The Baptism of Christ, by Rev’d Lucy
Isaiah 42.1–9, Psalm 29, Acts 10.34–43, Matthew 3.13–end
Today’s gospel reading describes a moment at the beginning of Jesus’ public life. He comes to the River Jordan, where John has been baptising people, immersing them in water as a sign of repentance and renewal. Jesus asks to be baptised and John does so. And as Jesus comes up from the water, the heavens open, the Spirit of God descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
It’s one of the moments the church returns to again and again, and is frequently depicted in Christian art. Pierro della Francesco’s version hangs in the National Gallery: Christ standing pale and still at the centre his hands together in prayer, with John to his right and the dove suspended directly above him.
But Matthew’s gospel includes a detail that the other gospels do not. Before the baptism happens, John tries to stop it. Mark and Luke record the baptism without comment. John’s Gospel never narrates it directly. But Matthew pauses the action and lets us overhear an awkward conversation, a sign that the meaning of this baptism was not self-evident, even within the early tradition.
John has been baptising in the Jordan, calling Israel to repentance, preparing the way for one greater than himself. And now that greater one arrives, and asks to be baptised. John resists: “I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?”
To grasp why John resists, we need to understand what he was doing at the Jordan. Ritual washing was familiar enough. Jews immersed themselves regularly in mikvaot, ritual baths, for purification. But John’s baptism was different in ways that would have unsettled his contemporaries.
For one thing, it was administered by another person rather than undertaken privately. For another, it was preparation for judgment: John warned that God’s decisive action was imminent, and those who came to him were getting ready for it. But most striking of all: baptism was what Gentiles underwent when they converted to Judaism. Jews didn’t need to be baptised. They were already within the covenant.
By calling Israel to the Jordan, John was making an implicit claim: covenant membership itself needed renewal. The people of God needed to cross the river again, to re-enter the land, to be reconstituted as if starting over. His location mattered. The Jordan was where Joshua had led the tribes into the promised land. John stationed himself at the place of entry and asked Israel to come through the waters once more.
So when Jesus arrives and asks to be baptised, John’s confusion is understandable. This baptism is for sinners preparing for judgment. For those who acknowledge their need to start again. What business does the sinless one have in those waters?
Jesus’s answer doesn’t quite resolve the difficulty. “Let it be so now,” he says, “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.” The phrase is dense, almost cryptic. Righteousness here is not a moral quality that Jesus lacks and needs to acquire. It names God’s saving purposes, the setting-right of all things. Jesus enters the waters not because he needs cleansing but because he is taking his place among those who do. He stands where sinners stand. He goes down into the river alongside them.
John consents, Jesus is baptised, and then three things happen in rapid succession: the heavens open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice speaks from heaven.
In Isaiah 64:1 there is a cry, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Those words belong to a communal lament, spoken after exile, when God’s presence feels withdrawn and the world looks misaligned. That language is being taken up here. The opening of heaven signals that what has been closed is no longer sealed. What has been held apart is now opened.
The Spirit descends like a dove. The image recalls Genesis, where the Spirit hovers over the waters at creation. It recalls Noah’s dove returning over the floodwaters with an olive branch, signalling that the chaos has receded and new life can begin. At the Jordan, something is being created. Something is beginning.
And then the voice: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
These words weave together strands from Israel’s scriptures. “You are my Son” echoes Psalm 2, the enthronement psalm spoken over Israel’s king. “The Beloved” may recall Isaac, Abraham’s beloved son, led to sacrifice on Mount Moriah. And “with whom I am well pleased” comes from Isaiah 42, the passage we heard this morning: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.”
The voice identifies Jesus as royal Messiah, as servant, and, perhaps, as the one who will be given over. These identities do not compete. They converge in one person, standing dripping in the river Jordan.
Isaiah’s servant passage tells us something about the manner of Jesus’s ministry. The servant will not cry out or lift up his voice in the street. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a dimly burning wick. His work is to bring forth justice – mishpat, the right ordering of things – but not through coercion or spectacle. His reach extends to the coastlands, to the distant edges of the known world. He is given as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open eyes that are blind and release prisoners from darkness.
This is the vocation the voice confirms. The Spirit’s descent is an anointing. The Hebrew word for “anoint” gives us “Messiah,” the Greek equivalent “Christ.” At the Jordan, Jesus is publicly commissioned for the work Isaiah described.
Psalm 29 sets this moment within a larger frame. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters,” it declares. Seven times the voice of the Lord thunders, breaks, shakes, strips the forests bare. The God who speaks at the Jordan is the God who spoke at creation, who sits enthroned above the flood, who gives strength and peace to his people.
The same voice that called light out of darkness, that subdued the chaos waters, now speaks over Jesus: “This is my Son.”
In Acts, Peter summarises the gospel to Cornelius, and he begins at this precise point: “the baptism that John announced.” The message spread throughout Judea, he says, beginning in Galilee after the baptism, “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.”
For the early church, the baptism was the hinge. Everything before it, the hidden years in Nazareth, remains obscure. Everything after it, teaching, healing, confrontation, death, resurrection, flows from this moment when heaven opened and the Spirit descended.
And Peter is speaking to Cornelius, a Gentile. “God shows no partiality,” he says. “In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” The servant given as a light to the nations is drawing those nations in.
Today’s feast falls on the first Sunday after Epiphany. The season is shaped by moments of disclosure: first in the visit of the Magi, and now, in the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Each is a showing-forth of who Jesus is.
The baptism is also a threshold. The infancy narratives end; the public ministry begins. After this, Jesus will be driven into the wilderness, will call disciples, will teach and heal and cast out demons, will set his face toward Jerusalem. The opened heavens and the descending Spirit and the voice; these inaugurate everything that follows.
But the voice does not speak only over Jesus.
The collect we prayed at the start of this service asks that “we, who are born again by water and the Spirit, may be faithful to our calling as your adopted children.” What is declared over Jesus at the Jordan is extended to those baptised into him. The voice that named him ‘Beloved’ speaks that name over us too.
This is not a metaphor. Christian baptism draws us into the same waters, the same Spirit, the same relationship. The God who delights in Jesus delights in those who belong to him. We are not servants striving to earn favour. We are children, already loved.
The beautiful anthem that we just heard the choir sing puts it simply: “Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew.” The Spirit that descended on Jesus is the Spirit given to us. The breath of God that hovered over the waters at creation, that rested on prophets and kings, that came upon Jesus at the Jordan, is breathed into the church.
The heavens that opened that day have not closed again. The voice that spoke has not fallen silent. Over every font where baptism is administered, over every life marked with the sign of the cross, the same declaration is made: ‘Beloved child’.
This is the ground on which everything else stands. Before any demand is made, before any call to faithfulness or service, the relationship is established. We are loved. We belong. The God who created us, who called each one of us by name, who drew us through the waters, delights in me and delights in you.
And that love doesn’t depend on our performance or waver with our doubts. It is the love that does not break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick. It preceded our awareness of it and will outlast our capacity to respond.
The voice at the Jordan spoke before Jesus had done anything: before a single miracle, before a single teaching, before the cross. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The pleasure comes first. The mission flows from it.
And the same is true for us. We are not earning our place. We are living from it.
The waters of baptism, like the waters of the Jordan, are not merely cleansing. They are creative. They are the place where God acts, where identity is conferred, where the Spirit descends. From those waters we rise into a life already held by grace. The voice still speaks and heaven remains open.