God says is
addressed to the servant.
I am the
Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given
you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations. (Verse 6.)
The mission
of the servant in Isaiah is to carry Israel’s
experience of God’s salvation to all the nations. For early Christians this mission was carried
forward through the Servant Jesus, a mission gradually expanding from an
abandoned Jerusalem to the many
nations (see Matthew 28:18-20).
Psalm 29.
This Psalm is
always used on the Sunday of the Baptism of the Lord (as well as on Trinity
Sunday in year B). On other occasions we
will comment on this psalm as a hymn to the Storm God manifested as an awesome
electrical storm sweeping eastward from the Mediterranean Sea to the desert
beyond Damascus (Year B, 1st Sunday after Epiphany), and also as an
Ugaritic-Canaanite contribution to the glory of Yahweh, the God of Zion (Year
C, 1st Sunday after Epiphany).
This psalm
is appropriate for Jesus’ baptism because of its emphasis on the Voice of
the Lord.
“The voice
of the Lord” (qol Yahweh) occurs seven times in verses 3 through
9. In so far as this phrase has one
meaning, it means the sound of thunder, and the psalm portrays it as wondrous,
violent, and astonishing in its power over many grandiose and lofty things in
the world.
However, the
wild sweep of roaring and flashing across the Syrian heavens culminates in a
reverent and liturgical response from the assembled people in the temple – “and
in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’” (verse 9, NRSV). The worshiping community thus speaks its awed Amen!
as the conclusion of the earthly sweep of God’s Voice.
In the
baptism narratives, of course, there is a Voice of God – one that speaks as
Jesus emerges from the waters of the river.
There, however, the Voice accompanies a peaceful dove and solemnly
declares that the Son of God has come into the world.
The psalm
affirms for Christian believers that the mighty sweep of the heavenly powers
has also spoken quietly through the dove that brings the Spirit to Jesus.
Acts 10:34-43.
In place of
an Epistle reading, the lection for the Baptism of the Lord is from the book of
Acts. The season of Epiphany represents
the movement of God’s power into the human world – into the world of Jesus’
people in the Gospels, into the world of the nations in the book of Acts.
The reading
is the sermon that Peter began to
preach when God had shown him that the people of the nations – the non-Judeans
– were to be accepted into the Spirit-filled life of the Jesus followers. The household of the Roman centurion,
Cornelius, listens to Peter summarize the story of Jesus – from baptism by John
through resurrection (verses 36-41).
The
culmination of the sermon – before the Holy spirit broke in and disrupted the
service – was the declaration, “[Jesus] commanded us to preach to the people
and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and
the dead. All the prophets testify about
him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his
name” (verses 42-43, NRSV).
Peter
proclaims a historic movement that had its beginning in the baptism offered by
John the Baptist.
Matthew 3:13-17.
The Gospel
reading is the Jesus baptism as
given in the Gospel According to Matthew, the Gospel for year A of the
Lectionary. All four Gospels begin
Jesus’ mission in the world with the baptism by John, though each treats it a
little differently.
Historically,
Jesus became a follower of the Baptist, and therefore shared the view that the
eschatological judgment was at hand. In
Matthew their messages of the coming kingdom are identical (3:2 and 4:17 ).
Jesus, however, came to realize that he was himself a channel of power
from that coming realm on behalf of the afflicted people among John’s
audiences. John does not seem to have
been a healer or one who ministered directly to the injured and broken among
the sinners. It was just such healing of
needy ones to which Jesus pointed when John later asked who Jesus really was
(Matthew 11:2-6). The healing had become
the difference between Jesus and John. (See
below the Special Note on John the Baptist and Jesus.)
Theologically,
the early followers of Jesus recognized some important link between Jesus and
John the Baptist, but were compelled by their later insights about Jesus to
interpret John as only “preparatory” in some way. This apparently remained an important issue
for some time, and evolved in the directions we see taken by the four different
Gospels. David hill comments, “The place
of John the Baptist in relation to Jesus must have been one of the most
discussed topics in the church of the 1st century.” (The Gospel of Matthew, “New Century
Bible,” Attic Press, 1977, p. 95.)
The
distinctive feature of the Matthew version of the baptism is the discussion
of who is worthy to be baptized by whom.
Here, the Jesus tradition assumes that John knows who Jesus really is,
that he is the “one more powerful” whose coming John is proclaiming as the
judgment of God at hand. Therefore, John
objects to his baptizing Jesus and says, “I need to be baptized by you …”
(verse 14, NRSV). Jesus’ answer is: we should do this now, “for it is proper for
us in this way to fulfill all righteousness” (verse 15, NRSV).
There is a
divine sequence to these things, according to which John is the last of the
prophets (11:10 -14), and in that
divine sequence Jesus begins as subordinate to John. The later issue, about whether a sinless
Messiah should submit to a baptism for the repentance of sins, is not yet an important
question in the stage of the tradition preserved in Matthew.
The baptism
itself is quickly told, and when Jesus emerges from the water the Spirit of God
descends upon him in the shape of a dove.
The Voice of the Lord then speaks from heaven, introducing the Servant,
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (verse 17).
After the
proper order has been followed – all righteousness fulfilled – the Savior,
Yeshua, receives the divine power that will heal and restore the many.
Special Note on John the Baptist
and Jesus.
This
note is about an item concerning the historical Jesus, not just Jesus as
presented in one or more of the Gospels.
