In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, pastor John Ames at one point observes a tree branch shaking water on some people. He’s entranced by the scene. He writes, “It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.”
Water takes a leading role in salvation history, a fact rehearsed at some length in that extraordinary blessing of the font at the Easter Vigil. It is there in the beginning, when the Spirit of God hovers over the waters of the unformed earth in Genesis, so that, in the words of that solemn blessing, “even the nature of water might conceive the virtue of sanctification.” It is there in the flood, when God dramatically remakes the world with water. It is there as the people of Israel cross the Red Sea from Egypt, and when they cross the Jordan to the Promised Land. Our Lord transforms water to wine at Cana of Galilee, he walks on the waters of the sea, and with water he is baptized in that same river Jordan where he meets John in our Gospel for today.
Water’s insistent presence is hardly surprising, because water is, now and always, insistently present in human life. It constitutes much of our bodies; we use it to drink and cook and clean. When we lack water, or a consistent source of clean water, as parts of the world still do, its absence is felt more deeply than probably any other thing that we might lack.
As a symbol of human life, then, it’s hard to do better than water. That basic, natural symbolism has always been on display at baptism, especially in the baptism of children. Baptism is a way of saying, welcome to the human family; welcome to life in this world. But there’s more to it than that. What the Church teaches is that baptism is a spiritual cleansing, a renewal of the inner nature that was made to know and love God. And so the baptized child receives a new spiritual life to go with his new biological life, a new invisible life to accompany the visible.
If that is so, and it is, then what should we make of the baptism of Jesus? What in the world is the connection between his baptism and ours?
When Jesus approaches John, in the Gospel, John questions, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Whatever Jesus is doing here, his baptism is neither the generic baptism of repentance offered by John nor the Christian baptism into the Church offered by the apostles. Jesus has no need to repent; he lacks the original sin that stifles the life of the human spirit. He has no need to enter the Church because he is the Church, and the Church finds its identity only in him.
The answer that Jesus gives John remains cryptic: “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.”
There is then something proper and even necessary about this baptism, but not for the reasons it is proper or necessary for us to be baptized.
We can look at the immediate event at the Baptism to see part of the reason: the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, with the voice of the Father saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This is why the baptism is put in the time after the Epiphany—because here is also an epiphany: a manifestation or a showing of God’s identity in the relationship joining the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
But why, again, did Christ need to be baptized? There are plenty of cryptic things in the Bible, and so it may be easy just to say, well, for mysterious reasons, his baptism was the key that unlocked the dramatic voice from heaven. That’s one interpretation. Another one, more plausible, is simply that Jesus submitted to baptism out of obedience—not because his baptism accomplished something in itself, but because it demonstrated his obedience to the will of the Father. For the Fathers, this is instructive for us, because submitting to baptism is an act of humility and obedience. If our Lord himself could submit to it, we dare not refuse out of pride.
There’s still a further explanation, one that you see a little more clearly in the Eastern churches, who celebrate this feast with great solemnity. At the Epiphany, the Byzantine tradition blesses the waters. And I don’t mean they bless holy water . . . I mean they go to rivers and lakes and streams and bless them, proclaiming them blessed by virtue of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan.
Here’s the interesting thing to think about: the Son of God, in the flesh, entered the waters of the Jordan River. There’s a striking physicality to this when we consider the way that all water is connected. Even streams and lakes and oceans that have no direct connection are always connected with the constant cycle of atmospheric evaporation and precipitation. Water is water is water, and the Son of God, in the flesh, was baptized in it. Again in that great blessing of water at the Easter Vigil, the priest addresses the water in the second person as a singular universal creature: not just this water here in the font, but the same water that was present in creation, at the Red Sea, and in the Jordan.
There’s a mystical aspect to this that we have to confront. If we really believe that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, surely it means something to say that all water has been touched by him. All water, in Christ’s baptism, has somehow been touched by God. It is no longer just plain water; water’s true purpose, its true end, has been revealed as the water of baptism, the water of spiritual life and blessing.
That is the other way that the baptism of Jesus is an epiphany. Not only was the Son revealed to the world by the voice of the Father, but water was revealed to the world as the waters of new birth. Christ was baptized so that we can be baptized, so that our baptism is not just a symbol of human life, but is a real participation with the life of God incarnate, and with his people the Church.
What is extraordinary is that this same water remains what we use for taking a bath and growing vegetables, for making tea and cleaning the car. There is no getting away from the presence of God. Our baptism into the Church is not an escape from the world, but an entrance into the fullness of what the world was intended to be: a participation in the life and the love of the God who is Father, Son and Spirit.