I guess we could all use
some good news right now.
And that’s what Mark says
he’s writing.
He begins his whole gospel
– which means “good news” – by saying:
“The beginning of the
gospel – the good news - about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
Mark says: “Have I got
good news for you!”
In fact, it’s the best
news in the world ever.
It’s not of course good
news about vaccine roll out or a falling infection rate.
But it’s not ultimately irrelevant
to all that in a way.
Mark is writing about
something even more important than COVID-19 – something of universal and
eternal significance.
Here is a message of good
news for all people everywhere, including here and now, whatever our
circumstances.
It’s good news about Jesus
Christ the Son of God.
And that’s exactly whom we
see Jesus to be revealed to be at his baptism:
Jesus The Christ the Son
of God.
Jesus may not save us from
COVID, but he can transform our fear of death.
He can give us a life
which no virus can destroy.
Jesus offers hope not just
for a better 2021, eventually, if we’re lucky and all goes well, but for life
and for eternity.
He promises not freedom
from lockdown but freedom from sin.
Not only an end to social
distancing, but an end to the distance between human beings and God.
Jesus can bring us not
only to a restored way of life but to the full and complete life for which we
were made, the life of heaven and the new creation.
Mark says his gospel is
all about Jesus.
I wonder if you’ve ever
really thought about what the Bible is all about.
The Bible is after all a
long and complicated book – even a strange book.
It contains poems and
prophecies and history and letters and much else besides.
There’s some stuff that we
might say is a bit like philosophy.
There’s lots about how to
live: is it law or guidance?
But lot of it is about
what to do if an ox kills someone, or how to build a temple, and what foods to
eat.
There’s all sorts of
strange visions about trees and stars and rivers and so we could go on.
One of my old University
professors has written a big history of the Bible published by Penguin and
serialised recently on Radio 4 which discusses the different ways in which Jews
and Christians have read the Bible.
Maybe you heard some of
it.
Those Jewish and Christian
readings of the Bible can be very different.
And not all Christians can
agree what the Bible means.
And for John Barton, who
wrote this book, that’s not necessarily a problem.
It reflects the nature of
the Bible itself as a collection of very human documents written by many
different authors over a long period of time.
Sometimes there are
tensions and even, according to Barton, contradictions between those writers.
He thinks we would be hard
pushed to agree that the Bible has a single coherent message.
But to my mind, that is to
underestimate the wonderful literary artistry of the Bible.
Granted that Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John all had their different perspectives and unique contributions
but they have a remarkable unity.
Paul was not James.
Proverbs is different from
Isaiah, Exodus or Job.
But what strikes me is the
amazing way in which the Bible fits together.
It seems to me that behind
the many human authors there must have been one guiding intelligence, and he
must have been a genius!
That makes sense if the
Holy Spirit inspired the different human writers.
And for me, the Bible is
ultimately God’s testimony about Jesus.
That seems to be the
Bible’s claim about itself – Jesus’ claim about the Bible.
The Old Testament looks
forward to him; the New Testament looks back to him.
Jesus is the centre and
goal of it all.
It is written that we
might come to Jesus in repentance and faith and find life in him.
And in the pages of
Scripture, God the Father bears witness by the Holy Spirit to God the Son.
The Bible is almost like the
voice of God from heaven in our reading today saying about Jesus:
“This is my Son, whom I
love.”
(This passage set for the
Baptism of Christ would be a good reading for Trinity Sunday too, wouldn’t it,
as God the Father speaks about God the Son and God the Holy Spirit comes down
upon him)
Later at the
Transfiguration, God the Father says the same thing again about Jesus and adds
the instruction: “Listen to him!”.
As we read the Bible, God
would have us focus on Jesus and hear his voice afresh in these ancient pages.
And I think we can see
that the Bible is all about showing us Jesus if we think about the Baptism of
Christ and our readings for today because so many of the patterns and pictures
of the Bible converge on Jesus.
So it’s worth just noting
that the Bible isn’t first of all and simply about you and me.
In fact our Bible passages
today are not very obviously about us at all.
Today’s readings don’t
obviously tell us what to do.
I guess Genesis tells us
that like all of creation we were made by God.
And that’s very important.
That would change so much
if we really grasped it.
But there’s an awful lot
of other detail and all the implications might not spring off the page to us.
God, in his wisdom, didn’t
write the Bible as easy, simple, clear messages for us.
We’ve already says that
Mark tells us that his gospel is good news.
