To Jesus, in His obscure and humble home, the thrill which passed through every section of society at the voice of the Baptist, and the appearance of a true man among the ignoble shadows and self-satisfied hypocrisies, came as a sign from His Heavenly Father that the time had arrived for His manifestation to the world. For now, by John's work as an avowed forerunner, the long-slumbering hope was aroused, and “with mighty billows the Messianic movement surged through the entire people.”
In going to listen to the preaching of John, our Lord doubtless followed that inward guidance which was the supreme law of His life. He offered Himself for baptism. The full meaning of this act is beyond our apprehension. The baptism of John was no mere Essene or Levitical ablution. It was accompanied with the confession of sins. It was not “a laver of regeneration” (Tit_3:5), but “a baptism of repentance.” It was a sign that a man desired to cleanse himself from moral defilement, to abandon all righteousness of his own, and “to draw near” unto God “in full assurance of faith, having his heart sprinkled from an evil conscience, and his body washed with pure water.” How, then, could it be accepted by the Divine and sinless Son of Man? To others-but not to Him-could have been applied the words of Ezekiel, “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean.” All that we know is what the Gospels tell us. We see that the stern prophet, who was no respecter of persons but had dared to address scribes and Pharisees in words of scornful denunciation, was overawed before the innate majesty of the Son of God. This new Elijah, in his shaggy robe of camel's hair, with its coarse leathern girdle-this ascetic dweller in the deserts-this herald whose voice rang with sternest rebukes to startle drowsy souls, and stir them to repentance-is at once hushed into timidity at the presence of the Lord of Love. So far from welcoming the acknowledgment of his ministry by one whom he instinctively recognized as his Lord, he made an earnest and continuous effort to prevent Him from accepting his baptism. He even said, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” But the only explanation given to us is in the words of our Lord Himself. He overcame John's hesitating scruples by saying, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” “He placed the confirmation of perfect righteousness,” says St. Bernard, “in perfect humility.”
Everyone who accepted baptism at the hands of John accepted it in its general meaning and purpose, and applied it to his own spiritual condition. In fact, he would accept it in no other way. And there must have been a variety of spiritual conditions as great as the individual cases that presented themselves. To some the meaning of the rite would be a strong but diffused desire with vague ideas; to others, material and social progress and national aggrandizement would loom the largest; while to others, again, the spiritual would be the most prominent part of the conception. We cannot reduce all the adherents of new movements to the same unbroken level of spiritual nature or expectation. And many a man who attaches himself to such movements does so accepting the general motif, but by no means pledging himself to every tenet and position.
How didst thou start, thou Holy Baptist, bid
To pour repentance on the Sinless Brow!
Then all thy meekness, from thy hearers hid,
Beneath the Ascetic's port, and Preacher's fire,
Flow'd forth, and with a pang thou didst desire
He might be chief, not thou.
And so on us at whiles it falls, to claim
Powers that we dread, or dare some forward part;
Nor must we shrink as cravens from the blame
Of pride, in common eyes, or purpose deep;
But with pure thoughts look up to God, and keep
Our secret in our heart.1 [Note: J. H. Newman.]
1. Of the intercourse of John with Jesus the Fourth Gospel gives an account which differs widely from that presented in the Synopties; but, apart from the Johannine colouring of the later narrative, the difference is sufficiently explained on the ordinary view that the Synoptists describe the meeting between the two at the time of our Lord's baptism, while the Fourth Evangelist concerns himself only with John's subsequent testimony to the now recognized Messiah (cf. Joh_1:7 f). There is no real discrepancy between John's, “I knew him not,” reported in the Fourth Gospel (Joh_1:31), and the representation of Matthew (3:13 ff) that, when the Man from Nazareth presented Himself at the Jordan, John declined at first to baptize Him, on the ground of his own unworthiness in comparison. Even if we suppose that, in spite of their kinship and the friendship between their mothers, the two had not met before, the fact that John's baptism was a baptism of repentance and confession seems to imply a personal interview with applicants previous to the performance of the rite-an interview which in the case of Jesus must have revealed to one with the Baptist's insight the beauty and glory of His character. On the other hand, the “I knew him not” of the last Gospel, as the context shows, means only that John did not know that Jesus was indeed the Messiah until he received the promised sign.
2. All the Evangelists unite in telling us that Jesus, as soon as He was baptized, went straightway up out of the water, as if to intimate that it was chiefly for others, and not from any personal necessity, that He had submitted to the rite. Luke tells us that as He ascended the shelving bank of the Jordan our Lord was engaged in prayer. We need not be surprised at this fact. On his ordination day a minister of the Gospel, if he enters at all into the spirit of the ceremony, will be in a praying frame from morning to night. How much more, then, would we expect this “Minister of the sanctuary, which the Lord pitched and not man,” to be found in a Jacob-like wrestling of spirit on the occasion of His baptismal ordination
What was Christ's prayer? Edersheim says that one prayer, the only one which He taught His disciples, recurs to our minds. We must here individualize and emphasize in their special application its opening sentences: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” The first thought and the first petition had been the conscious outcome of the Temple-visit, ripened during the long years at Nazareth. The others were now the full expression of His submission to baptism. He knew His mission; He had consecrated Himself to it in His baptism: “Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” The unlimited petition for the doing of God's will on earth with the same absoluteness as in heaven, was His self-consecration-the prayer of His baptism, as the other was its confession. And the “hallowed be thy name” was the eulogy, because the ripened and experimental principle of His life. How this will, connected with “the kingdom,” was to be done by Him, and when, He was to learn after His baptism. But it is strange that the petition following those which must have been on the lips of Jesus in that hour should have been the subject of the first temptation or assault by the Enemy; strange also that the other two temptations should have rolled back the force of the assault upon the two great experiences which He had gained, and which formed the burden of the petitions, “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.” Was it then so, that all the assaults which Jesus bore concerned and tested the reality only of a past and already attained experience, save those last in the Garden and on the Cross, which were “sufferings” by which He “was made perfect”?
