I grew up in a Christian tradition that holds to believer baptism, rejecting infant baptism. While I think there are valid arguments for both forms of baptism which both sides should consider, that wasn’t an argument in my home. I was expected to request to be baptized at some point.
My parents were incredibly devout in their faith. My Dad quit his very lucrative job in the business world to become a Bible school teacher and later on a pastor, taking a major financial hit as a result. My Mom wrote Bible studies and led numerous women’s groups. But despite this major preoccupation with teaching others the Christian faith, they never shoved it down my throat. And their lack of pressure when it came to baptism was equally gentle.
Being somewhat shy as a kid, the thought of getting baptized in front of a crowd gave me pause. And I kept pausing until I was 19, at which point I realized I had moved from being shy to being disobedient. I was no longer waiting for the right time, I was holding out on God.
It was then, having come face-to-face with my resistance, that I made the definitive statement of being “all in” with our Lord.
READ
All four Gospels begin with John the Baptizer. Mark speeds directly to the story, introducing him as the long-anticipated messenger referred to by Moses (Ex. 23:20), Isaiah (Is. 40:1-5), and Malachi (Mal. 3:1-3), and Mark does it in just the second verse of the Gospel. He follows that with this:
And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (Mark 1:4-8).
John is significant for two reasons. One has to do with who he was and the second with what he did.
Two millennia later, it’s hard for us to fathom this, but John was more famous than Jesus. Jews throughout the Roman Empire knew of John and had received his baptism but were ignorant of Jesus. John was a towering figure, a passionate prophet with fire in his eyes and a biting sting to his tongue. It had been four centuries since Malachi had written the last words of the Hebrew Bible and John’s appearance on the scene had ignited the Jewish imagination. Even his diet and clothing gave him an otherworldly air.
In a time where expectations of deliverers from Roman oppression were high — the names Judas and Jesus and Saul were filled with all kinds of messianic hope — John was dynamite and he exploded on the scene.
So, John’s endorsement of Jesus is of great importance. He’s the messenger, the prophet, the kingmaker, just as Samuel was for Saul and David.
The second thing about John was his baptism itself. In Jewish tradition at the time, a rite of purification in a river had become a normal practice for those who’d become ritually unclean. We see this in 2 Kings 5:14, when Naaman the Syrian general is cleansed and cured by immersing himself in the Jordan River seven times. But not only was this seen as a purification rite, it became used as part of the process whereby non-Jews became Jews. In a way, it symbolized coming through the waters of the Jordan River into the promised land just as the Hebrew people had done in Joshua 3.
So, when John was baptizing people who were already Jews, was he doing a cleansing ceremony or was he effectively saying, “You’re not real Jews as evidenced by your behavior. You need to become the people of God all over again”? The fact that he included both Jews and non-Jews in the same ritual leads me to lean to the second explanation.
He was telling people that their sins had put them outside of the people of God. They needed to repent. They needed to come clean and get clean. And the people agreed. They confessed their sins — I assume this was out loud and possibly quite humiliating — and became brand new Jews. But even so, his preaching was so clear and so moving that “all” in the Judean countryside and Jerusalem came and took part. There was a sense that God was remaking his people and they all wanted in on it.
Even as powerful as John’s baptism was, he insisted it was just a drop in the bucket of what was coming, just as he was just a shadow of the person who was coming.
ENGAGE
When was the last time you confessed a sin out loud to someone? What pushed you to the point of needing to do so?
Verbal confession to other people has far more power than mental confession to God. Why is that? And what keeps you from doing so more often?
Baptisms and weddings are among the biggest ceremonies most of us will ever take part in. What makes something like John’s baptism so powerful? How might something like that be useful to you right now?
PRAY
Jesus, I want to go “all in” with you. I want to be immersed in you and your way of living. I want to be cleaned by you. I want to submerge my identity in you. Lead me to the place of repentance. But don’t stop there. Immerse me in your Holy Spirit, as John said you would, that this new identity and way of life might well up from inside me. Amen.
LIVE
Rituals are powerful. They symbolize the end of one chapter of life and the start of a new chapter. Even though most of life is fluid, gradual changes taking place over time, rituals can make those changes far more abrupt and definitive.
Where in your life right now could you use an abrupt change? What accompanying ritual might solidify that change in you? And who would be involved in such a ritual?