But maybe it’s not
immediately obvious how or why.
What sort of good news is
this?
Good news for whom?
About what?
How does this account of
the life of Jesus make a difference to me?
John the Baptist tells the
crowd that the one who comes after him (whoever he is) will baptise them with
the Holy Spirit.
But even when we know that
Jesus is that one, what does that mean?
“Baptism with the Holy
Spirit” is a bit mysterious, isn’t it?
And does it include us?
We probably didn’t realise
that we needed to be baptised with the Holy Spirit, but even if we did, how do
we get this baptism?
How do we benefit from it?
It would be a mistake, I
think, when reading the Bible to leap too quickly to apply it to ourselves.
After all, I am not an
ancient Israelite.
I’m not John the Baptist
or Jesus or one of the crowd that day.
We’re different from them.
Our situations are
different.
And yet the Bible is for
us.
It would be a mistake to
leap too quickly to ourselves.
But also it would be
pointless if we never got to ourselves.
The Bible is not just
meant to be academic information about other people or other times out there.
It’s not meant to be just
quite interesting!
It has to touch me in the
end.
It’s meant to transform
and renew us and equip us for God’s service here and now.
How do we go from the
words of the Bible back then to our own situation?
The key to seeing how this
Gospel passage relates to us is to grasp what it tells us about Jesus.
And how we relate to
Jesus.
Jesus Christ is the same
yesterday, today and for ever.
The good news is all about
him.
He is good news for us
today.
He is the life-transforming
saving good news we ultimately need.
And this passage gives us
a wonderfully rich portrayal of Jesus.
More really than we can
manage to look at together today.
There are all sorts of
quotations and allusions and hints of other parts of the bible here converging
to show us something about who Jesus is and what he came to do and how it can
benefit us.
We’re meant to think today
particularly about the Baptism of Jesus.
Let me suggest two ways of
thinking about the baptism of Jesus.
First, I think Mark wants
us to see the baptism of Jesus as something he did for us, as our substitute,
in our place.
After all, John’s baptism
was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
But Jesus was the Christ,
the Son of God, whom God loved, with whom God was well pleased.
Jesus was the one who was
more powerful than John who would baptise others with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus could make other
people clean inside and give them new hearts.
So what was he doing
getting baptised?
Surely Jesus should be the
baptiser not the baptised.
Jesus didn’t need a wash!
He had no sins of which to
repent.
And yet here Jesus stands
in the place of sinners.
He took your place and
mine.
As the Bible would say
about the cross: Jesus was numbered with the transgressors.
The sinless one was
willing to undergo a sinner’s baptism for you and me.
The Bible speaks about the
cross as the baptism which Jesus chose to endure:
That’s God’s plan for
Jesus.
There was no other way for
us to be saved.
It’s necessary for our
cleansing.
Jesus will face the watery
death of baptism for us and rise again so that we need not be sunk by our sin.
He will be plunged under
the waters of God’s wrath and drowned by them that we might live in friendship
with God.
Judgement will flood over
him and he will come out the other side for us so that the waters might not
touch us.
Our sins will be washed
away by Jesus.
Jesus will be, if you
like, a second Noah with his dove there, saved from a watery death.
We, like Noah’s family,
can be saved in the ark which is Jesus!
But second, Jesus also
acts here not only as our substitute but as our representative.
If we are believers, we
are in Christ – united to him by faith, joined to him by the Spirit.
We might say that his
baptism is our baptism.
We are baptised with him,
in him.
What’s true of Jesus is
true of us.
He is the head, we are the
body – joined to him.
His death and resurrection
were our death and resurrection.
If Jesus comes up out of
the water alive and full of the Spirit, so do we.
Now we are dead to sin and
alive with Christ.
What God the Father says to
Jesus here he says to us in Christ.
We’ll think again about
the baptism of Jesus in a moment.
But let’s just pause over
the way in which Mark introduces him in that first verse, which is a kind of
title or headline:
“Jesus Christ, the Son of
God.”
These things are reflected
in his baptism just a few verses later.
Jesus was an ordinary
common name.
This is a real human being
among a great crowd of other Jewish men and women in a real place and time.
In one sense Jesus was a
very ordinary man in ordinary history – from an ordinary town at an ordinary
sort of time.
He as one of us.
His baptism was real:
It was an actual event:
not a fairy story.
It was full of meaning,
but it wasn’t just some kind of parable or symbolic spiritual event.
