Baptizing Jesus
Reflections on the Lectionary for January 11th
I have written a few times in this space about the awkwardness of baptism in the Gospel traditions. The Gospel-writers, in my opinion, didn’t seem to know what to do with idea of baptism or with the figure of John the Baptist. The evangelists clearly associated baptism with the Jesus movement, but they understand that baptism belonged first to John the Baptist, and they understood that Jesus himself had undergone baptism by John. But when it came time to make meaning out of that baptism, and when it came time to link Jesus’ baptism to the rest of his career, I sense uncertainty in the Gospel-writers’ approach. The Gospels all write around the scene in certain ways—especially the Gospel of John, which never actually describes John the Baptist baptizing Jesus—and at least from the perspective of later Christian theology, the Gospels never fully connect the dots to say what, if anything, baptism did for Jesus. Jesus’ baptism was a grand scene, in some ways; the heavens opened up, after all. But for all the glory that’s built in to the where, who, what, and how of Jesus’ baptism, there is scant attention to the why.
Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism is thin, just like the accounts found in Mark, Luke, and John. If anything, Matthew adds a few flourishes and changes that set his story apart. For starters, notice how both Luke and Mark use passive constructions: Jesus was baptized in Mark, and had been baptized in Luke. But Matthew introduces the scene with baptism still in the future; Jesus arrived to be baptized by John, using an infinitive verb to point to upcoming action, thereby showing us something about Jesus’ purpose and placing the reader in the midst of the story. And the exchange about John’s reluctance belongs only to Matthew; the other Gospels don’t say anything about John the Baptist’s mindset during the scene (though they do have John say deferential things about Jesus elsewhere). Matthew, though, has John defer to Jesus, saying that I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? It’s a telling little dance, theologically, because it’s a tidy way to show the reader that Jesus is safely superior to John, that John’s priority on the baptism scene didn’t have to mean anything about rank, and that the act of being baptized by John did not signify that Jesus owed anything to John or was inferior to him in any way. In that regard, Matthew’s account resembles John’s, which likewise works hard to minimize John’s role in the whole thing, albeit in different ways.
Because Matthew is the only one of the canonical Gospels to show Jesus and John sparring over who needed to be baptized by whom, it’s also the only one that has Jesus make the claim that he needed to be baptized by John because it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness, in 3:15. That’s an interesting claim, and a very Matthean one. Matthew’s Gospel will go on to show again and again how certain actions of Jesus took place to fulfill predictions and prophecies from Hebrew scripture, and this falls into that category, broadly speaking. Jesus’ baptism is a fulfillment of all righteousness for Matthew. But the precise nature of that righteousness, and the way baptism fulfilled it, remains frustratingly undefined. Why was baptism a way to fulfill righteousness? Where in Hebrew scripture did someone predict that a messianic figure would be baptized? Matthew is completely silent, and the reader is left to simply accept the claim that John baptizing Jesus was somehow the right (or righteous) thing to do.
One place where the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) all agree is that following Jesus’ baptism, something dramatic happened. They all tell substantially similar stories (and John does too, to some degree), but they differ slightly in the details. Each account shares a chronology, a heavenly apparition, a divine actor, a description of a dove, and a voice. I’ll take each of those features in turn and talk about some of the similarities and differences.
First, chronology. Matthew says that just as he came up from the water, suddenly something happened. Mark says that it happened just as he was coming up out of the water, and Luke says when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying something began to happen. Those are subtle differences, but perhaps meaningful, and they show that none of these accounts is simply copying from the others. They are all framing the scene and pacing the action in their own way. Matthew’s account is perhaps the most urgent, with the just as giving a sense of immediacy and suddenly drawing the reader’s attention to the role of surprise. In contrast, Luke’s account is almost sleepy, suggesting no real sense of urgency. And Mark splits the difference.
But the scene turns on the action in the heavens. Heaven is an interesting idea in the New Testament, because the word in Greek (ouranos, which is where we get the planet name Uranus, if you’re looking for trivia to dole out at parties) has both physical and cosmological meanings. The heaven is the sky, in a very general sense, but the heaven is also that part of reality that is distinguished from the earth, and therefore pointing to the divine. In this scene, across all four Gospels, those two senses of heaven get a little mixed up together. In Mark’s gospel, the action in the heavens unfolds from Jesus’ point of view: he saw the heavens torn apart. Luke has an omniscient perspective; the heaven was opened. And Matthew does a bit of both; the heavens were opened to him, so that the reader is told what Jesus was experiencing in that moment, but not precisely what Jesus saw.