That is unusual for me. I mostly treat
Jesus as an unknown entity, because we can only see him through several layers
of lenses which have shaped him in their own imaginations before telling us
what they remembered.
First
a few words about the historical John the Baptist.
Two facts in
the life of Jesus command almost universal assent. They bracket the three years for which Jesus
is most remembered, his life’s work, his mission. One is Jesus’ baptism by John. The other is his death by crucifixion. Because they rank so high on the ‘almost
impossible to doubt or deny’ scale of historical ‘facts,’ they are obvious
starting points for an attempt to clarify the what and why of Jesus’
mission. (J.D.G. Dunn, Jesus
Remembered, Eerdmans, 2003, p. 339.)
For Herod
[Antipas] had put [John the Baptist] to death, even though he was a good man
and had encouraged the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practice justice
towards one another and piety towards God, and so doing to join in baptism….
When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were roused to fever
pitch by his words, Herod became alarmed.
He feared that John’s ability to sway people might lead to some form of
sedition, for it looked as if they would act on John’s advice in everything that
they did. Herod therefore decided that
it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led
to an uprising … And so John, because of Herod’s suspicions, was brought in
chains to Machaerus…and there put to death.
(Josephus, Antiquities 18.115-119, as quoted in Graham Stanton, The
Gospels and Jesus, 2d ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, p. 184.)
So it
is historically clear that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist – something
he would only have submitted to if he shared John’s basic belief that God’s
power was about to break forth in judgment and radical rearrangement of the
human realm. However, we cannot accept
the Gospels’ view that John recognized Jesus as the “one mightier than himself”
in those early days of Jesus’ baptism.
This is clear from the fact that John later, while he was in prison,
sends other disciples to ask a now-independent Jesus, “Are you the one who is
to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Matthew 11:3 = Luke
7:19 ). John, while he was living, did not know Jesus
as having any special status in the divine plan. (And perhaps his disciples, those who did not
join the Jesus movement in the early years, did not know much of Jesus’ special
status even many years later; see Acts 18:24-25,
and 19:1-7.)
Jesus
the healer. Several years ago,
studying the miracle stories in Matthew’s Gospel, I was struck by an
implication of the difference between Jesus and John the Baptist. Historically speaking – no way around it –
Jesus was a healer, big time! That sets
him off from his mentor, John the Baptist, of whom no one, Gospels or Josephus,
suggests he had any healing powers.
The implication of this, projected back into some real Jesus’ early life, is that discovering this power to heal was the beginning of Jesus’ own route beyond where the Baptist had brought him.
The implication of this, projected back into some real Jesus’ early life, is that discovering this power to heal was the beginning of Jesus’ own route beyond where the Baptist had brought him.
One
may suppose that as the weeks and months of John’s ministry went on, his
disciples (like other assistants at great revivals) worked with the people who
came as candidates for the great moment of the dunking. Worked with people who came with disabilities
and psycho-somatic disorders (possessed ones).
In an excited atmosphere, permeated with expectations of divine relief
near at hand (such as those predicted in Isaiah 35), a compassionate and
spiritually acute believer (Jesus) might come to realize that healing could
come through him – that the power of God’s reign was not only ahead, but for
some suffering few could happen NOW.
That a pronouncement or a laying on of hands could bring God’s own power
into the present moment.
And,
if so, a new page of God’s good news would be opened for those seized by the
spirit of that place, time – and that special person. Jesus clearly became a widely-known
healer. He had to have started at some
time – and he probably did not get it directly from John the Baptist. (In a later view, of course, it came with the
Holy Spirit that descended on him at the baptism.)
I have
now learned that other Gospel readers, reflecting on the historical Jesus, have
come to the same conclusion. (The
reflections on Matthew 3:13-17 given above
were originally written in 2004.)
How are
these differences [between Jesus and John the Baptist] to be accounted
for? Paul Hollenbach (1982) discerns a
shift in Jesus’ ministry from baptizer to healer, and accounts for the change
by referring to Jesus’ experience of the kingdom
of God in his power to heal and
exorcize. Robert Webb (1994, pp. 225-6)
accepts this explanation and adds a further observation: as a prophet, Jesus experienced God’s call at
the time of his baptism by John, and only gradually understood the full
significance of that call. “Jesus’ shift
from baptizer to healer and exorcist implies a shift to an increased experience
and intimacy with the divine realm.”
(Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, 2d ed., p. 188.)
[The
cited works are: Paul Hollenbach, “The
Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the
Baptizer to Jesus the Healer,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt,
II.25.1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), pp.
196-219.
Robert
Webb, “John the Baptist and his Relationship to Jesus,” in B. Chilton and C.A.
Evans (eds.), Studying the Historical Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 179-230.]
In the
context of the Baptist’s highly public ministry, Jesus shared the apocalyptic
framework of John’s work, but gradually realized that the power of God’s reign
was already available for the suffering ones, through his own compassionate
voice and touch. Long after both men
were dead, and probably toward the second generation of Jesus followers,
Christians had developed a view of John’s subordination to Jesus the Messiah,
and that is made clear – though with somewhat inconsistent variations in detail
– at the beginnings of all the mainline Gospels.
Graham
Stanton concludes his discussion of John the Baptist with an observation about
the greatest difference between Jesus
and John. Unlike Jesus, John was not
acclaimed by his disciples as raised from the dead (though Herod heard rumors
of such a thing, Matthew 14:1-2). Thus John gradually became only a page in
history while Jesus became the “one more powerful than” he – and much more! Stanton,
p. 189.
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