The Only Way That Doesn’t Make Sense
WEDNESDAY IN THE FIRST WEEK AFTER THE EPIPHANY
Matthew 3:13-17
I like it when things make sense, when they flow logically. In college, I made a perfect score on my logic final. It hasn’t gotten me anything except a sermon illustration, but it remains a good way to get to know me. Making sense of things—even complex, multi-faceted things—comes naturally to me. Messy, mystical, imprecise wonder, on the other hand, isn’t really my thing. Sometimes new, counter-intuitive concepts ask my mind to bend a little too far, and, when I can’t make sense of them, organizing the premises into neat categories of understanding, I get frustrated enough to leave it behind entirely. I don’t like that about myself, but I’m learning to accept it.
In his encounter with John the Baptist at the River Jordan, Jesus asks the baptizer to believe something that doesn’t make sense—that can’t make sense—and I think it takes a leap of faith for John to go along with it. “Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented.”
John’s ministry was focused on helping God’s people prepare to receive the kingdom of God. He promised them that God was coming near to them. He explained that the power of God to renew the world was coming not through the religious institutions that they had known and trusted for generations but through a personal experience of God’s Spirit. The baptism of repentance was how John invited people to turn away from a life that was dependent upon the power structures of the earth and embrace their place in the coming reign of God. When the one who was to come arrived, he would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire—the full power of God.
Jesus was the one they were waiting for. Jesus was the one John had been preaching about. Jesus was the one who had come to bring the fullness of God’s reign to the earth and to set the world ablaze with the power of God one person, one heart, one life at a time. The wait was over. The time had come. But the one that they had been waiting for came to John and asked to be baptized with the same baptism of preparation and repentance that John had been administering for years. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t make sense.
“Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” Jesus said, asking John to trust him even if he didn’t understand it. The phrase that is translated for us as “fulfill all righteousness” carries a little more nuance than a simple English rendering can offer. In a different context, the word fulfill could also mean “to cram full,” as in to stuff a bag or a net until it was at maximum capacity. Or it could mean to “to level out” as in grading over a hollow in field or leveling off the top of a measuring cup. It can also mean “to satisfy” as in faithfully execute an office or responsibility. It can mean “to finish” as in completing period or a task. It can mean “to verify” as in to prove a prediction or prophecy as true.
Jesus wasn’t asking John the Baptist simply to do the thing we’re accustomed to doing but somehow, in a way that transcends our logic and understanding, to allow Jesus’ baptism to become the means by which our hollow is levelled out, our inadequacies are crammed full, our insufficient duties are satisfied, our period of longing is finally completed. How can that possibly happen as Jesus is submerged below the surface of the muddy waters of the Jordan River? In a way is possible because it doesn’t make sense.
Jesus meets our deepest need for fulfillment not by prescribing a spiritual discipline or laying out a regimen designed to make us more holy. That. Never. Works. No one ever set the world on fire with the power of God by requiring human beings to do anything. We fizzle out. We let ourselves down. We end up substituting a new religious institution for the ones we left in the first place. It’s a non-starter. Jesus does not show us the way to God. Jesus becomes the way to God by becoming us. Jesus meets our deepest need by becoming the hollow that needs to be filled in, by becoming the emptiness that only God can cram full, by inhabiting our failures so that our responsibilities can finally be fulfilled.
We prepare to receive the fullness of God’s reign and to greet the coming of Christ in the same way John taught. We forsake our attachment to institutions of earthly power in order to take our place in the kingdom of God. We enact that preparatory work in the waters of our own baptism. But our place in God’s reign is not something we then go off and find on our own. Jesus has come to bring it to us. The fiery power of God’s Spirit comes and dwells within us not because we have made ourselves holy but because Jesus has become one of us--because he is us. He has made these imperfect vessels the perfect receptacles for God’s Spirit.
Before he met Jesus, I don’t know what John the Baptist expected the coming reign of God to look like. I suspect he always knew that it would come and meet God’s people where they were, in a wilderness place, apart from the fleeting comforts and protections the world can provide. His work of preparing God’s people to receive the one who was to come was perfectly designed to help us become vessels for God’s power. But no logic could have expected the way that God chose to show up—in a transformation made possible not by our pursuit of holiness but by God’s own pursuit of our brokenness. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s the only way it could ever work.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas