"To Fulfill All Righteousness."

Matthew 3:13-17

January 8, 2017

I.

When Jesus goes to John, John recognizes him and at first refuses to baptize him.  What use would the Messiah have for a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins?  John even suggests that Jesus should baptize him.

The Lord’s response is to say, “Let it be so for now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

In the Scriptures, “righteousness” means something very specific.  Often we like to draw a distinction between righteousness and justice; righteousness having to do with one’s personal morality, and justice referring to our larger social, political, and economic relationships.  We talk like these are two different things because, depending on our personal outlook, it lets us off the hook.    

But in the Greek language they are the same word.  Whenever you see the words “righteousness” or “justice” in the New Testament, they are translations of the word, dikaiosune.  The New Testament sees righteousness and justice as aspects of the same thing.  In other words, there is no personal morality that does not have a social impact, and there is no social justice that does not reflect personal virtue.

This is important because the church in the modern age was split between Christians who emphasized personal righteousness, and Christians who emphasized social justice.  As if they were not only distinct, but some people seem to think they are even mutually exclusive.      

But this is an artificial distinction.  You cannot have one without the other.  Liberals who reduce Christianity to the championing of social causes, but whose personal and family life is a trainwreck are just as wrong as conservatives who live upright and moral personal lives while allowing, perpetrating, and profiting from injustice, inequality, and violence in society.  Both groups are in need of serious repentance, most of all from a self-righteousness that makes them blind to the holistic, integral nature of faith.

Righteousness and justice both point to the covenant life together according to God’s peace, God's shalom, God’s holy, intended, created order for human life.  This order is all-encompassing.  It has to do with what is going on in our own hearts and minds; and it involves what we do at home, as well as what we do at work, at play, in transit, at school, at the store, or in the voting booth.

Jesus’ baptism is not just about his private, personal experience; it is at the same time his commissioning to public ministry.  He does not have his personal experience and then go back home to resume his former existence, content with his own saved-ness.  He goes first into to the desert to figure out what just happened.  Then, he emerges and begins working with people.

II.

Jesus fulfills all righteousness and justice by submitting to John’s baptism.  He doesn’t just agree to do this as a kind of charade, a temporary concession to our sensibility; it is what he comes down to the river to do in the first place.  It is an expression and anticipation of his whole mission.  Not only is he not too big, too holy, or too perfect to really need baptism, baptism is the point of his life.  Baptism literally means immersion, and Jesus has come to immerse himself in our mortal existence.

John doesn’t get this at first.  John still harbors a very conventional, old-fashioned, Jewish understanding of God as “above” and “almighty,” ever ready to punish transgression and demanding total allegiance.  And these are certainly valid and accurate, as far as they go.  But they aren’t all God is, and understanding God in this narrow way can prevent us from appreciating the true character of God’s Most-High Almighty-ness.

Which Jesus proceeds to demonstrate.  Unlike what humans normally take for greatness, Jesus reveals God’s greatness and power in his self-emptying love.  God’s greatness is not found in the kind of violence and coercion from above that made Caesar, or any other nation or leader, “great.”  God’s greatness is shown in God’s humble infusion into the creation from below.   To use a meteorological image: God’s glory is less analogous to a spectacular and terrifying lightning bolt, and more like the subtle, all-encompassing, invisible, life-giving Presence of the atmosphere.

What if Jesus had said, “You know, John, you’re right.  I’m God, for crying out loud.  I can’t stoop to something as humiliating as having you baptize me for repentance and forgiveness of sins.  What was I thinking?  I don’t even have any sins!  My job is to walk on water, not get dunked in it like all these sad losers!  I must go fulfill my destiny!”?  Had he said that, he would not be the Messiah, or God, or the truly Human One.  He would not even be a competent rabbi.  He would be just some deluded guy from Nazareth suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Jesus starts revealing the nature of God right here.  It starts with humility.  I am continually drawn back to Paul’s words, probably quoting an early Christian hymn, in Philippians.  Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness… he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.”  Jesus demonstrates power in what the world calls weakness, leadership in what the world calls servitude, and greatness in what the world calls humiliation.  Jesus reveals God’s greatness by the explicit renunciation and letting go of all greatness as defined by humans.  We’ll see this in his encounter with the devil in the next chapter, and in whom he identifies as blessed by God in chapter 5.  

God, and the kingdom of heaven, is about becoming the opposite of “great,” as the world defines it.  It means becoming nothing; it means giving up your possessions, your will, and your life.  Jesus goes down into the water of the Jordan River at the hands of John, not just to humor us or even to “come alongside” us.  It reveals his very nature as the God whose essence is this continual flow of self-emptying love for creation and people.  This flow is the Trinity; it is the creation; and now it is the redemption and sustaining of creation.

III.

Here is God’s righteousness and justice, fulfilled in Jesus’ self-emptying, self-abnegating, renunciatory dunking in the water.  And it is ratified by the appearance of a bird, a dove, reminiscent of the bird that Noah released to determine if the Earth’s renewal was complete and the waters of chaos were receding.  Just as the Earth emerges from its own watery death, so the Lord Jesus also emerges both here in his baptism and later when he steps out of his own tomb.

And in case the mere descent of a bird is not clear enough, God’s own Voice speaks from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.”  What the voice from the sky says is so impressive and portentous that it would shake whoever hears it to their foundations.  The consequence for Jesus is that the Spirit drives him into the desert, on what the Native Americans might call a vision quest, to sort this out.  Whatever Jesus knows about himself before he gets to John, he certainly has his identity shoved in his face by what has just happened.

The Spirit and the Voice are the means by which God creates the universe; they are the Word of God; expressing the Wisdom of God.  And it is when Jesus submits to the act of going down into the water in a symbolic death and washing that this realization occurs.  God is saying, “Look.  This is my way.  Humility.  Self-emptying.  Descent.  Offering.  Renunciation.  My Son comes down, into the water.  Into real life.  My way is not lifting yourself up; it is bringing yourself down.  Go and do likewise.”

It is this humility and immediacy, this connection to our physical, embodied existence by healing, touching, and sensation, that the Lord Jesus fulfills all righteousness and justice.  He does this finally by having iron nails driven into his flesh and shedding his own actual blood, representing God’s life, given for the life of the world.

Maybe that is the message we will all hear in his name.  When we let go of our self-importance, our self-righteousness, our self-centeredness, our ego-centric, personality-driven approach to life, and allow ourselves to sink into the water of life, the water from which all life emerges and which animates all life.  Maybe then we also hear something from God like: “You are my beloved Child; I am well pleased with you!”  Maybe that voice is always there and we just can’t hear it because we have so much other noise going on all around us.

IV.

The early church confessed that what Jesus Christ is by nature, we who trust and obey him become by grace.  What Christ does as an expression of his nature, we do as a matter of repentance.  His new life becomes ours when we follow him.  He has always been heading in this downward and outward direction; for us it takes a reversal to go in that direction.

This means turning and immersing ourselves in nature and in life.  It means embracing human relationships and cherishing each person, holding them in prayer and light.  It means living according to the kindness, generosity, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, welcoming, gratitude, healing, and delight we see in Jesus.  That is the beginning of righteousness and justice.

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