Summary: John the Baptist offers one view of what the baptism of Jesus meant, but perhaps it wasn't a full picture of the start of Jesus' ministry and its purpose. That baptism was another act of divine creation that can lead all of us to lives of wholeness and wellness so that we, too, can lead people to become Christ's disciples.
John the Baptist, a wonderfully strange man who, as Matthew's gospel reports, survived on a diet of locusts and wild honey, got a lot right about his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth.
As the text we read today from the gospel of John reports, the baptizer says of Jesus that "I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Chosen One." Other translations use the phrase "son of God" instead of Chosen One. Either way, John is clear that Jesus is the Messiah that Jews have long awaited.
So John got that part right.
But a good argument can be made that John didn't fully understand the nature of what Jesus came to say and do. And John's emphasis on one aspect of the Jesus story -- that Jesus was "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" -- has led some followers since then to ignore the fact that Jesus seemed a lot more interested in our health and wholeness than he was in our particular sins.
Jesus didn't come with a long list of actions he considered sinful so he could warn us that this or that one would get us sent straight to hell while another kind would require simple repentance and acts of penance. Instead, as Jesus himself said in John 10:10, he came to give us an abundant, flourishing life, the kind of life that would be generative and loving and not bogged down in destructive actions that hurt others and ourselves.
The late (and great) German Reformed theologian Juergen Moltmann put it this way: "Believing in the resurrection does not mean assenting to a dogma ... It means participating in this creative act of God's ... [I]f we really know and understand what it is about we shall be born again to a new life."1 A new life now and, the church teaches, a new life after death, too.
When Jesus seemed really focused on sin, they were acts that took advantage of people, that destroyed the peace of the world that he came to offer. Remember when he told members of a crowd that was ready to stone an alleged prostitute that they could cast the first stone at her only if they themselves were without sin? That crowd melted away, perhaps finally recognizing that anyone who wanted to kill another person for some alleged sin wasn't whole and healthy himself and needed to turn back to God for restoration.
If, indeed, sin is an act of separating oneself from God, it's clear that the person committing that sin is not healthy, is not seeing things clearly, has gone off the track and needs repair. Jesus came to restore us to health, wholeness and a divine relationship, to show us the path to a flourishing life, an abundant life when all of us would be recognized as beloved, precious children of God. Wanting to injure such a child is evidence that the person who desires that is not in his or her right mind and needs to be restored to wholeness.
The Jesuit priest, Gregory Boyle, in his 2024 book Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, asks this important question: "Is the God of love looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?"2
The answer to both may well be "Yes," but which of those options is more focused on how we should be living today and what we can do to demonstrate what the glorious reign of God will look on Earth like when it finally comes in full bloom? That question is important because it's aimed much more at what our options are for living life now and less on what happens after we're dead.
As Boyle notes, "A bad diagnosis can't ever lead us to a good treatment plan."3
Boyle certainly knows that broken world of pain in need of healing. He's the founder of Homeboy Industries4 in Los Angeles, an organization (now gone international) that provides work, nourishment and healing for former gang members who have run out of options.
Boyle says he's learned from Jesus not to focus so much on what's sinful in people but, rather, on what's broken and needs to be healed: "Original sin doesn't explain the terrible," he writes. "... We're born from love and always invited to love. The Incarnation gives flesh to God; then we participate in this 'wholemaking,' divine love. We seek out the transcendent, inclusive and life-giving impulse within. We are born for this."5
Perhaps we come to all of this with a limited understanding of what salvation means. On that point, Boyle is clear: "We think salvation means eternal life, life beyond this one. But the root of the word 'salvation' means whole, well, healthy, sound and healed. Not about sin but wound."6
John the Baptist at times seemed focused not so much on Jesus as a source of a flourishing life today but on depending on him to make sure our afterlife is not blocked by destructive actions we engage in on Earth. Christianity, to be sure, is about both ideas, but an abundant, flourishing life on Earth depends for its health on all of us being well, whole and healthy in body, mind and spirit.
As the 10th chapter of John tells it, Jesus said he came so that we "may have life and have it abundantly."
The author of one of the other New Testament books in the Johannine tradition, 1 John, declares in chapter 5 that he writes "these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life." The message throughout the John books is clear: Jesus is the way, the life, the hope -- for both now and eternity.
If we keep that goal of these New Testament books in mind, we need not get all tied up in theological arguments and ponderings about just what John experienced at the baptism of Jesus, when, as he writes, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him."
Was there a real dove with feathers? Did John, overcome by the realization that the very son of God had asked him to baptize him, picture in his mind some kind of divine descent as evidence of the reality of the incarnation of the living God as human flesh? Did he connect his vision to the many doves routinely sacrificed at the Temple in Jerusalem as part of traditional Jewish practices and, thus, did he in that way even foresee the crucifixion of Jesus some three years before it happened?
You, of course, are free to have opinions about all of that. But as we ponder this passage today, we would do well simply to give thanks for a God who loves us enough to become one of us, who cherishes each one of us and wants to make us whole, a God who is dying, quite literally, so that we may live flourishing lives.
In the passage of John's gospel that we read today, we have what we might think of as a second act of creation, the first being described in Genesis, when God hovers over what translator and scholar Robert Alter calls the "welter and waste"7 and speaks the cosmos into existence. The second act occurs when the second member of the Holy Trinity begins the loving work of showing humanity its need for wholeness and how such healing can take place when we commit ourselves to living as the eternal God in Christ calls us to live.
When the late Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jensen writes about creation and the work of the Trinity, he concludes that "God as Father, Son and Spirit can make room in himself for others, and the room that he makes is our created time. The opening of that room is the act of creation."8
But, of course, God didn't stop just with the creation. God saw that what he had created as "good" and even "very good" needed a more direct experience of the divine presence so that all could live lives modeled after the divine concept of what makes life wholesome, healthy and abundant.
So the incarnation happened. And John the Baptist was present at that second act of creation when the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth began with the blessing of the Holy Spirit. This one, John said with complete confidence, is the one for whom we've been waiting. This is our Messiah, our rescuer, our physician, our counselor, our lover. Follow him and you, too, can be whole and healed and can show others the way to the Lord.
This is what the Presbyterian Confession of 1967 calls "the new life." That life, it says, "takes shape in a community in which (people) know that God loves and accepts them in spite of what they are. They therefore accept themselves and love others, knowing that no (person) has any ground on which to stand, except God's grace."9
May we rededicate ourselves this day to being that Messiah's committed disciples, dependent on God's generous grace.