How is Jesus’ baptism related to ours?

Posted: 1st December 2004

On the eve of the Christian era, in Palestine there was a man of God called John. He proclaimed the imminent coming of the Lord to transform radically the present world, and he called believers to accomplish a concrete act of preparation for this. By descending into the waters of the Jordan River, they expressed their need for forgiveness and their readiness to change their behavior in order to welcome the God who was coming to them. But John explained that this act was only a preparation: someone else, more powerful than him, would come to “baptize in the Holy Spirit and in fire”(Matthew 3:11).

At that moment Jesus arrived and, instead of calling down God’s fire from heaven, asked John to baptize him, notwithstanding the surprise and hesitations of the Baptizer (see Matthew 3:14). He had the conviction that his place was in the midst of the people, in full solidarity with those who are aware of their faults. In this way he expressed that fact that God does not want to liberate us from an inauthentic life without first sharing fully in that life. By letting himself be submerged in the waters of the stream, Jesus symbolized his desire to go to the lowest point of the human condition, in order to open it to God’s light from within.

And so, this “death” was immendiately followed by a “resurrection”. “Coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit come down upon him”(Mark 1:10). The wall between humanity and God having been broken through, God is once again at home among human beings. And words come from the Father that express, in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures, his relationship with Jesus as well as the mission he gives his Son to communicate this relationship to others. Starting with the humanity of Christ, the Creator Spirit is renewing the face of the earth, allowing it to enter into communion with the eternal Father.

It is not incorrect to see our baptism as the act by which Christ puts his arm around our shoulders and takes us with him into the space marked our by which Christ puts his arm around our shoulders and takes us with him into the space marked out by his own baptism. We die with him to an existence characterized by false suffeciency and isolation, in order to enter into a new life, a life of communion (see Romans 6:3-6). In the company of Jesus we hear the Father address to us these words of light: “You are the Son whom I love; my favor rests on you”(Mark 1: 11). Sons and daughters in the Son, henceforth we can continue the mission of Jesus in the circumstances of our own lives, withnessing to the coming of God’s Kingdom that is entering our world and transforming it from within. In a word, baptism sets us within the body of Christ. By drowning our limitions, and even our refusals, in the waters of divine mercy, our baptism opens a gap through which God can make himself present, through us, at the heart of human history.

Article Source: Letter from Taizé, October - November 2004 (Page 4)