For Sunday
Epiphany 1C
Collect
Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
We return in this first Sunday after the Epiphany to a scene we encountered in Advent, just a few weeks ago, when John the Baptist was drawing people to the wilderness with a message of repentance and baptism. This message isn’t so much heard by Jesus as it is embodied—that he would come forward in grace to be a part of this grace.
There is a recurring theme in Christian thought about the nature of Jesus and his participation in such earthly and human things. That people of faith have wondered from the beginning why Jesus would need to be baptized. And the easy answer from tradition responds that Jesus doesn’t actually need to be baptized—he’s perfect—so there is no need. But that the world needs his participation in it.
In Eastern tradition, the place of the baptism of Jesus is paramount. It was the inspiration for the ancient feast of the Epiphany and serves as a nexus point in the life and ministry of Jesus. For it isn’t the birth of Jesus that sets things off, but Jesus’s baptism, for it is from here that everything else unspools.
The baptism also serves as a leverage point in Christian theology. For the Western church, Jesus’s divinity is present at birth—making his divinity and humanness an innate tension from the beginning. Some Eastern traditions offered the baptism as the origin of the divinity, that the Holy Spirit embodies Jesus in baptism and empowers him to do the miraculous things he will soon offer the world.
The essential truth virtually every tradition offers us is that the baptism of Jesus is a central, foundational story in the life of Jesus and the beginning of his messianic work. It compels us to see his movement, not just his person, as the essential character of Christ. And we can all join him in this movement the same way he did.