The Baptism of Christ

The Baptism of Christ, Joachim Patinir, Kunst Historiches Museum, Vienna

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 12th January 2020, the 1st Sunday after Epiphany, the Baptism of Christ.

Today the Church asks us to remember the Baptism of Christ.

Picture again, in your minds eye, the moments after John baptised Jesus, as described by Matthew in his gospel (3:13-17).

Here is Jesus, a man in the prime of his life, about 30 years old. He is glistening wet from receiving John’s baptism of repentance, as he walks up out of the river Jordan. Then, suddenly, the heavens burst open. The Spirit of God descends like a dove to alight on him. And the voice of God declares from heaven, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.

What a strikingly vivid and dramatic scene – it’s easy to imagine being there, isn’t it?

Matthew describes an epiphany, in which God reveals Jesus to be his Son and anoints him with his Spirit.

The same epiphany, bringing together Jesus at his baptism, the dove and a voice from heaven, is also described by Mark, Luke and John. It must have been part of the common tradition of the earliest Christians on which Matthew and the other evangelists drew when writing their gospels.

For Christians by the 4^th Century these baptism passages were seen as supporting and illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that the one God consists of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are the only passages in the NT where we encounter all three persons together at the same time, in the same place.

Matthew would have known the book of Isaiah well, like all educated Jews of his time. He would have seen the parallels with today’s OT reading (Isaiah 42:1-9), in which God declares, ‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him’. But there is this crucial difference: for Isaiah, God identifies his chosen one as just a servant; whereas for Matthew, God identifies Jesus as his beloved Son.

What did John the Baptist make of Jesus’s baptism?

John recognised Jesus when he came to ask for baptism - not surprisingly since they were cousins close in age. John says to Jesus, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ What’s going on here?

John proclaimed ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1:4). He called people to repent, and baptised them as a sign that God forgave their sins. John knew that he needed baptism, repentance and forgiveness himself. But I think he must have believed that Jesus was such a good and holy man that he had no need of them.

John would also have recalled Isaiah’s description of God’s chosen servant in today’s reading, ‘He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.’ Perhaps John recognised the Jesus he knew in Isaiah’s description - softly spoken, filled with compassion for the damaged and the weak, yet determined and passionate for justice.

Despite John’s reluctance to baptise him, Jesus insisted, and John consented. And we know John then experienced the epiphany described by Matthew, since John’s Gospel records him saying: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” 

Only then does John realise the full truth, that his cousin Jesus is the promised Messiah, the incarnate Son of God, not just a remarkably holy man.

I wonder what his baptism meant for Jesus himself.

Jesus very deliberately chose to ask John for baptism, and insisted on it – it must have been very important for him.

Matthew gives us a clue when he records Jesus saying to John, ‘it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness’. For Jews, righteousness meant obeying God’s law and doing God’s will. Jesus clearly believed God wished him to be baptised by John. But for what purpose?

Perhaps God wanted Jesus to seek John’s baptism at the very start of his ministry in order to demonstrate publicly that Jesus was God’s incarnate Son, not just a good man like Isaiah’s servant. This was certainly the effect on John.

But Jesus himself surely also needed to be certain who he was before beginning his ministry. Is it possible this is also the very moment when Jesus finally understood that he was Christ the Messiah, the Son of God?

Whatever the truth of this, Jesus clearly associated himself quite deliberately with John’s proclamation, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matt 3:2) - he went on to proclaim it in his own ministry (Matt 4:17). And I like to think that Jesus chose to be baptised by John because he wanted to show his solidarity with sinful people like you and me, who desperately need to repent and be forgiven, even if he had no such need himself.

So what does Jesus’s baptism mean to you and me, 2000 years on?

Well, no doubt there are many answers. But this one strikes me.

The epiphany at the baptism of Jesus marks a great new insight into the nature of God as the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As God says through Isaiah, ‘See the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare’.

Before it, Jewish religious thinkers could only conceive of the relationship between God and a human being as that between a remote master and a terrified servant. After it, Christians could see the relationship as one in which God takes our human nature upon himself, to be incarnate as a human being, like you or me.

Everything is changed, everything is made new. God ceases to be a remote figure and we are no longer afraid. God comes near to us, as close to us as our own skin. We feel his presence to be like our loving Father, to be like Jesus, his Son, our friend and brother, to be like the Spirit which inspires all that is good and true in us.

Let us thank God for Jesus’s baptism, most particularly for the insight it gives us into God’s intimate and loving nature as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:

Almighty God,

who anointed Jesus at his baptism with the Holy Spirit

and revealed him as your beloved Son:

inspire us, your children,

who are born of water and the Spirit,

to surrender our lives to your service,

that we may rejoice to be called your children;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

The origins of Baptism & Confirmation

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 10th January 2016, the 1st after Epiphany.

On this 1^st Sunday of Epiphany we celebrate the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

St Luke in today’s Gospel reading (Luke: 3:15-17, 21-22) tells us what happened when John baptised Jesus: ‘When all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the same event is described in slightly different words in the other three Gospels.

