Mark 1:7-11
I too am the beloved

I grew up in a Baptist tradition, and since Baptists don’t do infant baptism, I was sixteen years old when I got baptized. I went for the pre-baptism classes everyday with two dozen other kids my age for a week before the Sunday we got baptized.  It was a cold March morning and our baptismal font was outdoors. Heated water in the font is not even a concept even today in most parts of India. When my turn came I walked down the few steps into the pool. The Pastor held the back of my head with one hand and with the other hand he pinched my nose and told me to hold my breath for a few seconds while he dunked me in the water to be baptized. As a child I had once nearly drowned in one of our local rivers. My father happened to see me being swept away by the current and quickly came to my rescue. As the Pastor held my head ready to baptize me, I suddenly remembered how helpless I felt that day in the river as the current swelled around me. And just as I felt some irrational fear creeping up within me, the pastor immersed me in the font. For the few seconds that I was submerged completely in the water, I felt as if I was drowning. But before I knew it, I was already out of the water being marked as God’s own child and ready to participate at the Lord’s Table.

For the most part, we read about the baptism of Jesus as something that happened in the distant past, as just one of the necessary things for Him to have done as he began his ministry on Earth as the Son of God. The voice from heaven that said, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" are words that we have somehow set aside only for Jesus. We feel that such divine declarations are some of the most important aspects of why we look to Jesus as our Lord and Savior. In our eagerness to believe that Jesus is the man sent from heaven, we forget that the voice from heaven came only after Jesus humbled himself before the crowd in going through the baptism of repentance that John was offering. If we believe that Jesus was sinless, why did he have to go through the baptism that John was offering? I do not presume to know the exact reason why he did so, but looking at Jesus’ life of obedience to God the Father, I am inclined to believe that it was in obedience to the Father to fully and completely identify with us fallen human beings.

The act of baptism itself is not what makes us holy, but it symbolizes our acceptance of the need to repent and be washed of our sins. More than anyone else Jesus understood the need for human beings to be reconciled to God. In 1997, France's Roman Catholic clergy apologized for the church's silence during the systematic persecution and deportation of Jews by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.  About 76,000 Jews, including 12,000 children, were deported from France between 1941 and 1944. Only about 2,500 survived. Standing before a sealed cattle car like the ones used to transport Jews to their deaths, Bishop Olivier de Berranger read from a statement confessing the silence of the church and its clergy from 1940 to 1942. "We confess that silence in the face of the Nazi's extermination of the Jews was a failure of the French church," he said. "We beg God's forgiveness and ask the Jewish people to hear our words of repentance." Most of the clergy that day were either too young or not even born to be directly responsible for what happened so many years ago, nonetheless, they bore the shame of what happened before their time. In going through that symbolic act of public confession they were not only asking for forgiveness from the Jews, but also from God and hoping for reconciliation and healing from the brokenness on both sides. Jesus was sinless but he still bore the shame of our sinfulness and our inability to save ourselves. He identified so strongly with us and our need to be healed of our brokenness that he had to go through that baptism in order to build the bridge between God and his rebellious, estranged children.