CW 377 – To Jordan’s River Came Our Lord
Your teenage daughter has won the lead role in her school’s musical. Your middle school son beat everyone in the conference track meet. Your 4th grade child has all A’s on his report card. Your Kindergartener brought home a wonderful finger-painted picture of your family. You take the programs, awards, report cards, and paintings and you display them on your refrigerator; you make shadow boxes; you share the news via email; you text your friends; you have the kids call Grandma; you post the video on Facebook. You do all of this because you are well-pleased with your children.
God the Father was well-pleased with his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. The Father declares his pleasure at Jesus’ Baptism. Our Scripture readings, hymns, prayers, and sermon for this first Sunday after the Epiphany focus on the Baptism of our Lord. We sing of Jesus’ Baptism with Christian Worship hymn 377 – “To Jordan’s River Came Our Lord.”
Verse one: To Jordan’s river came our Lord, the Christ, whom heav’nly hosts adored, the God from God, the Light from Light, the Lord of glory, pow’r, and might.
There he was, the Son of God, standing in line at the Jordan River. "The God from God, the Light from Light" waited his turn to step down into the Jordan to be baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist. Jesus stands with the other pilgrims who have traveled into the desert. Yet this pilgrim has traveled farther than anyone else. Jesus has come down from heaven to stand in solidarity with his creatures. Standing with the human race against the evil one. Looking like everyone else, but in reality, he is the Lord of glory, power, and might.
Verse two: The Savior came to be baptized— the Son of God in flesh disguised— to stand beneath the Father’s will and all his promises fulfill.
Why did the Son of God, of all people, want to receive this Baptism of repentance? That is what John wanted to know: “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14) It should have been the other way around. John was a sinner who needed to be baptized by the sinless Son of God. Jesus answered John, “Let it be so now, because it is proper for us to fulfill all righteousness" (Matthew 3:15). This was what the Heavenly Father wanted. Jesus would accomplish what Adam and Eve, and all people after them, had failed to do. "In flesh disguised," the Son of God became one of us, “one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The righteous Son came to stand in the place of sinners, as he did that day in the Jordan River.
Verse three: As Jesus in the Jordan stood and John baptized the Lamb of God, the Holy Spirit, heav’nly dove, descended on him from above.
God in the Flesh is baptized! Humanity is cleansed, reborn, restored. The new Adam, the new head of humanity is baptized for the world, and in him the whole world covered over in a gracious Flood. As God once baptized the earth in the Flood and promised with the rainbow
never to destroy the earth with water again, so here God immerses the whole world in the Person of his Son. When Jesus was baptized, the world was baptized in him.
Verse four: Then from God’s throne with thund’rous sound came God’s own voice with words profound: “This is my Son,” was his decree, “the one I love, who pleases me.”
As parents we are not happy when our children jump in mud puddles and get their clothes dirty. But our Heavenly Parent is well-pleased that his Son jumped into the Jordan to begin becoming muddied with humanity’s sins. This is what God had been working towards for all of human history. That’s why Jesus’ Baptism is so important. That’s why our Baptism is so important.
Verse five: The Father’s word, the Spirit’s flight anointed Christ in glorious sight as God’s own choice, from Adam’s fall to save the world and free us all.
God had once opened heaven and rained death and destruction upon the earth. He literally poured out his wrath upon humanity. At the Jordan, heaven opened again. This time God does not call down thunder or throw down lightning. He calls out his pleasure. Now God is using the flood of Baptism – not to destroy sinful mankind, but to destroy sin.
Verse six: Now rise, faint hearts: be resolute! This man is Christ, our substitute! He was baptized in Jordan’s stream, proclaimed Redeemer, Lord supreme.
The Father is so pleased that he doesn’t just hang up a shadow box or announce it ato few people via social media. The Father rolls back the clouds and opens the sky so that the angels and archangels and all the saints already gathered in heaven might look upon this wonder in the making. The wonder of God as man, taking man’s place in the water. He is already taking the sin of us sinners. The water of his Baptism means that the wood of his cross is not far away. Just as the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom when Jesus died on the cross, opening our access to God and the Holy of Holies through the blood of Jesus – so too, already here in Jesus’ Baptism, heaven is torn open. His work of salvation has begun.