In this striking scene God reveals to us that this man Jesus is his Son, the Beloved. It is also the only scene in the Gospels where we find all three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - together at the same time. It is in fact an epiphany of the Trinity, so it is especially important for all of us Trinitarian Christians.

Luke tells us that John’s baptism was ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.

John baptised with water those who came to him to signify their repentance – that is, their personal commitment to live in future by God’s standards. God forgives their previous failures to live up to his standards – their sins – which are symbolically washed away in the water.

Since the earliest times, Christians have been puzzled that Jesus came to be baptised by John. After all, the argument goes, Jesus as the Son of God must be without sin, with nothing to repent, so a baptism for forgiveness of sins seems inappropriate. Matthew tells us that the Baptist himself was reluctant to baptise Jesus, but Jesus insisted, saying ‘it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness’.

For Jews, righteousness meant doing God’s will. Jesus clearly believed God willed him to be baptised by John. But for what purpose? Perhaps so that Jesus would be certain who he was before beginning his ministry. Or perhaps so that John could testify to his Trinitarian vision. But I like to think that God willed Jesus to be baptised in a stunning act of solidarity with sinful people – with you and with me – so that Jesus stands alongside us as we bare our souls in repentance, as our sins are washed away, and as we receive God’s forgiveness.

What about the Christian sacrament of baptism with water as we know it today?

None of the Gospels tell us that Jesus himself baptised anyone, but his disciples certainly did. They did so with his approval while he was alive, as John’s Gospel tells us. John also records Jesus teaching that ‘no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit’. And the disciples continued to baptise after his death, following his Great Commission, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel in these words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  3000 are said to be have been baptised on the day of Pentecost alone!

Those who came to Christian baptism in the earliest days would have made the same personal commitment to change, in expectation of God’s forgiveness, as those who John baptised. This baptism, like John’s, must surely have been ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.

But as time passed, baptism with water more and more came to be seen as a ceremony of initiation into the community of believers, the Church. Baptism was essential, Christians felt, because Jesus had said no one could enter the kingdom of God without being born of water. In times when many children died in childhood, Christian parents naturally wanted to make sure their children would join them in the kingdom of God, so they began to baptise infants too. Parents and friends sponsored the infant Christian, making personal commitments on their behalf. The original idea of a ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ began to fade into the background, perhaps because it is hard to see what sins infants need to repent.

So baptism evolved to become the sacrament of Christian initiation we know today, and the parents and friends became what we call sponsors and godparents.

But surely there is something missing in this baptism as Christian initiation?

In today’s Gospel John the Baptist says ‘I baptise you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming.’ That’s Jesus, of course. ‘He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’. What has become of Jesus’s baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire?

The apostles were baptised with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, just as Jesus had promised them before his ascension. They also experienced tongues of fire – and fire was certainly kindled in their hearts. They went out fired-up to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, which as the Book of Acts tells us spread like wild fire.

The embryonic Church spread despite – or rather because of – persecution. As it grew the apostles found it necessary to appoint assistants, called deacons, one of them a man called Philip. When persecution came the new Christians scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria, leaving the apostles in Jerusalem. Philip fled to the city of Samaria, where he in his turn preached the good news. Large numbers of people responded and Philip baptised them.

This is the background to today’s 2^nd reading from Acts 8:14-17.

‘When the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them’. Peter and John were, of course, apostles. In Samaria, we are told, they discovered that the new Christians had not received the Holy Spirit, even though they had been baptised by Philip. Peter and John prayed for them, ‘laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit’ - in other words they received Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit.

The apostles were faced with the problem of maintaining the unity of the church as it spread away from Jerusalem. Their solution seems to have been to insist that they alone could administer Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit by laying on of hands. As a result Christians in faraway places maintained links with the apostles in Jerusalem.

As the church grew and the original apostles began to grow old and die, they consecrated others they trusted to carry on their work, which included administering the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These others in turn consecrated their successors to do the same, and so on to our own day.

Their successors are what we now call bishops. The line of succession we call apostolic succession. And the sacrament of confirmation is Jesus’s baptism with the Holy Spirit, administered by a bishop in apostolic succession laying his hands on a person seeking confirmation.

So to conclude, as we celebrate the baptism of Jesus:

First, let us give thanks for the insight we receive into the nature of God as Trinity from the epiphany of Father, Son and Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism by John.

Second, let us give thanks for the sacrament of baptism with water, which builds on John’s baptism, to mark our incorporation into Christ’s body the Church, whether as infants or adults.

And third, let us give thanks for the sacrament of confirmation, through which we are born again as we receive Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit, to inspire us and put fire in our hearts to work for his kingdom.

An Epiphany of the Trinity

An address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on 11 Jan 2009 - the Baptism of Christ

Tracks of charged particles in a cloud chamber

Ever since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been fascinated by the pictures taken by particle physicists of the tracks of sub-atomic particles in cloud chambers.

The particles are smashed into each other in accelerators. By studying and measuring the patterns they make as they split and decay, scientists can see traces of the underlying structure of matter. The results confirm or disprove elegant theories – mathematical models - constructed by theorists.

