Text: Isaiah 43:1-7
Date: Epiphany I + Baptism of Our Lord 1.10.16
On the First Sunday after the Epiphany we always remember, celebrate and proclaim the baptism of Our Lord by John the Baptist. Having worshipped at the nativity, then the circumcision, then the presentation in the temple, after the family’s escape or flight into Egypt and His surprising appearance as a twelve-year-old child in the temple, today marks the beginning of our Lord’s active earthly ministry. Whereas during Christmas we have witnessed His birth, His being made man as the result of so many Old Testament promises and predictions of God, now, when Jesus was about thirty years old, we begin to tell the Gospel of our salvation and the salvation of the whole world by our Lord’s active righteousness (living faithfully with us under God’s Law) leading up to His passive righteousness (His crowning, atoning, redeeming work on the cross, His innocent suffering and death).
But did you notice that this year we don’t hear the trickle of Jordan River water? We don’t have an account of our Lord’s actual baptism as in Matthew or Mark. St. Luke tells the story in the past tense, “when Jesus also had been baptized.” As we are going to consider the Word of the Lord through the prophet Isaiah this morning, we can confess that we often think of our baptism in the past tense too, as something that happened way back then, for many of us even before we could remember, something that tends to rarely if ever cross our mind in our daily struggles. Or does it? For it is precisely because of those struggles, those ups and down, the sins and failures of our lives that God’s Word brings us back to our baptism, or more precisely, to God’s covenant and promise to us sealed for all time in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. God sent the prophet Isaiah to call His people back to Him, back from their waywardness, their forgetfulness of God’s mercy. He calls them back precisely because they were and still are His people. It’s all there in the first verse of this chapter beginning with the words, “But now.” “But now” indicates a change from something that went before. What changed was the message of “the heat of God’s anger” against His peoples’ spiritual blindness and deafness and their sin. “But now” the voice of God’s judgment blossoms into the great promise that this same Almighty God is Israel’s only Savior.
He calls them “Jacob” and then “Israel” recalling their striving with God and His gift of new life. Then He says, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” God redeemed or rescued them from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea and through the Jordan River into the promised Land. Martin Luther in his wonderful “flood prayer,” which we hear at baptisms and especially at the Easter Vigil, recalls God’s merciful preservation of Noah and his family through the great worldwide flood, the drowning of “hard-hearted Pharaoh and all his host in the Red Sea,” saying all of these foreshadowed “this washing of Your Holy Baptism.”
As we said, St. Luke at first appears to ignore the actual baptism of Our Lord. But he means to emphasize the sign that followed, the sign John the Baptist saw, the heavens opening, the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus in bodily form, like a dove and the voice, that great voice from heaven declaring, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” As we prayed in today’s psalm, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters,” “the voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty” (Ps 29). Today the voice of the Lord comes to ordain His only-begotten now incarnate Son to the ministry, that is the service as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Now when you are baptized (and notice I didn’t say “were baptized” but “you are baptized,” a new identity and life for all your days), when you are baptized you are joined to the cross and death of Jesus as St. Paul so clearly and succinctly says in Romans chapter six, “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were (there!) buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” We are baptized to walk, to walk today in newness of life. So how’s your walk going? How’s your new life? That walk is a daily drowning of the old sinful nature and rising to new life.
The Lord said to His people, “I have called you by name, you are mine.” Today, though there is the tradition of the naming of the newly baptized, the name by which God calls you is the Name that is above every name, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10). To you, as the pastor pours water three times on the head, he says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” So now and ever since then every time we gather for the Divine Service we do so remembering our baptism, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Every time we receive the holy absolution of our sins by God it is in remembrance of our holy baptism, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The baptized hear God’s holy Word “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Then we continue our walk, begin and end each day, and receive our daily bread as those walking in newness of life “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” “In the morning when you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say: In the name….” “In the evening when you go to bed, make the sign of the holy cross and say: In the name….” (Small Catechism).
Our closing hymn today has it right. “God’s own child, I gladly say it: I AM baptized into Christ!” (LSB 594). Because Jesus Christ was baptized by John He joined Himself to you even hip deep in your sin and need, shoulder to shoulder with you. Someone has said that as when we are baptized in the name of Christ we receive the forgiveness of sin, life and salvation, it is because when Jesus was baptized He bestowed and consecrated all water, as Luther prayed, “to be a blessed flood and a lavish washing away of sin.” That is solely and alone because, with our sin on His back He went to the cross. It was our sin that killed Him, our sin for which He died. But His death was not the end, but only the beginning, the beginning of new eternal life for all who belong to Him.
Yes, Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River. Yes, you are baptized into Christ according to His own resurrection command and institution, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” For He promises, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.” Today the Lord reminds you, having dealt decisively with your sin and deepest need, “But now,” “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you…he who formed you…‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’” In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.