He's Got You

Remembering Christ's baptism and yours

When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Luke 3:21-22

Today in the Church, a week before the United States has its Inauguration Day, we remember Jesus’ inauguration day of his ministry through the waters of his baptism.

There’s too much about baptism to share in one sitting, but here are some basics. For us Presbyterians, it’s one of the two sacraments that we practice alongside the Lord’s Supper. These are the two things that Scripture said Jesus instituted, meaning he did them and told us to do them. As signs that we are in his body with him, they are things he not only offered, but things he shared and partook with us.

From there, it gets complicated.

There are so many things going on in baptism symbolically, but first, I only want to focus on two key things:

(1) Baptism was connected to (and is another name for) the Jewish ritual washing called mikveh, which continues in modern Judaism in various ways. However, it was especially important in Jerusalem when the Temple stood. Such mikveh baptisms were regularly performed any time you wanted to enter the Temple, properly preparing yourself to be in the presence of God (not completely unlike Christian baptism).

(2) A second big symbolic thing going on with Christian baptism is that, in the life of the Early Church, it replaced circumcision as the sign of being in a covenant relationship with God.¹ This is one of the big theological reasons many Christians baptize infants, even if they can’t profess faith; just like eight-day-old Jewish babies are too young to know whether they will actually live into the covenant or not, they were still accepted into the covenant by God. In both circumcision and Christian baptism, we receive a physical, outward sign of God’s promise that before we fully know God, God claims us and has brought us into his body.

But is there something even more basic at the heart of our baptism? And what about Christ’s baptism? What did that mean when he didn’t have sin to repent?

I want to keep it as simple as possible: when we enter the waters of baptism, it is as if humanity is trying to reach out to heaven. And for Christ, his baptism is about him coming down from heaven to be with us. He meets us in the water.

In baptism, we collectively reach out to the God who has already reached out to us.

In our baptism, we say, “God, we want to be with you. We know there’s a rift between how we are and who we are and who you are and how we know you want us to be.”

In Christ’s baptism, we remember that before we reached out, God had already come down and said, “I’ve got you.”

In that famous Michelangelo painting, “The Creation of Adam,” God stretches out hard to Adam. But (as many have observed), compared to God’s outstretched finger, Adam is just lackadaisically holding out his hand to God:

This is humanity’s default mode: “Okay, thanks but no thanks, God.”

But in our baptism—and when we remember it—we say to God, “Lord, I need you. I am fully stretching out my hand,” and he says again, “I’ve got you.” And he wants you to live a holy life where you hold on.

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After hard weeks watching floods ravage western North Carolina this fall, it was another sad week for me watching fires rage in Los Angeles. It’s a place I called home for eight years, and I’ve had friends lose their homes, and many more friends-of-friends, especially in the churches I attended in Pasadena. So I don’t use this analogy lightly: there is a way in which the sin of the world is like wildfire. Not like a holy, creative fire of the Spirit that blazes without burning, or the fire that John says Christ will baptize with, but one that destroys, a cosmic, elemental force in the world that can spread incredibly fast. Such sin is always raging and destroying us.

In that vein, I can picture John the Baptist as almost like a firefighter trying to put out sin with just his one hose. He knows he can’t, and the people returning to John as a forgiver of sin keep going back to the water even though they know it’s ephemeral because John can only fight sin’s fire with water. He knows that is not enough to put out sin. But he is not hopeless, because he knows one is coming who can.

So this is the burning backdrop of despair in which Jesus sees all these people fervently going to John, rushing over the hills to get to the river Jordan. The vibe is that this was not for any normal mikveh, but something more. Jesus sees how hard his people are trying to get clean and how badly they wish to receive a fully-washed repentance through John’s baptism. They return to Jordan over and over, going out of their way from the bare-minimum rituals in the city and seeking something real in the wilderness with John.

While we Christians don’t have the same ideas of ritual purity, I think this same yearning is in both the mikveh and in our baptism. It’s that feeling that comes when we are truly throwing ourselves at the mercy of God, truly repentant deep in your bones, “Please, Lord, make me whole with you; make me clean with you. Wash me fully.” That is the yearning they sought at the Jordan. Many were there just following the crowds, but so many by the river didn’t want to be only ritually pure, but to have a heart transformation that would allow them to live out the fullness of the Torah. They wanted their walk with God to be alive in a way that it hadn’t been, in a way that many of their leaders failed to do too. John and Jesus are so hard on hypocrites not because they didn’t care about keeping the Law, but because they weren’t fully living the most important parts of God’s Teaching (the same theme the prophets had warned, lamented, and decried).

When we’re honest with ourselves, we know we fail to live into the covenant too. We know we fail to live up to our baptism. This is often hard to accept, especially in our best-defended places, especially if we feel we are trying really hard, but just as a mikveh was needed to enter the Temple, we cannot receive the gospel without repentance; for Christians, repentance of our hearts is our mikveh preparation.

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So back to that old question: why does Jesus get baptized? He doesn’t need to repent. He doesn’t need to be ritually pure to appear before himself. It almost seems like dividing by zero, with the Holy Spirit pouring in through the universe’s broken math.

Again, I think Jesus is baptized because he sees our humanity yearning for something holy. He sees how hard we are trying. He sees us over and over admitting and acknowledging we’re not enough to save ourselves. Despite our best vision of our behavior, despite our pride, we can’t. We’re trying so hard to carry our own burdens that our hands are too full to reach out to him. It’s only in those moments where we give up trying to save ourselves that we let him instead. This would be Peter’s story, who only becomes a “good disciple” when he realizes he can’t be a good one. In his weeping after denying Christ, accepting that he will always fail his Lord, he becomes closer to him than he ever had been.

These are the people Jesus sees by the Jordan. So he steps in the water with us. And in the midst of everyone repenting, getting their mikveh, stretching for this living relationship with him, the heavens proclaim, “This is my Son,” followed by a Trinitarian explosion—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all in one single moment of outpouring love.

Now Jesus could begin his ministry. It was official, proper, and fitting that it be this way, for his ministry would be defined by God reaching out to us.

In Jesus Christ, the heavens have broken, the divide between divinity and profanity has been breached, and what had been separated in the Genesis waters of creation is now bridged through the flesh. God has come down to say, “Have you forgotten his name was Emanuel? I’m with you.”

He is with you in the waters that bring life and death, where fish are caught and boats destroyed, water that we need to drink but can drown us. He says, “I’m in the water with you not because I need to, but because I know you need me to; not because I need to, but because I love you. And through the Holy Spirit, I will be with you in your heart if you let me transform you.”

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So today, we not only remember Christ’s baptism, but we remember ours. This is not a literal remembrance for those of us who were infants, but “remember” as one of the most prominent commands in the Hebrew scriptures (where “remember” is more fundamentally “to bring back to the top of your attention”²). The Israelites were told to remember the covenant they had been brought into before they had any memory. We are to do likewise.

Remember that through your baptism, God has grabbed your hand that reached out to him—or your tiny hand that was held up for you—and God has said, “I’ve got you.” And as we remember that we were baptized in the Holy Spirit, let us remember that God wants us to keep holding onto him and to let the Holy Spirit do more and more work in you. You are in his body, and he is in you. As the Apostle Paul said, “We were buried with him by baptism into death so that we might have new life.”³ Remember he’s with you, and he’s got you. Amen.

1. “In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” — Colossians 2:11-12

2. Courtesy of Tim Keller

3. Romans 6:4