A sermon on Matthew 3:13-17 for the Baptism of Our Lord. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz.
Giving a baby a name is kind of a lot of work. First, you and your spouse have to agree on a name, which could potentially be a drawn-out process. But having a baby name written in your Notes app doesn’t really make it official. Once the baby is born, you fill out the paperwork for the birth certificate, which makes it official, but that isn’t really enough to fully verify their identity, because insurance won’t work until baby gets a Social Security Number, so you need to submit all the stuff for that too. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through, but it’s understandable. Because it’s not just giving a name, it’s giving an identity, something that is going to stick with that child forever.
We’re now in the season of Epiphany , which is all about showing us who Jesus is, revealing His identity. The Christmas season shows us that God became man. The Epiphany season shows us that this Man is God. And today, the first Sunday after Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord. At Jesus’ baptism, He is called some interesting names, but that’s not Him getting a new name but revealing to us who He is. We also find our identity in baptism as we are given new names and are united to Christ.
I. Identity Issues
Jesus’ baptism is kind of a big deal because it’s this big turning point in the life of Christ. Scripture records a fair bit for us about Jesus’ birth and early years: the journey to Bethlehem, the angels and shepherds, the visit of the magi, the flight into Egypt and return to Nazareth. But after that, we don’t really hear much. Besides the incident at the temple when Jesus was twelve, we don’t hear anything about what happened during the first almost thirty years of Jesus’ life.
Jesus has been living in obscurity in the small town of Nazareth. Subject to His parents, learning His craft, providing for His mother, but that’s about it. The hype of Christmas has died down. It doesn’t seem like anything is happening. No one really knows who Jesus is.
But people are still waiting for the Messiah to come. So when John starts doing his thing, they think, “Maybe it’s him.” John clears up that misconception pretty quickly, but even he doesn’t really know what’s going on.
After Jesus’ baptism, John is recorded as saying, “I did not know Him” (Jn 1:31). Now, John must have known who Jesus was—they were cousins and Mary and Elizabeth seemed close. But John doesn’t know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ. He might have heard the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, he might have been able to guess, but he hasn’t received any divine revelation or assurance that that was the case, that Jesus was the guy. Even John doesn’t know Jesus’ true identity.
What about you? Who are you? What’s your identity? To answer that question, we usually jump to easy things: your name, your career, your relationships. I’m Caleb. I’m a pastor. I’m a husband and a father. But you can change your name. You can lose your job or even your loved ones. So that can’t be who you really are on a deeper level. So who are you? What gives you your identity?
On a deeper, moral level, I think most people would say, “Well, I’m a good person. That’s who I am.” But what happens when you mess up? When you do something you never thought you would or maybe even swore you wouldn’t? How do you resolve that identity crisis? You can’t be a good person if you do bad things. Maybe you struggle with depression or despair, with complete lack of an identity. “I’m garbage. I’m nothing. I’m no one.”
II. Identity Resolved
Jesus was living in obscurity and anonymity until His baptism. There His identity is revealed and His work begins. Before Jesus’ baptism, John might have had some doubts about who Jesus was or who the Messiah was. But after this, there’s no room for doubt. The voice from heaven makes it clear, “This is My beloved Son.” Jesus is the Son of God. This title is not bestowing anything new upon Jesus. He has always been the Son of God from eternity. But now this identity is revealed and proclaimed. This Man is the Son of God.
Jesus also received the Holy Spirit. Now this sounds a little weird, because we know that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit (Lk 1:35), and, well, He’s God so it’s not like He was ever without the Spirit. What’s going on here?
In the Old Testament, prophets, priests, and kings would be anointed with oil. This served as their installation into this office and the beginning of their new work. The oil symbolized the Holy Spirit, who would strengthen them for this new calling.
With His baptism, Jesus starts his public ministry. He hasn’t been doing much until now, but after His baptism, things really start rolling. There’s only three years between His baptism and His death, and everything happens in that short timeframe. So at His baptism, Jesus is anointed, not with oil that symbolizes the Holy Spirit, but with the Spirit Himself. Jesus is anointed as He begins His ministry to give Him the strength and the power that He needs to carry out this work. And Jesus starts His ministry with his Father’s approval, “in whom I am well pleased.”
So Jesus’ baptism is used to reveal His identity and to start His ministry, but why baptism? This could have been done in some other way. And Jesus doesn’t have any sin so He doesn’t need to repent or receive forgiveness, so why is He baptized?
Jesus doesn’t need forgiveness. But we do. So Jesus is baptized in the place of sinners to show His solidarity with sinners. Jesus is baptized as a sinner because He is now on the side of sinners. He’s one of us now. Now He’s fighting for us.
Jesus is baptized because that is what His work as the Anointed One entails. To take the place of sinners, to take their sin and carry it to the cross. At His baptism, Jesus receives not just the Holy Spirit, He receives the sin of the world on His shoulders. It’s as if there’s a drain at the bottom of the baptismal font. Our sins are washed away, flow down the drain, and travel through a sewage pipe to the Jordan to be placed on Jesus. At His baptism, Jesus begins the work of redemption. His ministry has begun and that ministry is one which leads Him to the cross to endure the punishment that our sins deserve so that no punishment is left for us.
Jesus didn’t need baptism. But baptism needed Jesus. John could only baptize with water, that’s all he could do as a human being. It takes Jesus to grant forgiveness. So Jesus is baptized not to be cleansed by the water, but to cleanse the waters of baptism so that they give the forgiveness of sins. By His baptism, Jesus puts the power in baptism so that those who were baptized by John and we who are baptized into the name of the Triune God receive the work of the Spirit: the forgiveness of sins.
In baptism we are united with Christ. Our sins are placed on Him, and His righteousness is given to us. Because we are united with Him that means that what happened at His baptism happens to us.
No one saw it and no one heard it, but at your baptism, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on you and the voice from heaven spoke about you, “This is My beloved son, my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased.” At your baptism, God placed His name on you as you were baptized “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” God has marked you as His, He has claimed you to be His own, he has adopted you as His dear child, so He gives you His name.
Just as Jesus’ identity was revealed in His baptism, so our identity is given to us in baptism. We are children of God, loved by the Father, well-pleasing to him. This is the bedrock of your identity. This is something about you that will never change. God will always love you. He will always see you as His dear child. This is the foundation of how you look at yourself, of what you think about yourself.
If you think you’re a good person, at least, in comparison to others, baptism says, “No, you need forgiveness. You need to be washed clean. Don’t look at yourself, look to Christ.” If you think you’re garbage, baptism says, “No. God loves you. You have been bought by the blood of Christ.” If you think that you’re worthless, that you can’t possibly be of any use to God, baptism says, “No. God has a plan for you. The power of the Holy Spirit is yours.”
Baptism is the cure to our identity crisis because it places our meaning and our purpose not in us, since we change so quickly and easily, but in God and how He views us, as wrapped in and united with Christ.
Identity theft is a big problem. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received 1.4 million reports of cases of identity theft. If you can pass yourself off as someone else, you can wreak a lot of havoc. Baptism, in a certain sense, is identity theft. It is taking the identity of Christ, the beloved Son of God, and giving it to us. Nothing in us matches up with that description, but it’s who we are since we have been united to Christ. In Him we find our identity, in Him we are well-pleasing to God. Amen.
