Chapter Four – Baptism and Temptation
Read Matthew
3:1-4:21; Mark 1: 1-15; Luke 3:1-4:21; John 1: 1-36
This chapter is
intended to explore the questions of our faith from a doctrinal perspective.
Why did Jesus get baptized? Was it necessary? Who is John the Baptizer? What
was he offering to the people? Why do we have the temptation story? All of
these questions are valid questions before the people who call themselves
Christians and have been debated throughout the ages.
Let’s start with
John. What we know of John from Luke’s Gospel is that he is related to Jesus
through Mary. They are cousins though all of the accounts later give no
indication of that. Mark, Mathew and John simply indicate that John the
Baptizer comes out of the wilderness as if he is a wild man from God. That may
not be far from the truth as we study the extent of John’s ministry. Historically
we know that John existed and Herod of Antipas, the son of the Herod of Jesus
birth, had him beheaded. John preached a sermon of repentance and baptized
through the water a baptism of repentance. This custom of cleansing with water
comes through the Jewish purification rituals that had existed for centuries.
But John adds a twist in that he indicates that the cleansing must come from
within. Come to the water and repent your sins before God and be forgiven for
those sins and go forth in grace and mercy before God. John is often thought to
fulfill the prophecy of Micah 4:1-5 and the prophecies of Isaiah 40:3 which
tell us that one would come out of the world before the Messiah paving the way
for his arrival. Many scholars today believe that John may well have been Elijah;
certainly his appearance and message fit the description of Elijah from Kings
and Chronicles in the Old Testament. Regardless of what you believe in that
regard, John did in fact pave the way for Jesus ministry. He brought together a
group of followers, some of them would go on to follow Jesus, and he began the
people thinking about repentance to God.
So what exactly
was John offering? John was offering hope in the midst of great unrest and
struggle. On the one hand the people were struggling with the hard hand of
Rome. Taxes were taking a heavy toll and Rome would put up with very little
before lashing out at the inhabitants of Israel. On the other hand, they were
struggling with their own religious identity. The leadership which called
themselves Jewish clearly was more Roman than Jew. Herod was not a well-liked
leader and many would long for his removal. The Religious leadership of the day
in the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and Pharisees seemed more about law than they
did about forgiveness and repentance. So John’s message of hope in the midst of
this tension was well received. Josephus, the historian indicates that large
crowds followed him wherever he went. And what he invited folks to do is to get
right with God. Not in the legalistic way that the Sadducees and Pharisees were
demanding, but in the old way of the prophets. And his message that one was
coming after him that would be the Messiah gave people hope that freedom was on
the way.
All four Gospel
writers spend time with the Baptism story. In fact it does a number of
important things for the greater story of Jesus. First it promotes the idea
that Jesus has been chosen specifically by God for the message He brings. Second,
the Gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew indicate that God declares Jesus to be
His Son. In John God declares Jesus to the Lamb of God, indicating for the 1st
century Jew that this is the completion of the Passover story? All four Gospel
accounts use this baptism to begin the story of Jesus. Matthew and Luke have
birth narratives but we hear nothing about what Jesus’s message until after the
baptism story. So for all the Gospel accounts, the Baptism of Jesus is the
beginning of His ministry. Why reveal it in such a way? First, by god
proclaiming Jesus identity, Jesus authority to preach and teach what He does is
secured. Secondly the baptism of Jesus clears the way for his message of
repentance, forgiveness and love amidst the struggles of legalism and law that
exists.
One of the most
discussed questions of the Gospel accounts of Jesus is whether He needed to be
baptized or not. There are really two theories that dominate the argument. The
first is that Jesus, having been born of God, is born pure from sin. If this is
the case then why get baptized at all. The argument is that Jesus receives
baptism from John for recognition and to be obedient to the will of God. So
does He need it? NO! But He needs to do it in order that God will be pleased
with Him and so it is out of obedience. The second theory is more controversial.
Because Jesus was born to a human mother, then all the inherent natures of Adam
are also in Jesus. In other words, Jesus has the inherent nature we all have to
be disobedient to the will of God and so baptism becomes necessary to cleanse
that nature. We have the temptation story to use as argument that the latter
rather than the former reason is true.
Let’s take a
little detour here. Up until the Protestant Reformation the prevailing doctrine
of baptism was that it was an act of God. Though we simply had to show up, God
is doing what only God can do. And that is to cleanse us of the taint of original
sin which has flowed down through generation after generation. If you want to
understand that, realize that we all have within us this inherent nature to want
to do it our way, on our time and with our rules. We fight this imposing will
of God in our lives from birth onward. So baptism cleanses us of the taint of
that nature so that we are free to learn and grow within the nature of God’s
will. Since God is the principle actor, the when, the how and the method are
not as important as the actual act itself. After the Protestant Reformation,
the Ana-Baptist movement, from which many Baptist understandings derive,
believed that baptism was not a God thing, but an outward sign of inward change
of the person. Hence the term, “Believer’s Baptism”.
So what is the
purpose of the Temptation story? We should note that the story is not part of
John’s Gospel. John clearly wants us to know that Jesus is God right from the very
beginning and having a temptation story lends nothing to that proclamation so
it is clearly missing. Matthew, Mark and Luke though have the story intertwined
in the beginning of his ministry. Why? To tell a story within a story I
believe. First we have the baptism of Jesus and God proclaims Him to be God’s
Son. And then we have Jesus tempted in the wilderness by Satan. Now if Jesus
could not be tempted why have the story? But what if Jesus could be tempted in
His humanness? What if Jesus temptation story is for us more so than for Jesus?
What if the story is to show us what perfection in human form looks like? Jesus
being tempted by Satan would lead one to believe that He could be tempted and
yet He never succumbs to that temptation. He is tempted in His hunger, He is
tempted in His belief in who He is, and He is tempted in His power and
authority. Yet, in all of that Jesus never wavers in His obedience to follow
God’s will. In the story we have the perfect example of what it means to live
as we were originally designed to live.
No comments:
Post a Comment