I’m looking forward this Summer to the first results from the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Built in a circular tunnel 17 miles in circumference under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, it will accelerate beams of charged particles to almost the speed of light and smash them together head on. Among the things scientists hope to discover are traces of a weird particle called the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Some people jokingly call it the God particle, because it gives mass to all other particles!

In much the same way, I think, as particle physicists search their cloud chambers for events that reveal the nature of matter, Christian theologians have searched the Bible for passages which reveal something of the nature of God.

The Greek word ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia), from which our word epiphany comes, literally means a showing forth or a manifestation. And it is during Epiphany that we are invited through the chosen readings to reflect on how God reveals himself to us, how he is shown forth, made manifest. In the Church callendar, Epiphany begins on Jan 6th, when the focus is on the story of the Magi, when the Christ-child is first shown to the gentiles. But on this and the next 3 Sundays in the season of Epiphany, until Candlemas on 2 Feb, the set readings present us with many other epiphanies, many other stories that reveal something of the nature of God.

So today I invite you to reflect on how God is revealed to us in today's readings as a Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and what this means for us.

Psalm 29 presents us with an epiphany of God the Creator.

From time immemorial human beings have seen traces of the majesty of God the Creator in the natural world, and in the awesome power of natural forces.

Psalm 29 captures this kind of epiphany in these words:

The voice of the Lord splits the flash of lightning;
the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe
and strips the forests bare;

I think we’ve all experienced this sense of awe when confronted by the great forces of nature, and by wild and desolate landscapes. They make us feel small and insignificant.

But this is a rather primitive idea of the nature of God, isn’t it? If this were all we knew of God, no doubt we would still be sacrificing our children to appease such a terrifying presence, as many primitive cultures have done, and as it seems the Hebrew patriarch Abraham planned to do with his son Isaac, before the angel prevented him.

Over the long centuries of OT time, the Hebrews came to see themselves as having a covenant with this powerful God, who promised to protect, strengthen and nurture them, so that Psalm 29 can finish with these words:

The Lord shall give strength to his people;
the Lord shall give his people the blessing of peace.

By the time of Jesus, Jews had begun to think of God the Creator as loving his children - the Children of Israel - as a father does. And of course Jesus built on this in his teaching. He himself clearly experienced God as like a loving Father, and he taught his disciples – and through them us - to pray to Our Father in Heaven.

God the terrible creator is transformed into God the loving Father.

The 1st reading from Acts (19:1-7) is about an epiphany of God’s Holy Spirit

The dozen or so disciples that Paul met in the great pagan city of Ephesus were followers of John the Baptist. They had been baptized into John’s baptism of repentance, but they had not been baptised or initiated as Christians. They knew nothing of the Holy Spirit, which the disciples in Jerusalem had experienced after the Ascension.

Paul explained to them that John himself had taught his disciples ‘to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus’. And they accepted baptism from Paul, not ‘in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’, the Trinitarian words we use now, but ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’. Perhaps the earliest baptismal words were changed as later theologians began to understand the nature of God as a Trinity.

Only then, when Paul laid his hands on them, did they experience the Holy Spirit. We are told they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just as the disciples in Jerusalem had done. We are not much given in the Church of Ireland to speaking in tongues and prophesying, are we? – in fact we are rather afraid of the idea! I hate to think what the Rector and Bishop Trevor would do if I started to speak in tongues from this pulpit! But if we interpret this phrase as how the early Christians described their sense of being empowered, empowered by Jesus to do the work of God, perhaps we would do well to be more open to the idea.

The 2nd reading from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel (1:4-11) describes an epiphany in which Jesus is revealed as the Son of God at his baptism by John.


‘Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan’, Mark tells us. ‘And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart, and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven,’ – from God – ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”’. What an amazing vision Mark conjures up with so few words! It has inspired so many artists over the centuries to paint beautiful images.

The Baptism of Christ, by Andrea del Verrocchio, 1475, in the Uffizi, Florence

But who saw the dove, and who heard the voice from heaven? I don’t think it can have been the crowd down by Jordan’s banks, because Matthew uses the pronoun ‘he’: this vision is surely a private not a public experience. The pronoun is ambiguous. Is it Jesus who sees the vision? Possibly. Perhaps this is the very moment when Jesus the man realises his own significance as the Son of God. But perhaps more likely it is the Baptist who sees the vision. For the writer of John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist testified: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’”

Whichever it is, this passage is very important for all Christians who see the nature of God as the Trinity. This is the only place in the Gospels where we find all three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - together at the same time. It is the defining vision of the Trinity.

The Church teaches that God is a Trinity – a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit


After analysing these and other Bible passages for a long time, around 3 centuries, Christian theologians achieved a high degree, though not complete, unanimity on this. And they expressed it in the historic creeds which we still say together.

But do we have to rely entirely on the authority of ancient scriptures and long-dead theologians to reach this understanding?


I wonder if, like the particle physicists probing the nature of matter with their cloud chambers and experiments, we can ourselves come to understand God as Trinity, by probing our own hearts and spiritual lives, and the hearts and spiritual lives of those about us? I rather think we can.

All around I see faint but unmistakeable traces of a God like a loving Father, of a Son that shows people how to relate in love to all about us, and of a Spirit that animates all creation!