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When we think of baptism we think of water. No doubt water is important to us at a very basic level. No water, no life. Water is the determining factor in there being life on earth. Our bodies are 60% water. If we go more than three days without water we will begin to physically die. Improper hydration of the body has its effects. If we are under hydrated our mental functioning suffers. We become depressed. Our joints will hurt. Too much water dilutes other important chemicals in our bodies causing weakness, disorientation, muscle cramping. You can get drunk on too much water, but it takes gallons and who wants to pee that much.
Water is also an important symbol in the faith narrative of the Bible. Let’s look at a few starting with the Creation story of Genesis 1. This account appears to have developed among a people familiar with standing on the shore of a large body of water such as the Mediterranean Sea and taking in the horizon. The image is that in the midst of a great Sea God created a bubble in which we live. When God began to create, his raw materials were deepness, darkness, formlessness, emptiness, and…water – the primordial Sea of Chaos. In the midst of watery Chaos God brought forth an ordered world and filled it with life. Water is an important symbol of Creation.
In Genesis 2 we find a second Creation story which seems to have been developed by an inland people familiar with the desert wilderness feature of the oasis. The Garden of Eden was an oasis formed around a spring, natural well, which was the head of four rivers that carried life giving water out into the rest of God’s creation. We also find this River of Life image in the writings of several of the OT prophets and the Book of Revelation where a river of life-giving water is flowing out of the Temple in Jerusalem. This is the life-giving and healing water of the Presence of God found in the spiritual life of relationship with God.
Water is also a symbol of cleansing. In the days of Noah, God’s good creation became so corrupted with humanity’s Sin and evil that it needed to be radically cleansed. So, God opened the skies and the ground and flooded the bubble with those primordial waters of Chaos and as they receded humanity got a new start.
Water is also a symbol of deliverance. By plaguing the Egyptians God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. For the finale, God parted the waters of the Red Sea to let his people through to safety and then destroyed their powerful foe, Pharoah and his army, by letting the waters collapse back on them as they tried to pursue.
Finally, water is a symbol of future hope. After God’s people’s Wilderness Wandering, God parted the waters of the Jordan River so that the Israelites could cross into the Promised Land and settle it. God brought them out of the transitional and difficult life of trial in the wilderness to life being filled-full according to God’s promise to Abraham to make his descendants a great nation that would be blessing to all other nations.
Looking here at Matthew, it's in the waters of the Jordan that we find Jesus being baptized obviously as a symbol of a new beginning for God’s people in the Promised Land. But, all these symbols of water are at play. With Jesus there is New Creation, New Beginning. Flowing from Jesus is the Live-giving Water of the Holy Spirit present with us. With Jesus is found the cleansing water of forgiveness, of knowing we are accepted and beloved by God. Jesus and his way of life is deliverance from the slaveries that overtake us when we don’t live life on God’s terms. With Jesus is found a foretaste of our future hope of when God has finally intervened to heal his good creation of the disease of sin and of evil and death and filled it with a deeply personal knowing of himself. It is in the profundity of all these symbols, these images of water that we find Jesus rising up in a clear image of resurrection.
But wait a minute. Water is not the only thing we need to consider here. We must also note the opening of the heavens and the Spirit of God coming to alight on Jesus in the form of a dove and also the voice of God. Jesus’ baptism is actually a moment of self-revelation by God very similar to the revelation of God we find present in Genesis at the beginning of Creation. There God was mostly unseen. But God spoke the Word, the creating Word of God that the Spirit of God who was hovering over the waters brought about.
At the beginning of John’s Gospel this Word of God is what John says became flesh as Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1,14). Jesus is the Word God speaks that brings everything into existence.
At Creation God spoke the Word amongst the words of what he wanted to come into being. The Spirit brought them about. Then, once Creation was filled with life, in the midst of all that life God placed an image of Godself – humanity – and then God said “Very good.”
Here at Jesus’ Baptism, we see Jesus, God the Son, the Word of God become a human. He is God filling full God’s own image with God’s own very self. Jesus is the culmination of God’s very good Creation. As Jesus comes up from the water of Jordan, the waters of future hope fulfilled, the Spirit of God alighted on him in the form of a dove to remind us of the Noah story and how Creation was washed clean of our turning from God. At that moment God the Father speaks and the “Very good” that he speaks over his filled full Image coming up from the waters of New Creation is “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”
This moment of Jesus’ Baptism is a self-revelation of God. We have to note that God reveals God’s self here as Trinity, a Three-in-One/One-in-Three mystery. Reflecting on that, we can say that God is a communion of persons (God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and at the heart of this communion is belovedness. The Three give themselves so selflessly to each other in love that they are One yet Three but One. I don’t want to get too theological here but God reveals God’s own essence to be a community of belovedness.
Therefore, to reflect upon how this should matter to us: we are created in the image of God. The image of God found in us is a capacity for living together in communities of belovedness – such is the importance of marriage and family. True community is found in persons selflessly giving themselves, sharing themselves such that we find a unity in love arising in our relationships. This is why things like self-emptying, serving, and helping and striving together to be all that we can be are so foundationally important to our own self-discovery and the survival of God’s very good Creation. Noticeably, self-emptying, serving, helping, and striving together are things so totally given a backburner in this me-oriented world of individualism and self-actualization. The result is that our attempts at being in functional community always just seem to culminate with a sourness of self-gratification that hurts others and fractures community, indeed mars the image of God we are created to bear.
To close, Jesus is the New Human around and in whom we find the New Humanity that has the capacity to truly be the image of God in God’s very good creation because this New Humanity is filled full of the Presence of God. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The water of creation, of life, of cleansing, of deliverance, and of hope are embodied in Jesus. He is central to God’s purpose for us and his whole creation. It is in relationship to Jesus displayed through following him that we discover that we each are a beloved child of God, a belovedness that is confirmed in the fellowship of those who follow Jesus and who love in the way he loved us, laying his life down for us, serving us, healing us. In the midst of our following him together, we find ourselves daily being created anew by the mysterious presence and work of the Holy Spirit who alights on us and fills us. In the community of faithfulness, we imbibe of the water of new life. We find ourselves forgiven and cleansed of shame and guilt in the living-water of the welcoming hospitality embodied in our fellowship. In the living water of this fellowship, we live in the realm of hope where God’s will, reign, and love are open to all and where it is becoming here on earth as it is in heaven.
So, let us not underestimate the importance of the fellowship we share in self-giving love as followers of Jesus. It is in the midst of our Christ-like, Holy Spirit enabled love for one another and for the community around us, in the midst of our serving and helping one another that Jesus yet again rises up from the water of his Baptism and the world receives of moment, a glimpse of who God is. What a difference it would make in this world if the only God people could see is the God whose essence is a Communion of Belovedness in which all can come and be welcomed and loved. Let us come up from the water and let God’s self-revelation be evident among us. Follow Jesus in the Jesus was of self-emptying serving and helping. Amen.
