One of the greatest plays in the English language is Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth is a Scottish general who receives a message from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Macbeth is immediately inflamed with ambition. Supported by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and seizes the Scottish throne for himself.
But there’s a problem. After the deed, Macbeth and Lady MacBeth can’t live with themselves. Their consciences torment them. They cannot sleep since murdering King Duncan. When Lady Macbeth does finally fall asleep, she is haunted by nightmares.
She walks and talks in her sleep about the deed, rubbing her hands as though she is trying to wash out the stain. She’s rubbing them, trying to remove the spot, but it’s no use. “Here’s yet a spot,” she cries, desperately rubbing. “And here’s the small of blood still.”
Later, when the two hear a knocking at the castle door, she goes to tell Macbeth that they should go to their quarters to wash. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she declares.
Of course, no amount of washing averts the tragic fate of the couple. Macbeth spirals downward into paranoia and madness. Lady Macbeth commits suicide.
The play has universal appeal, because the predicament is universal. We can all relate to her. She’s done wrong, and she feels dirty. Washing her hands is an outward gesture that expresses an inward desire. She wants to be cleansed; she wants to be made pure.
The same can be said for all those who thronged to John down by the river Jordan. They want to be cleansed; they want to be made pure.
That is why they stand on the river’s banks listening intently to him as he preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This piques their interest. Granted, they probably have never murdered a king. But they have all done things they are sorry for, things that weigh heavy on their conscience.
So they listen to John preach. Many respond by confessing theirs sins as they are immersed in the waters of the Jordan River, one repentant sinner after another. They receive baptism at the hands of John.
What is the significance of this act? To answer this question, let’s consider for a moment the properties of water. Water cleanses, water removes stains, as we have already seen. Undergoing baptism is a symbolic act that represents not the removal of dirt from the body, but the pledge of a clean conscience before God (cf. 1 Pet. 3:21).
Water also drowns. Undergoing baptism also represents a giving oneself over to death and burial. Everyone can appreciate the annihilating, destructive powers of water. The mind of man in Bible times perceived the sea as a chaos, a standing threat to order. At any moment, it could exceed the boundaries assigned to it and carry away everything in its path. It was the primeval flood that might submerge all life (Joseph Ratzinger).
Paradoxically, water also gives life. The great rivers in the world of the Bible—the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile—were seen as the sources of life. The Jordan too—to this day—is a source of life for the surrounding region (Joseph Ratzinger). The Psalmist praises God for providing water for his creation: “You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it” (Psalm 65:9).
These properties taken together tell us what the people standing on the banks of the Jordan are seeking: They want to exchange an old, failed, life for a new one. They desire to leave behind a sinful life that they have led up until now and to start out on the path of a new, changed life (Joseph Ratzinger).
But then the unexpected happens. There amid the grey mass of sinners stands Jesus. He comes not from Judea or Jerusalem, but from Nazareth of Galilee, from a distant country, as it were.
But that’s not the unexpected. What’s unexpected is that he is the “more powerful” one, for whom the great prophet John is not worthy to perform even the most menial service (Brendan Byrne). He is the one who has a greater baptism than John, for while John baptizes with water, he will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
And yet there he stands, wanting to be baptized by John. We have already seen that confessing sins goes together with baptism. Is that something Jesus could do? How could he confess sins?
If we are right in what we said about what the people who came to John at the Jordan are seeking, it is clear that we cannot say the same about Jesus. He has no past to regret. He has not disobeyed God. He has not offended against his neighbor. In all he does, his motives are sincere; in all he carries out, his intentions are good.
In short, he has no need to confess his sins, because there are no sins for him to confess. If we turn to Matthew’s account of this scene, we find John the Baptist just as perplexed as we are, and for the same reason. He says: “Lord, I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me?” (Matt. 3:14). Indeed, how do we make sense of Jesus’ baptism? Why is Jesus there at the Jordan River?
Jesus is there because he stands in solidarity with all those people. He stands together with them in the deepest sense, that is, he makes their sinful humanity—our sinful humanity—his own.
