"Yet Without Sin."

I.

In Mark’s version of this story, Jesus himself is the only one who has this experience of the dove as the Spirit, and the voice from heaven.  It is something that happens between him and God.  The bystanders don’t see or hear all this.  God enlightens him, and confirms his original and eternal identity to him.  He is God’s beloved Son, “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father,” as the creed says.”  

The baptism of Jesus is the effective beginning of his ministry.  He goes into the water apparently intending to confess his sins like everyone else.  But when he comes up he realizes that sin has nothing to do with him.  Sin is separation from God.  Sin is when we fall short, or long, or wide, of who we truly are.  Sin is living in an ego-centric lie, according to self-serving stories about ourselves.  Sin is when we try to exist as if we were isolated, independent individuals.  In that water he finds himself connected to and in everything.

What Jesus experiences in his baptism is a deep oneness and identification with God.  It is not that he declares himself to be God, which would be spectacularly audacious and presumptuous.  That would be a display of hubris and arrogance that would automatically and conclusively disqualify him from his mission.  Humanity has no road to God that involves self-affirmation, self-esteem, self-righteousness, or self-realization.  That’s why this happens as he is coming up out of the water.  This water is where our small, old, false self is symbolically drowned and washed away.

Sometimes I am drawn into a debate about Jesus’ sinlessness.  Hebrews 4:15 says that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”  I know people who feel that Jesus’ full humanity has to include sin or our sin would not be redeemed and forgiven.  He can’t have sympathized with our weaknesses unless he gave into them as we all do.  If he didn’t sin we would be in some other, non-fully-human, category.  I understand the reasoning, and it does appear to make Jesus more accessible.  As if he has to be a sinner to heal us of our sin, just like only an alcoholic can relate to and help heal another alcoholic.  

But sin is not part of true humanity.  Sin is an aberration, a distortion; it is a corruption and a soiling of who we are.  But, no matter how comprehensively sin pervades and covers and penetrates us, it is not identical with who we are.  God does not create us sinful; God does not even recognize our sinfulness.  It doesn’t strictly even exist.  We invent it, and we allow it to infect us.  We allow it to kill us, and to cause us to kill others.

Sin is a figment of our imagination.  It is something that the Bible tells us was skillfully planted in our consciousness by the snake in the garden — representing the devil — in Genesis 3.  And because we choose to accept it and follow it, cultivating, and cherishing, and assuming, and building on it, it becomes very powerful and wreaks untold horrible, damage on creation and other people and ourselves.  The pain, the injustice, the destruction caused by our sin is very real.  

II.    

Jesus comes to reveal the true character of our humanity and to show us that sin does not characterize who we really are.  This is what he realizes at his baptism.  The Lord goes down into the water and he has this realization that, for him, there is nothing to wash away.  For the Truly Human One is also the One Who Is Truly God, in whom there can be no separation, no daylight between himself and God.  The beloved Son is one with the Father and the Spirit, as this passage makes clear, which is why the church now baptizes in the Name of the Trinity.

That does not mean that he does not, and constitutionally cannot, relate to or identify with us.  For what he is by nature, he makes us by grace.  A physician does not have to suffer from cancer herself to be able to heal the cancer in another.  Indeed, it may be necessary to have before us the image of a whole, fully realized, person to inspire us to realize that possibility in ourselves, and give us the courage to rise to potential we never before imagined.  

At his baptism, Jesus Christ discloses in himself what he proceeds to reveal is in all of us.  He gives us the gift of true self-knowledge by showing us that there’s really nothing for us to wash away either, because the lies and the fears and the stories and the strategies that accrue to us, and by which we bring death and destruction into the world, are also really nothing.  But all that has enough of a corrosive effect on our behavior and on our relationships that it really does have to be washed away in the waters of baptism.  We really do have to die to it, such is the stranglehold sin has on us.

But Jesus’ message is that you — the real, true, original, and essential You, the Self that shares in Jesus’ true humanity — will not and cannot ultimately be annihilated.  This Self cannot die, even though our mortal bodies do eventually give out and cease to function.  

For what God says to Jesus as he comes up out of the water, Jesus Christ says to each one of us.  “You are my beloved Child; I am well pleased with you!”   

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