What happened once the heavens were opened or torn apart? A divine being appeared, but the three synoptic Gospels disagree slightly about which being, exactly, it was. I sometimes wrestle with what to make of differences like these. On the one hand, the four Gospels were all written before Christian theology really got ironed out and theological language became standard. So, we can’t expect all Christians of the first or second centuries to use shared vocabulary. But on the other hand, the differences in the ways early Christians described divine beings takes on significance if we remember that each of these writers was grasping for language on their own, without the benefit of some standard vocabulary. Mark plays it simply: the Spirit descends. (Here and everywhere else, the capitalization of Spirit is a translation choice, and in many ways a theological one; there is nothing to set this instance of pneuma apart from any other in Greek, and it’s only by capitalizing it in English that translators signal to readers that this spirit might be a Spirit). Luke is quite a bit fancier: the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form. (The same capitalization caution applies here; you could just as easily render this the spirit of holiness as the Holy Spirit). And Matthew says that it was God’s Spirit or the Spirit of God. Today Christians might conflate all these terms together as slightly different ways to talk about the same member of the Trinity, but when the Gospels were written, before Christian orthodoxy had been nailed down, it’s interesting that the terminology for describing which heavenly personality was visiting could vary so much. (The Gospel of John, for its part, describes a Spirit and then later also Holy Spirit).
Whatever divine personality the Gospels were evoking, they all described its form using the language of doves. All four Gospels use the same basic Greek words to describe the dove-li-ness of the Spirit, though sometimes translation differences lead to one Gospel reading like a dove while another reads as a dove for stylistic reasons. It seems clear, though, that there was a strong historical memory of a dove making an appearance at the baptism of Jesus, and a strong theological tradition of interpreting that dove as the presence of the Spirit. All four Gospels say that the dove landed on Jesus, alighted on him, or remained on him, in one way or another. It’s a fascinating detail that must have stuck with the followers of Jesus as they told and retold the story of his baptism.
Perhaps the detail of the dove stuck because of the voice of God that accompanied it. Interestingly, John doesn’t record a voice from heaven at that moment, but instead has John the Baptist proclaim Jesus’ divine sonship. Matthew’s account, which is in the lectionary this week, has the voice from the heavens say this is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. In Mark and Luke the voice says you are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased, switching the language from third person to second person, and having the voice from heaven address Jesus directly. It’s interesting to think about what’s at stake in the audience for the divine proclamation. Was it for Jesus alone, as Mark and Luke have it, implying that Jesus was the one who needed to hear it? Or was it for the assembled crowd and John the Baptist, implying that the divine voice was speaking primarily to make an announcement to the world?
This proclamation from the heavens became very important a couple of centuries later, during the Christological controversies that reached a climax at the Council of Nicaea. Was the voice from heaven affirming what had always been true about Jesus—that he was and had forever been God’s son? Or was the voice announcing a new condition, an award bestowed on Jesus as a result of his faithfulness in being baptized—that he had become God’s son in that moment? The Gospel accounts leave enough room for both interpretations and several others besides, and the story of Jesus’ baptism became fodder for the claims of adoptionists and Arians and orthodox Christians alike. To me, the most natural reading of the scene is the adoptionist reading, which would say that the moment of baptism became the stage on which God announced the new condition of Jesus’ divine sonship. That makes the most sense of the timing and framing of the story, for me. But obviously, many others have read it differently through the years, and the orthodox position has largely won out.
There’s something fascinating about the way all four Gospels tell this baptism story in substantially the same way, while also inflecting it with small differences and idiosyncrasies. To me, that similar-but-different pattern suggests that the baptism of Jesus had a strong place in the traditions of early Jesus followers, and that the community remembered the scene as an especially meaningful and symbolic moment in Jesus’ life. But it also suggests that from the beginning there was tension and disagreement about how to tell the story, and about what meaning the story was meant to convey. The followers of Jesus seemed to be workshopping the basic details of the story, like the words spoken. But they also seemed to be wrestling with whether and how the story fit into broader questions about Jesus’ identity and his relationship to God. And perhaps above all, the way the early followers of Jesus tell this story suggests to me that they were unsure how to talk about the role of John the Baptist without making John seem like a mentor or authorizing figure for Jesus. That tension around John shows up elsewhere in the Gospels, but nowhere is it as prominent as it is here, where Jesus appears on a scene where John the Baptist had already been long established and where John’s ministry had already determined the meaning of baptism in substantial ways. Baptism became a central part of the Jesus tradition—a core ritual of Christianity. But it belonged to John the Baptist before it belonged to Jesus, and the Gospels simply weren’t sure what to do with that fact. So the Gospels display a bit of uncertainty and anxiety about it.
Today, baptism is a central ritual of Christianity, and many parts of this story have become natural to people familiar with the traditions of Jesus. There isn’t a lot of ambiguity here, for 21st-century Christians. No one wrings their hands over what a Spirit (or a spirit) is, since anyone familiar with Christianity will be familiar with the Spirit and its role. Nobody wonders whether John the Baptist might have been the more important figure, because John the Baptist has always been secondary to Jesus in the tradition. Today no one bats at eye at a descending dove or a claim of Jesus’ divine sonship. But in the first and second century, a story like this one from Matthew (and the parallel ones from the other Gospels) would have been a narrative alive with theological uncertainty and the anxiety that came from being a new tradition emerging into a crowded religious landscape. The story, as it is told in all four Gospels, shows us how the earliest followers of Jesus were wrestling with the events of Jesus’ life and death and how to make sense of them in some holistic or systematic way. For them, the baptism was clearly a pivotal moment of divine drama, and an important starting point for Jesus’ life and ministry. The evangelists already seemed to believe that was true. In the Gospel accounts, we can see them working out exactly how and why it should be true.