This means that when Jesus steps into the Jordan River to undergo baptism at the hands of John, he steps into our place to receive our baptism. This is the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, the baptism that the people at the Jordan sought in their desire for a new start.
Again, he made this baptism his own, because he made our humanity his own. That is why the great fourth century church father Athanasius could say that when Jesus was washed in the Jordan, it was we who were washed in him and by him.
This is the baptism that he completes on the cross, in which it finds its true meaning. The term baptism refers to the suffering of the cross in the saying of Jesus recorded in Luke 12:50: “I have a baptism to undergo and how great is my distress until it is accomplished.”
In the cross his solidarity with us in our sinful humanity is seen with the greatest clarity.
And in the light of the cross we see what Jesus is doing when he submits to baptism at the hands of John. He loaded the burden of mankind’s guilt onto his shoulders and bore it down into the depths of the Jordan (Joseph Ratzinger). He is, as it were, the true Jonah, who told the crew of the ship, “Take me and throw me into the sea” (Jon. 1:12).
But Jesus comes up out of the watery chaos. When he does, he sees the heavens torn apart. This is a striking image. It recalls our Old Testament lesson on the First Sunday of Advent. Then we heard the prophet Isaiah plead with God on behalf of his people: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1).
And here at the Jordan, the heavens are rent, as if in answer to the prophet’s plea. Before, the heavens constituted an impenetrable barrier between God and us. What Jesus actually “sees” is a breaching of that barrier that allows the creative power of God to come through to God’s people and the world (Brendan Byrne).
That creative power of God none other than the Holy Spirit. Through the opening of the heavens, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove. The image of the Holy Spirit as a dove hovering over the waters of the Jordan recalls what we heard in our Old Testament lesson today.
There “the “wind” from God swept over the face of the waters.” A better translation is “the Spirit of God brooded over the face of the deep.”
God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. Do you see the connection? Just as the Spirit of God presided over the watery deep at the original creation, so does he here at the Jordan. Jesus is the new creation. He is the new Adam in whom the Creator’s original intent for us human beings is realized.
Jesus’ baptism is good news for us, the good news whose messenger is a dove.
Do you remember another place in Scripture in which a dove is the messenger of good news? After the waters of God’s judgement submerged a violent and evil world at the time of the great flood—which you now know is an image of baptism—Noah sent out a dove. The first time the dove returned to him because she could not yet find dry ground on which to rest her foot.
But the second time she returned to him with an olive leaf in her beak. It signaled to Noah that the waters of God’s judgment had receded. It signaled the restoration of peace on earth, of new beginnings (cf. Gen. 8).
Jesus Christ here emerges from the waters of baptism. In Jesus Christ the dove has found the one on whom she can rest. She signals that he is the true restoration of peace on earth.
On Christmas eve we heard the angels sing: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men on whom his favor rests.”
Today we gain insight into the meaning of the angels’ words. During Christmas, we behold the Christ child. During Epiphany, we discover who he is for us. “He himself is our peace” (Eph. 2:14).
A voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
With these words, there is another epiphany. For the mystery of the Triune God we worship here emerges, at the beginning of Jesus’ mission. The Triune name of God recurs at the end of his mission, when Jesus, after his resurrection, gives to the disciples the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19).
This brings us to our final point. We have been speaking about our baptism that Jesus willingly underwent for us, in our place. But we have still to speak about our own baptism.
To accept the invitation to be baptized now means not to go to John, but to Jesus. It is to go to the place where he identified himself with us, so that we may receive there our identification with him (Joseph Ratzinger). The Apostle Paul speaks of this identification when he reminds the believers in Rome that as many as were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death. In the watery grave of baptism, we have been buried with Christ into death. But having been united with him in a death like his, we have also been united with him in his resurrection from the dead. Therefore, just as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the Father, we too can walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:3-6).
This is the good news that Lady Macbeth and all of us like her need to hear and accept. We all share in her predicament. We all have “blood on our hands,” as it were. But we cannot wash out the stain on our own. Only by repenting and believing the gospel, enacted in baptism, can we be cleansed, can we made pure. In baptism we see that “He was given over to death for our sins, and raised to life for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Amen.