January 10 2021
Luke 3:15-22
Well, as we move into this new year, we as a church also move into a new season which is called Epiphany. Epiphany is kind of a strange word which is actually formed from two Greek words, epi and phainen. Epi means on or to, and phainein means to show, to bring to light and together they give us the meaning of coming into the light or better the light coming onto us. Epiphany then is the light coming on much like we see in cartoons when someone has an idea they have a lightbulb go on in their head. We sometimes call this an a-ha moment, when something we previously didn’t understand we suddenly have an insight and the light goes on for us. This idea is what we hope will happen for us with Jesus. Now, that Jesus has entered into into our world at Christmas we have to figure out just who he is and what is he up to. We need the light to once again to go off in our heads and have an a-ha moment where we suddenly realize the profound nature of just who Jesus is. It is significant, I think that Epiphany is a season of the church, a time set aside every year when our hope is that once again the light will go on, that once again the Jesus that has perhaps become so familiar, so commonplace for us will suddenly appear to us in a much greater way. The church rightly understands that we need time every year to re-examine just who this Jesus is, just what it is that he is up to, just what it is about him that his coming to us was and is a world changing event.
So we begin by pausing and asking ourselves just who is Jesus? People have a lot of different ideas about Jesus but unfortunately many of them are mere figments of their imagination.This past week we watched as the most unthinkable act occurred in our Capital where a mob overran the Capital building. As I looked at all the images that were put out on social media of that event, images of crazed people charging at the police, scaling the walls, breaking down the doors, there amongst the image of a gallows with a noose there was also a cross. My first thought when I saw this was a song that my kids picked up from Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong.” I say that because if these people had known Jesus, if they had truly known about the cross they would have known that this setting was the exact scenario that Jesus and his dying on the cross came to abolish. The angry mob had more to do with the angry mob that cried out, “Crucify him” than it had anything to do with the one who was crucified.
So, you see there are dark images of who we think Jesus is that must be brought into the light. It is in the light that we can see clearly the strangeness and unique nature of Jesus that in the darkness of our minds becomes easy and familiar. Nowhere is this more evident than in our scripture for today. It is the old familiar story of John the Baptist, you know that crazed man out there in the Jordan wilderness, wearing a coat of camel hair and eating locust. We know this story quite well, or do we? When you begin to examine the life of John a little closer, in the light of what God wants us to reveal to us and what you discover is that there is a lot about John that just does not add up. John’s birth is given to us only here in Luke’s gospel because, I believe that Luke wants us to understand that John comes from a long line of priests and Luke shows that John’s lineage goes back to Aaron, the first high priest of Israel. So we have to ask just why is John not found in the Temple following his family business of being a priest?
Another odd aspect about John and what he is doing at the Jordan is that he is performing the ritual cleansing bath normally only done for Gentiles, non-Jews who are converting to Judaism however John is preforming this rite on people who know themselves as Jews. Isn’t that just a bit weird? In other words, what is implied is that John considers that the Jews he is calling to come to the Jordan are in essence no better than those who are not Jewish. So this makes us ask just what determines just what it means to be a Gentile, to be a non-Jewish person? Just what is it about the people John lives with that points out that they are living no differently than everyone else. Well, Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount gives us three definitions of what it means to be a Gentile, a person of the nations in a spiritual sense. The first defining feature Jesus tells us is in Matthew, the fifth chapter, the forty seventh verse, is that the Gentiles are those who only love those who love them. This is the root of tribalism, to just hang out with those who have your back and to say the hell to everyone else. The second identification of what it means to be a Gentile is found in the next chapter of Matthew where Jesus states that the Gentiles, the people of the nations are those who heap up empty phrases when they pray because they believe that that they will be heard for their many words. Now, it is hard to understand just what Jesus is getting at but in the next part of his teaching he tells us that there is no need for them to do so because we have a Heavenly Father who knows what we need before we ask him. The important part of what Jesus tells us is that our Heavenly Father knows what we need not necessarily what we want. You see, the empty phrases and many words are signals of an attempt to manipulate God into yielding to ones demands of their desires. One more defining feature of the people of the nations is that they are people who are frantically searching for what to eat, what to drink or what to wear. This is what Jesus explains further in the sixth chapter of Matthew, where he says that they do not know that there is no reason for them to be so anxious or worried because they have a Heavenly Father who will faithfully provide all that they need. It is here that the teaching of Jesus comes full circle so to speak, because instead of seeking after what they need they should instead be seeking the kingdom of God. This kingdom is one where people love not just those who love them but they love as their God, the king loves, loving even those who hate them. You see, the root of why the Gentiles only love those who love them stems from their anxiety and worry and their dissatisfaction with what God provides. Now, knowing this, we can understand that the reason that John was performing the ritual bath required for Gentiles on his fellow Jewish folk is that they had become people who loved only those who loved them, they had become anxious and worried people and they had become manipulative with God, not satisfied with his provisions but demanding that God lend his power to their fight against the Romans. Yet, how could God do so if he was a God who loved even them, sending the rain and the sunshine upon them, caring for even them, the enemy called Rome.
