Most gracious God, bless the thoughts of our hears and the words of my lips. Help us to grown in faith and in love that we may be pleasing to you and a blessing to others. We ask of it in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
When I walk through the book shops, toy shops and video shops here in Hong Kong, I noticed that there are literally hundreds of varieties of super heroes in the toy stores, on video tapes, books and toys. All of them had one thing in common. They overcame “Evil” through violent destruction of the evil ones.
Professor Dr. Walter Wink of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City calls it the belief in ‘redemptive violence.” Evil must be overcome with violence.
Our reading from the Prophet Isaiah this morning looks forward to the coming of the Messiah, and it proclaims a different kind of approach, especially in verse two and three.
There it says of the promised one:
He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. IN faithfulness he will bring forth justice.
What I find most interesting in today’s reading is the role the promised one will have in bringing about justice. Three times, in this short reading, his task is described as, “bringing forth justice.”
Justice is a big word in this reading, indeed it is a big word in the Bible.
The prophets were the mouthpieces for God’s justice, agents for God. They were preoccupied with calling God’s people to doing justice – to equitable behavior. They preached God’s will is a society in which all people are treated fairly.
God, according to the Hebrew prophets, is especially concerned for those overlooked in the normal routines of the world:
- The poor and the weak
- Those not important enough to be heard or see in the council rooms of the rich and powerful
- Those cannot afford to hire top rate lawyers, such as Martin Lee, costing millions of dollars Hong Kong to represent them in the courts.
Justice is so central a characteristic to the kind of society that God wants, that anything less would mean that the people were not God’s people. The prophets tell us that despite all their prayers and religious ritual, without justice, God would turn a deaf ear to his people’s prayer.
All in society, particularly the poor, were to be given their most basic rights for food, clothing and due process. The prophets not only confronted the unjust in society, they also stirred up among the forgotten the longing for a day when all would be made new, when justice would light up their dark world.
Isaiah says that the promised one will establish justice, especially for those in most need, “…to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison, and to release from dungeon, those who live in darkness.”
He also says that the promised one will be made a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, for those who in the past were not God’s people..
The Gospel of this morning tells us that on the day Jesus appeared at the Jordan, he found John baptizing those who confessed their sins and expressed a need for God’s deliverance from their various forms of captivity.
Sin is a form of blindness, a kind of slavery and an absence of light.
The Gospel reading of this morning tells us that the one promised by Isaiah appears to be part of this repenting and enslaved community. Of course he had no need for the washing, he could have kept his distance. Instead he chooses to be intimately united with them and so enters John’s cleansing waters.
Jesus may be without sin, but he too is part of a people enslaved by the Roman occupation, a people living in the dungeon and darkness of a foreign power.
In Matthew’s account of the baptism, the voice from heaven speaks words over Jesus which are very similar to the ones we heard in the Isaiah passage.
While John recognizes that Jesus has no need for repentance, Jesus says it must be done, “to fulfill all righteousness.”
What does that mean?
First of all, Jesus’ presence to John’s baptism puts the stamp of approval on what John is doing. John truly is the precursor, truly the one calling people to readiness for the promised one of God.
God wants this baptism for Jesus, for it will be the occasion for God to announce that the promised one has come who will set things right. Justice will be established through him, and people will be invited by him to live in right relationships with each other and with God.
Jesus receives h is commission to do exactly that on this day.
The baptism of Christ Jesus is a lesser point for Matthew, the epiphany that follows is the key point, that epiphany or revelation that comes when the voice from heaven says, in words which are much like the words in this morning’s reading from the prophet Isaiah: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
The voice is speaking not to Jesus. Rather it is speaking to us. Do we hear it?
Are we ready to live the just life this One makes possible for us through our own baptism?
- That baptism in which we receive the same Spirit that Jesus had.
- That baptism that makes us, like Jesus, a people beloved and pleasing to God?
I think that most of you are familiar with the Gospel reading regarding the dream Joseph had. In the dream he was told the true identity of the child Mary was carrying. The child would be called, “Emmanuel, God with us.”
Well how far would God be willing to go to be with us?
Would God address sinners from a safe distance? Calling us to repentance from the clouds as it were, not soiling his hands with our sinful and tired world?
Would God send still more prophets to call us to himself?
No, God had already done that many times over with no results.
The human response to how obstinate the human race is, would have been to throw up hands in disgust and proclaim, “Enough already! And strike us all dead. To send in the super heroes to blow up the homes of the wicked and kill all whose who have worked evil.
But our God is not some kind of humanly invented hero.
Our God is completely different from us and our God surprises us.
- Not by zapping those who have sinned with thunderbolts.
- But by entering our flesh, taking on our human condition.
- By identifying with us so completely that he even goes down into the water to mix with those people who are admitting that they are sinners in need of redemption.
There must have been better people praying in the Temple that day who we would have thought to have been more “worthy” of a divine visitation than those at the River Jordan. But instead of going to those at the Temple, Jesus is immersed into the same water that has washed over sinners.
Who can resist a God like this?
How did Jesus set things right? How does he fulfill all righteousness?
His baptism shows us he would not use brute force to get us to be a just people – forgiven and right before God and just with one another.
Rather it shows us that he chose to move among us, winning us over to him by his reaching out to the fringe, to the outcasts, the sick, those who are sinners, those who are the poor and imprisoned.
He would do this gently, since there are already languishing people who have had too much to suffer. IN the words of Isaiah once again – Jesus would not break “a bruised reed…and a smoldering wick he shall not quench…”
By joining people in the waters of their own predicaments, God had taken the first steps in acknowledging their importance in the plan He has to set things right; to bring justice and right relations to all people.
Jesus has come for people who are broken or like a ‘smoldering wick,’ feel depleted, about to go out.
He enters the waters, not where the movers and sharers of society meet to make deals that affect so many others, but where those who know their needs and have turned to God have gone.
They have gone out to John because they cannot make it on their own. They need to hear and experience that God has head their distress and has come to breath a new Spirit into them.
This Spirit descends upon Jesus, but soon it will descend on all who follow him into his baptismal waters.
At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, as he takes his leave of his disciples, Jesus promised to be with us till the end of time.
He is still Emmanuel, God with us.
He has given us His Spirit through our baptism so that we are not left alone throughout our lives to stumble along and get tripped up by sin and the unjust ways of our world.
Jesus’ baptism shows us how close God wants to be with us, and our baptism establishes this closeness for all of our lives.
We gather together today to remember this and to draw closer to God and to one another in His name. We gather together today to be strengthened by the one who is different from our super heroes. We gather together today to worship and follow the one who does not use violence to end violence – but who instead enters into our lives in every way and transforms us – giving to us that which we need to be faithful servants of God.
Today’s readings does not call us to do anything in particular.
Rather they call on us to understand and to know what it is that God has done and will do, and how it is that God will do it.
They are a testimony from God to us about Christ Jesus, and a reminder that God has come to be with us in Him, and that He has come to help us to be with God – and to live in the way that God wants all people to live.
Praise be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – and forevermore. Amen.
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