God Was in Christ

Text: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

In today’s text, John the Baptist is out in the wilderness preaching.  You will remember we met John back in Advent, twice!  He reappears now, during Epiphany.  And that is as it should be because John is our first epiphany, our first vivid look at who Jesus is.  And in linking John the Baptist and Jesus, Luke puts Jesus in the line of the prophets of old.  The prophets also spoke fierce words of truth.  The prophets also called upon Israel to repent and change its ways.  John does that.  In fact, John has always been thought of as the last of the Hebrew Scripture prophets.

        But John has a new word from the Lord, he says that though many people come out to the wilderness to hear him, there is one coming after him who is “mightier” than he.  John preaches judgment and says the mighty one coming after him will be the judge.  John baptizes with water; the one coming after him will baptize with fire.  And who comes?  Just a guy from Nazareth, a regular human being, who humbly submits to John’s baptism and who prays - a gesture in which someone bows and humbly submits to God.  There is no question, Jesus is clearly a human being, showing the humility that is appropriate for all human beings in the presence of God.

        And yet when Jesus is baptized by John something happens that has never happened before or since: the “heaven was opened” and “the Holy Spirit descended upon him” and there was “a voice” that came from heaven that proclaims, “You are my son, the Beloved.”

        What Luke is saying here, right at the very beginning of his Gospel, that while Jesus is definitely a full human being, he is also the long-awaited Messiah.   He is fully God and fully human.

        In ancient days, when people encountered Jesus, they had two things to say about him: he is really a person, an obvious human being, and he is the fullness of God.  His followers looked at him and, very early on, began using the most effusive, extravagant words to describe him.  They told stories about him, just like the story Luke has told us this morning.  Now, in our modern era, some have said that Jesus was a “great man of history,” and “a fine moral teacher,” but nothing more.

But nobody who ever met him said that about him.  What people said about Jesus from the earliest days was that Jesus was God, he was the Son of God, God’s Beloved, the Savior of the world.  And the New Testament is a report on how Jesus’ followers quickly moved to the acclamation that this Jesus from Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly, was in complete union with God.  God does what Jesus does.  God is one with who Jesus says God is.  Jesus is not just an aspect of God, a messenger of God.  Jesus is the one whom we acclaimed him to be here on Christmas: God with Us.

        The modern idea that the followers of Jesus, after he was crucified, let their feelings get the best of them and got carried away by their grief into believing that Jesus was divine is absurd.  You just can’t get from a Jesus was a only a great moral teacher and a deeply spiritual person to a Jesus who began a church that spread out across every nation and race filled with Christians willing to die, not in some misguided jihad, but in order to tell everyone about Jesus. 

        The only plausible explanation for those martyrs, for the church, for the Gospel of Luke, for the presence of this congregation gathered here 2000 years later is that Jesus was not only a great moral teacher, a deeply spiritual person, but also the Son of God, the Beloved, the Messiah in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.  There is no lack of the man Jesus in God and no lack of God in the man Jesus.  In Jesus, people got a redefinition of God and a redefinition of humanity.  God redefined as God, not just in power and glory but also in service and suffering weakness. 

        So when someone asked me recently, “How can you believe in God with all the suffering and heartache in the world?”  I presumed that the questioner was working out of a very limited idea of “God” a God who is always in control, whose essence is unconstrained power, rather than the God who was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world through service, suffering, sacrifice, and love.  Certainly not the most appealing of messages in a culture that worships self-sufficiency and potency. 

        And when someone says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” I respond, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

        Luke says that the one who stood knee deep in the muddy Jordan being baptized by John, is none other than the Son of God.  And if you believe that, then you cannot help but have a very different understanding of who God is. 

        Beginning that day in the Jordan River Jesus redefined both “humanity” and “divinity” so that never again could people think “human being” or “God” without thinking of Jesus.  Never again could anybody say that humanity was without hope, rotten, and of no account after God Almighty became present in this Jew from Nazareth.  Never again could anybody say that God was distant, threatening, fierce, and overpowering after God was revealed to be who Jesus is. 

        And did you notice, Luke offers no explanation of Jesus’ divinity/humanity.  Rather Luke testifies to what everyone who followed Jesus eventually knew – Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human.  God was “in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19).  To see Jesus is to see God (Jn 14:9). 

        Now, I’m sorry, if you are one of those who prefer your God to be with you only as a remarkably effective moral teacher or wise sage.  For when Jesus was baptized the heavens opened, the Holy Spirit descended, and a voice was heard and humanity and divinity were fused together.

Now, I know this is complicated stuff and at a minimum, intellectual humility is required, as Michael Green put it, “Never be so arrogant as to presume that God’s truth is limited by your ability to understand it.”  We need a willingness to let God be God incarnate, close to us, rather than the simpler God we thought up on our own.  Sometimes the strange, rational impossibility just happens to be true – God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self. 

        And I’m sorry, if you prefer your God to come at you in an exclusively spiritual, inflated, pale blue and fuzzy vagueness hermetically sealed from where you actually live.  When Jesus was baptized, he stood in solidarity with all of us sinners, submitting to baptism as we must submit to baptism and to God if we are to be brought back to God.  And yes, it’s a lifelong task to think about God with all the complexity that God is present to us in Jesus, fully human and fully divine.    

        And so this Sunday of the Baptism of Jesus is an Epiphany.  We discover that God is not exactly the God we presumed God to be.  And we are not exactly the lost, forlorn, unredeemably sinful ones we thought ourselves to be.  For God comes to us, stands with us, prays for us, speaks to us, holds nothing back from us in.

        So toward the beginning of another year, at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, in our first glimpse of Jesus, nothing is held back.  We are told everything that is absolutely essential for us to know about Jesus.  The curtain is pulled back; Jesus’ full identity is made manifest to us.  The greatest mystery at the heart of the Christian faith is exposed through a voice from heaven, so that we in our time might adore and worship – “this is my Son, the Beloved.”