What John had been enlightened by God to see is the truth found in the fifth chapter of John’s first letter, is that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. The power that the evil one has over the people of this world is sin. It is as Paul writes in the sixth chapter of his letter to the Romans, where he admonishes them to not let sin rule in your mortal bodies to submit yourself to its passions. So, we see how sin is a ruler, a controller of the hearts and lives of people. The rule of a ruler is ultimately enforced by the threat of death and through this threat the ruler makes his subject submit to the desire of the ruler. What sin as our ruler tells us is that we are under attack, that we are vulnerable and at risk arousing in us the passions of fear, anger, greed and resentment. These are passions that tear apart the very fabric of society. The reason why we need to understand sin as the ruler of a world under the dominion of the evil one is that John, quoting from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, proclaimed that now was the time to prepare the way of the Lord, prepare the way of the true king, the one true ruler to rule over us.
Here once again in John’s proclamation we encounter yet another oddity because he speaks of the coming of the Lord yet wasn’t God already there? Wasn’t God’s presence to be thought to dwell in his Temple? I mean how does God come to a place where he was already thought to have been? Here is where the location of the Jordan gives us a clue to this mystery. The Jordan as we remember was the boundary that was crossed by the people of Israel when they left behind their wilderness wanderings to live in the land promised to them by God. But there was more to the this gift that God was giving to them than just a place to live because what God had desired is that in entering this land that they would enter his rest. This is what we learn in the ninety fifth Psalm, where in the last two verses we read, “For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “they are a people who go astray in their heart for they have not known my ways.” Therefore I swore in my wrath “They shall not enter my rest.” So, what entering into the Promised Land was supposed to be was a symbolic entrance into a life of peace that comes through following faithfully the ways of God. Only by trusting God, understanding that he is a Heavenly Father who provides all that is needed and finding contentment in his provision, only then could people find freedom from their anxious restlessness. This is why, I believe that the people of Israel had flocked to the Jordan to heed the cry’s of John because they were anxious and restless. They came seeking relief and as John was telling them they would not find relief until they came under a new rule, the rule of God their king. Yet for this to happen they had to prepare the way for their king to come to them. This meant that they had to place their faith in the ways of God, to act as he commanded them to act and only then would they discover the reality that God promised to them. As John explained, those who had two coats were to share one with someone who lacked a coat. Those who had food were to share their food with the hungry. They were to let go of their demands which were nothing more than a cover for their insecurities and be content in what God had provided to them. They were to seek his kingdom and only then could they discover that they lived under a new rule, a new king who had come to them through faith.
