Preaching Paths 12 January 2025  Baptism of Our Lord

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

It can be daunting to preach from Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism: how does one find traction in something so succinct and unadorned? Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 presents two simple scenes. First, John faces the crowds who hope he is the longed-for Messiah; he points away to “one more powerful” who “is coming” (vv. 15-17) to refine us, baptizing with “Spirit and fire.” Bracketing Luke’s aside about John’s eventual imprisonment (vv 18-20),*our text moves to v21. There is no dialogue between Jesus and John (cf Mt 3:13-14). Luke does not encourage discussion from the pulpit of the “fittingness” of Jesus’ baptism. The rite itself is covered in six words in a subordinate clause. Luke dwells instead on its aftermath: the Spirit descends while Jesus prays, and the heavenly voice blesses and rejoices. Reflecting on the details unique to Luke’s account can fuel illuminating preaching.

First, Luke alone places Jesus squarely amid the crowd of others coming for baptism. “When all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also was baptized . . . ” v 21a) suggests that Jesus undergoes baptism in solidarity with many others who have come for immersion, in order to signify their embrace of God’s inbreaking reign, announced by John.  Luke reminds us that Jesus was one of us and with us. Jesus, like every human being, was born into a social matrix already in place. Like us, Jesus was heir to imperfect systems and webs of relationship that bestowed on him both constraints and privileges. He was poor, yet enjoyed privileges and prerogatives denied to women. He inherited a religious tradition that made law-abiding righteousness all but out of reach for the poor. In his baptism, Jesus chose to identify with us, and thus with the messiness and moral ambiguity of the human condition.

Second, here and throughout his two-volume work, Luke-Acts, Luke turns a spotlight on prayer. It is while Jesus is praying following his baptism that “Spirit” (no definite article) descends from heaven in the form of a dove. Simultaneously, a heavenly voice addresses Jesus in the second person: “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am pleased,” echoing Ps 2:7; Is 42:1b. (Notably, Mt has the divine voice announcing to all present, “This is my son….” etc.). Again and again, the Spirit descends when people of faith are immersed in prayer. Prayer opens us, bodily, to the Spirit’s transforming power.

Third, Jesus submits, in the company of broken humanity, to a human washing that signifies a human commitment to serve the inbreaking reign of God. The empowering Spirit answers, and the Father rejoices in his self-giving: “You are my beloved son, in whom I delight.” Jesus’ fidelity is unique, yet his baptismal experience foreshadows our own. Either we, or the church on our behalf, hands us over to the God who, from our first breath, has already claimed us—“My beloved child!” Our commitment actively to embrace the reign of God may come years later. Even then, our steadiness in pursuing God’s ways in the world is stumbling and inconstant. Struggle, error, failure, and loss bring us to our knees, again and again. Yet, it is often precisely in our empty-handed vulnerability that our hearts break open. The Spirit comes to liberate us from self-absorption, clear our vision, and recall us to the prophetic and compassionate work of healing this broken world that God so relentlessly loves.  

* Luke’s notation about John’s eventual imprisonment by Herod has been taken by some interpreters as a strictly sequential account of events, leading them to insist that Jesus could not have been baptized by John himself. Yet the syntax does not require such a reading. Luke almost certainly assumed the validity of Mark’s and Matthew’s accounts, in which Jesus is baptized by John.