It matters that the events
of the gospels really happened.
But it’s significance that
the name Jesus is a form of the name Joshua.
This is one of the many echoes
of Biblical history that resound onto Jesus.
And Jesus is a Second
Joshua.
A New and Better Joshua.
The context of the Jordan
river here at Jesus’ baptism perhaps reminds us of Joshua who had to lead the
people across the Jordan to conquer the promised land.
Jesus, then, is the one
who will defeat our ultimate enemies and give us victory and bring us security
in the promised land that we might find rest and blessing.
Jesus’ baptism is a kind
of new Exodus, a new exile and return from Exile for a new Israel.
Jesus sets God’s people free
from slavery to sin and brings us home to God.
Jesus, Joshua means The
LORD Saves.
Jesus came to bring
rescue, salvation.
The angel explained Jesus’
name to Joseph:
Jesus would save his
people from their sins.
And he is the Christ, Son
of God.
Christ is the same as
Messiah.
Not a surname but a title
– a job description.
It means anointed one.
Jesus is God’s chosen
rescuer-king, the long promised one.
Our prophet, priest and
king.
This baptism, we might
say, is a bit like Jesus’ pre-ordination wash which he underwent at the age of
30, like the temple priests of Old Testament times.
This ceremonial wash
marked the beginning of their ministries, as it did for Jesus.
Jesus our great High
Priest is our mediator, our God-between with God who puts us in touch with
heaven.
Just as the heavens are
torn open here, the temple curtain will be torn open (Mark uses the same word) when
Jesus offers himself as the acceptable God-appointed sacrifice so that sinners
like me and you can come into the presence of a holy God without fear.
Jesus is the Son of God.
He’s like Adam – the first
Son of God.
The mention of the wild
animals in v13 perhaps reminds us of Adam.
This passage is surely
meant to remind us of the creation as we read from Genesis about the Spirit of
God hovering over the waters and God speaking, as he does here again at the
baptism.
So Jesus is a new and
better Adam – a new humanity, a fresh start for planet earth.
Jesus’ work will be a work
of new creation, of new life.
Immediately after Jesus’
baptism we’re told the Spirit sent him out into the desert.
Jesus will be obedient in
the desert whereas Adam was disobedient in the garden.
The Son of God was also a
title for Israel, the people of God, in the Old Testament.
And Jesus here is like the
epitome of the nation: a faithful remnant.
Jesus is Israel embodied
in one man, if you like.
Here is God’s man: the
faithful one.
Again, as Israel was
unfaithful in the desert for 40 years, Jesus would be faithful for 40 days in
the desert.
Son of God was primarily a
title for the Old Testament king.
It was very much like
Messiah in that respect because the king was the anointed one.
And Jesus is anointed here
by the Spirit of God.
Like Isaac, the Son of
Abraham, Jesus is God’s - quote - “son whom he loves”, which both Abraham and
God the Father are willing to give up.
Jesus will be the ultimate
sacrifice for sin.
He is like the Servant of
the LORD, with whom God is well pleased.
He will act for God to bring
salvation and blessing to Israel and to the nations.
We could go on.
The Bible builds up these
layers of meaning so that we can see the relevance of Jesus as the king and
saviour we need.
All the plans and purposes
of God find their fulfilment in this Jesus.
All the promises of God
are “Yes” in God’s Son.
Jesus matters to us
because of what he did for us as our substitute in our place.
But also because we are in
him, joined with him: he’s our representative.
In him we are the people
of God, dearly loved by God, equipped with his Spirit.
It seems likely that we
face even more difficult and testing days ahead before the COVID Pandemic is
behind us.
Perhaps more than 40 days
of trial and isolation – mainly in our homes, not in the desert – though it may
be a rather lonely experience for some of us.
How was it that Jesus
faced his time of testing in the wilderness?
Perhaps he was encouraged
by the words spoken to him at his baptism:
“You are my Son, whom I
love; with you I am well pleased.”
As we trust in Jesus, it
might do us good and strengthen us to hear the Father say to us in Christ:
"You are my child,
whom I love. With you I am well pleased."
Just listen to those words
of God again and let them sink in:
"You are my child,
whom I love. With you I am well pleased."
If we’re trusting him,
Jesus has dealt with our sin, made us clean within and given us new hearts.
We can look to the Holy
Spirit to equip us for all the challenging situations in to which he sends us.
May God grant us victory
over temptation and may his angels attend us.
Amen.
* * *
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