This then is what we must first understand so that when we come to the baptism of Jesus we see this act in its proper setting. Yet once again we are faced with another oddity that requires some unpacking. By this I mean that as we clearly read in this account of John, his baptism in water was a baptism of repentance, a turning away from the rule of sin to live under the kingship of God by faith. If this is true then why is Jesus baptized because as we know he was without any sin of which to repent? These are the questions we must learn to ask to bring this life of Jesus out into the light so that we understand just who he is and what he came to accomplish because the answer to his baptism is quite surprising. The baptism of Jesus was different in many ways from all the others that John performed. First, we are told that the heavens opened up and from the heavens the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove. Secondly, there came a voice from heaven declaring, “You are my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” This was the voice of the Heavenly Father making a public statement about who Jesus is that Jesus is the beloved Son of God and that as this beloved Son of God his Heavenly Father is well pleased with him. This declaration by the Heavenly Father is very similar to the beginning verses of the forty second chapter of Isaiah where we read God telling Isaiah, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him he will bring justice to the nations.” I believe that God is pointing us to this verse to help us figure out what was going on with this baptism of Jesus. Jesus in that moment was consecrated as God’s servant. A servant of God in the Bible was known as being a priest and as a priest Jesus was anointed not with oil, as was done with the high priest at the Temple, but with what the oil represented, the very Spirit of the holy God. So, where the baptism of repentance performed by John was to be an ending, an ending to living under the rule of sin, the baptism of Jesus was a beginning, the beginning of a new priesthood, what we call in the church the priesthood of all believers. The old priesthood represented by the Temple had become corrupt and was destined to be destroyed as John alluded to several times. As John said any tree that did not bear good fruit was to be cut down and thrown into the fire. This saying is understood as being the destruction of the Temple as we learn in the story of the fig tree that bore no fruit that Jesus cursed and destroyed as told in the eleventh chapter of Mark. The Temple which represented the Law of Moses proved that the limitation of all law is that no law can change the heart.People can outwardly adhere to the law all the while being quite unlawful in their hearts. This unlawfulness of the heart though cannot remain hidden because what is stored in our hearts eventually comes out in what we say and do. So it was with those who worshipped at the Temple. For them Temple worship became the means for their attempt to demand that God be their means to achieve victory over their enemy, the Romans something God was opposed to. This hatred of their enemies was the bad fruit which would lead to the destruction of the tree, the Temple which would come at the yielding of the axe at the hands of the Roman army.
God’s answer then was to send his Son Jesus, to be his high priest, to be his new Temple where his Spirit, his glory could reside. In the seventeenth chapter of John, what we read is what is often called the high priestly prayer of Jesus. There on the night he was betrayed, Jesus prayed with his disciples. His final words tell us of what was his primary purpose was as being the new high priest. Jesus prayed to his Heavenly Father that he had made known to his disciples God’s name and he would continue to make this name known in order that the love which the Heavenly Father had loved Jesus his Son might be in his disciples, that Jesus himself might be in them. This was his purpose as high priest to bear the name of God. As we recall, God spoke his name to Moses in the thirty fourth chapter of Exodus, where God tells him that he is a God merciful and gracious, a God slow to anger, a God abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin but who by no means clears the guilty. So, when Jesus was baptized and anointed by the Holy Spirit he was declaring that his purpose, his public ministry was to be one who was going be a living representation of the truth of who God is because when people knew the truth of who God is, when they knew God as the fount of all grace and mercy, that they knew God to be patient with them, when then knew this God was a God of love that was bedrock solid, when they experienced this God as the one who could always be trusted that it was his promises that were true forever, then the passions of fear, anger, greed and resentment could be forever left behind. This was the life of Jesus, whose priesthood was seen most clearly upon the cross where Jesus our high priest placed his very life upon the cross as a once for all sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. There Jesus demonstrated that the fear of death no longer has to rule over us, for the rule of love is stronger than the grave. This our resurrected high priest proved to us.
So, here at the baptism of Jesus we see who Jesus is as the one that day at the Jordan who was anointed our high priest. He was anointed to be the servant of God, the high priest who knew his purpose as being to bear the name of God. Yet he came to not just be our high priest but more importantly for us to be the founder of a new priesthood of which we become a part of when we are baptized by water and the Spirit just as Jesus was. The truth of this is heard in the words of Paul in the sixth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians where we read “But you were washed, you were cleansed, you were made holy.you were made righteous, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.” This is what has happened to us when we were baptized. When it states that we were made holy and righteous in the name of Jesus, this is the name of God that he bore as the priest of God. And now as his priests we are charged with bearing that same name, bearing the very reputation of the truth of God. In other words, what do the people in your world know about the truth of who God is through what you say and do? You see this is God’s plan to transform the world, to create a priesthood who will bear the truth of who he is to the world because when the world truly knows who he is they will be set free from the rule of sin to welcome in the true king, our Lord, Jesus God’s anointed one.Amen!
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