3. As the prayer of Jesus winged heavenwards, His solemn response to the call of the Kingdom-“Here am I”; ‘Lo, I come to do thy will”-the answer came, which at the same time wan also the predicted sign to the Baptist. Heaven seemed cleft, and, in bodily shape like a dove, the Holy Ghost descended on Jesus, remaining on Him. The Jewish imagination, fastening on that passage in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis which speaks of “the Spirit of God brooding upon the face of the waters,” according to the Rabbinical comment, “like a dove hovering over its young,” loved to figure the Spirit as a dove. And there was another idea which had lodged itself in the minds of the later Jews. The voice of prophecy was mute, and men, longing to hear the silence broken, and remembering perhaps how their poets in old days had styled the thunder the Voice of Jehovah, persuaded themselves that over and anon God spoke from Heaven, sending forth at perplexing crises what they called Bath Kol, the Daughter of a Voice.
Being a child of his age and people, the Baptist shared those ideas, and God employed them to reveal the Messiah to him. As Jesus after His baptism stood praying on the river bank, “Lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” It was a distinct attestation of His Messiahship, since “the Son of God” was a Jewish title for the Messiah. The vision was seen and the voice was heard by Jesus and by John, and by no others. Even so it was when the Lord manifested Himself after the Resurrection: His glorified body was invisible to the eye of sense, and only those perceived Him who were endowed with the gift of spiritual vision. Jesus and John were thus enlightened, and they beheld the vision and heard the voice, while the multitude saw nothing and heard nothing. It was fitting that it should happen thus. For them alone was the revelation designed-for Jesus, that He might know that His hour had come, and for John, that he might recognize the Messiah.
If this vision were objective, would it not mark a new departure in the method by which Jehovah communed with His servants the prophets? The “voice of the Lord,” or the “word of God,” came to them and spoke in their exalted, inspired, and sensitized consciousness. It was “a conviction of surprising force and intensity”; and when it was a message for the people, it became, by thought and communion with God, at length too great and strong for retention, and burst forth in “Thus saith the Lord.” Moses and all the prophets heard, believed, and obeyed these voices and uttered their messages, as the slightest examination of the records would amply show; and had they been objective, open to the eyes and ears of all and sundry, they must seriously have militated against the prophets' sacredness, their separateness of office and function as Jehovah's representatives and heralds. Micaiah said to the king of Israel: “I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left.” In like manner, Isaiah declares: “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim,”-and the prophet goes on to describe the scene in the heaven that is at once the throne-room and the temple. No one seriously considers that these visions, and others like them, existed anywhere else save in the inspired consciousness and sublime imagination of the prophets themselves. This is placed beyond doubt by the vision of Stephen at his martyrdom. Surrounded by his persecutors, he declared he saw the heavens opened, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. Not when they saw the vision, but when they heard the testimony, they cried out, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord and stoned him. Stephen alone saw it. We cannot but conclude, then, that the vision of John and Jesus was subjective.1 [Note: J. Feather.]
Matthew and Mark made clear the subjective nature of the vision by saying, “He saw the Spirit of God descending,” and “He saw an opening in the sky.” Moreover, the words of the message are compounded of two texts from the Hebrew Scriptures, suddenly heard within the mind and invested with a special meaning and authority. They are instances of audition, of the “distinct interior words” whereby the spiritual genius commonly translates his intense intuition of the transcendent into a form with which his surface mind can deal. The machinery of this whole experience is in fact natural and human machinery, which has been used over and over again in the course of the spiritual history of mankind.2 [Note: E. Underhill, The Mystic Way, 87.]
And once again I saw him, in latter days
Fraught with a deeper meaning, for he came
To my baptizing, and the infinite air
Blushed on his coming, and all the earth was still;
Gently he spake: I answered; God from heaven
Called, and I hardly heard him, such a love
Streamed in that orison from man to man.
Then shining from his shoulders either-way
Fell the flood Jordan, and his kingly eyes
Looked in the east, and star-like met the sun.
Once in no manner of similitude,
And twice in thunderings and thrice in flame,
The Highest ere now hath shown him secretly;
But when from heaven the visible Spirit in air
Came verily, lighted on him, was alone,
Then knew I, then I said it, then I saw
God in the voice and glory of a Man_1:1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint John the Baptist.]
