Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Matthew 3:13-17; Acts 10:34-43
Every year at this time we make an enormous leap between the visit of the wise men to Jesus when he was a baby and his baptism in the Jordan as an adult, thirty-odd years later. And every year – thank goodness, or it would be dead boring for me to preach and for you to listen – I notice something new and strange about this old familiar story. This year it’s a question of the order in which the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – tell the story. Because first Jesus is baptised, then God’s Spirit comes down on him. First his obedience to God, symbolised by his immersion in Jordan’s waters; only then is God’s spirit put on him, in an echo from our first reading this morning. And when I read that, in all three Gospels – John has his own take on the story, as we’ll hear next week – I thought, Hang on a moment. If this is Jesus we’re talking about, surely he and the Spirit are more than nodding acquaintances already?
Go back to Mary and her conversation with Gabriel before Jesus’ birth. The only explanation she gets from the angel – and if it were me, I’d have thought it was a bit sketchy – is: the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. From before his birth – if we’re going by John, from before the beginning of the world – Jesus and the Spirit are intimately connected. So why this order of events here: baptism then the Spirit?
Maybe it would help if we consider why Jesus is being baptised. John evidently sees the baptism he offers as a new start for people who recognise they have gone wrong and want to begin again with God. And his intuition tells him that Jesus is in no need of such a new start. Isn’t this the wrong way round? he enquires of his cousin. Shouldn’t you be baptising me? But Jesus wants to ‘fulfil all righteousness’, so they go ahead as originally planned. As you know, we’ll be journeying with Matthew’s Gospel through this year, and we’ll see again that Matthew’s very strong on Jesus’ fulfilment of prophecy, his fulfilment of the law, his getting things right, so non-Christian Jews can’t say that Jesus isn’t kosher. So for Matthew it’s important that Jesus is dotting his spiritual i’s and crossing his theological t’s. But maybe there’s a deeper point too.
And that’s the highly unfashionable idea of obedience, of doing what you’re supposed to do whether or not you feel like it. My guess is that for a lot of people here, that message was preached loud and clear at you, three times a Sunday, all through your childhood; an experience which may have inspired many youthful Presbyterians never to want to set foot in a church or hear the word ‘obedience’ for the rest of their lives. But since the fall last century of both fascist and communist regimes, where obedience to the state had sent people into a dead end, these days, the idea of choice rather than compulsion is crucial to us. Moreover, in our theme introduction, we saw how Isaiah promised that God’s servant would bring people out of prison and set them at liberty. So why am I going on about obedience?
Because it is through the obedience of doing what God requires that the Spirit comes upon us: as the Spirit came upon Mary who said Yes to God at the annunciation; as the Spirit came upon her son who said Yes to God at his baptism. It is the same sort of self-discipline that you get in Scottish dancing or in bridge: unless all players can agree on the rules of the game, and keep them, there is no room for the moment of inspiration.
Of course, obedience to God is not always as safe and uncomplicated as we might wish. Obedience to God’s true command is bad enough. Isaiah’s successor John the Baptist discovered that, when the message he proclaimed from God about the need for everyone, even kings and queens, to mend their ways, landed him in prison. Jesus discovered that, as we have heard again this morning from Peter’s speech in Acts, when his message of God’s coming kingdom put him onto a cross. And obedience to a false idea of God is infinitely worse, as cult members have discovered, to their cost. Yet there are tried and tested ways, through prayer, Bible study and advice from people we trust, of discerning God’s true command. And our danger is more likely to be disinclination to do what God wants, because it may cause us upset. Consider the people listening to Peter’s sermon. In our reading we didn’t hear the story background, but these are Gentiles, members of the household of Cornelius.
He’s is a God-fearing centurion, who’s been going to synagogue a while and getting the hang of Judaism without actually converting. But while he is at prayer one day, an angel commands him to invite a Jewish stranger to his house. Normally we hear this from Peter’s point of view: how brave and obedient it was for a Jew to go to a Gentile’s house and eat with him, after God had shown him in a vision that Gentiles were not unclean, as he had always been told. But it must have been hard on Cornelius too: an important military man in an occupied country, asking one of these Jews – notoriously touchy about their religion – to his house; would he be rejected as unclean himself?
When Peter gets there, he gives the set-piece speech we have heard this morning about Jesus’ life, beginning with his baptism; his work; his death; his resurrection; and the fact that prophets testifying about him – Isaiah included – witness truly that Jesus offers forgiveness and reconciliation with God to everyone who is sorry for where they have gone wrong.
And just as Peter says ‘everyone’, what happens? In a way reminding us of how Jews from all over the world, gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost, experienced God’s Spirit, suddenly all the Gentiles listening to him feel the Spirit with them. And their lives thereafter must have changed drastically, as a hierarchical military Roman household got used to the idea of being brothers and sisters in Christ, and all the implications that entailed.
When we get the call to obey God, what we are asked to do may well not be spectacular. It may be to give gentle encouragement to someone who feels like a broken leaf or a candle about to go out. It may involve opening someone’s eyes to new truths in a metaphorical way. It may mean campaigning for the closure of detention centres in a very practical way. I can’t tell you how it will be for you, because that is something only you and God need to know. But one thing I can tell you for sure. When we decide, however nervously and falteringly, to try to do what we believe God wants us to do, we too will find God’s Spirit, God’s presence is with us, giving us peace of mind, and showing us how deeply and eternally we are appreciated as God’s beloved daughters, God’s beloved sons.