SECTION III

the participation of Jesus in the baptism of john

The significance of John’s baptism, as explained in the preceding section, furnishes the simplest solution of the problem in modern theology, why Jesus submitted to that rite in order to fulfil all righteousness. Antagonistic critics have violently assailed the Apologetics of the Church with the question, How could Christ submit Himself to this baptism of repentance? At length they have distinctly proclaimed the consequence, that Christ, in submitting to John’s baptism, presented a confession of His own sinfulness.¹ The explanations of the Church could not be satisfactory as long as the idea of the sacred ablutions of the Old Testament was not clearly understood.

According to the Mosaic law, not only the corporeally unclean in Israel, as for example lepers, but also those who had touched unclean animals, or in a similar way had, according to the Levitical typology, defiled themselves, were excommunicated from the camp of the typically pure congregation.² Readmission into the congregation could take place only after a given period, as was fitting for a case of uncleanness. But every Israelite whose object it was to recover the communion he had lost, was obliged to undergo the appointed religious ablution.

And not only those who were unclean in their own life, or had directly defiled themselves, but those who came in contact with them, were involved in that exclusion, and a similar ablution preceded their readmission into the congregation.³

According to this enactment of the law, Christ also was obliged to submit to John’s baptism, as soon as He recognized it to be a purification of the people which John administered as a true prophet by an intimation of the Spirit of God. For He stood in the closest contact with the people who were regarded by the prophet as excommunicated. In God’s sight He was pure; but according to the Levitical law, as restored by the theocratic authority of the Baptist, and made by him into a sermon of repentance, He was unclean through His connection with an unclean people. On the principles of the Old Testament righteousness, therefore, His baptism was required.

But the essential significance of the baptism of Jesus was the symbol of an actual relation. By baptism, Jesus was pointed out as the sacrificial Lamb of the world, laden with no other burden than His historical life-communion with the world. Considered in Himself alone, He might have had joy; but His connection with sin-laden humanity was the great reproach of His life, which led to His death. Thus His death became the real completion of the Israelitish baptism, and the foundation of baptism in its New Testament form and significance. John’s baptism in its highest point was a typical prophecy of the death of Jesus; Christian baptism, on the other hand, is a sacramental representation of the same event.⁴

But when Jesus came to be baptized, John the theocratic champion lost his lofty bearing. He who had reprimanded the members of the Sanhedrim as ‘a generation of vipers,’ exclaimed in tones of alarm to the consecrated Nazarene, ‘I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me?’ Thus the splendour of the New Testament broke forth from the verge of the Old.⁵ But the sternness of the Old Testament flashed across the dawn of the New when Christ said, ‘Suffer it to be so now; for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Here the staves of the Old and New Testament righteousness form a cross. John represents the New Testament in the presence of Jesus; Jesus represents the Old Testament in the presence of John. The two economies manifest their relationship and unity by this junction of their contiguous links. We might say that the two covenants salute and bless one another in this holy rivalry; the one glorifies itself in the other, and from the glory of the first emerges the greater glory of the second.

But the determination of Jesus prevailed, for He came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil it; and He well knew that this baptism expressed that consecration of death for His people which was spread over His life. But by this wonderful humility of Jesus, John was prepared to receive the positive revelation, that this was the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world. At that very instant the feeling must have agitated him, that Jesus was necessitated only by communion with His people to submit to the humiliating ordinance of baptism-that He bore the sins of His people.

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Notes

1. Strauss remarks, that according to Mat 3:6, John appears to have required a confession of sins before baptism. Hence it would follow, that Jesus by submitting to baptism favoured the supposition that He was a sinner. The whole difficulty is obviated by the representation given above of the import of the baptism of Jesus. But, in addition, it is well to observe, that according to the words of Matthew, baptism and the confession of sins were identical. But the moment of immersion was naturally not suited to allow the persons immersed to utter a verbal confession of sins. If, therefore, the persons baptized were (ἐξομολογούμενοι) confessing at this moment, they were so in the act. But this confession of sins was, as we have seen, according to its nature a social and solidaric (solidarisches) act by which the measure of the guilt or innocence of individuals was not determined. In the infinite reciprocal action of social defilement in which individuals in Israel stood before the law, a separation of the individual from the whole body was impracticable. So, then, every one confessed in his own manner, individualizing and modifying his confession more or less-the collective guilt of Israel. Hardly would so many Pharisees have consented to an individual confession before John. But Christ’s confession was this: ‘So it becomes us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Social righteousness drew Him down into the stream.

2. The ideas μετανοία (repentance), ἄφεσις ἁμαρτιῶν (remission of sins), and ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν (the kingdom of heaven), stand in reciprocal action to one another. The one is as deep as the other, and each has always a significance differently determined on the legal, the pharisaical, the prophetic, and the Christian stand-point. The purely legal stand-point is that of the typical rendering of satisfaction and of social atonement, in connection with an unlimited apprehension of the relations of Being corresponding to this symbolism. The pharisaic stand-point accomplishes the social satisfaction and atonement with a more decided dependence on outward works, without the perception of a higher righteousness. The prophetic stand-point deduces from the social satisfaction and atonement the full feeling of the defect of realizing this symbolism in spirit, and of hope in the Messiah. John pronounces the whole Old Testament righteousness to be water-baptism. The Christian stand-point exhibits, in all the points indicated, the fulfilling of the symbol in full spiritual reality.

1) Strauss, Leben Jesu, i. 408. Compare Bruno Bauer, Kritik., i. 207.

2) Lev. xi. xiv.

3) Lev. xv. 5, 10, 11, 19, &c.

4) When Ebrard (Gospel History, 194) denies the relation of baptism to the Jewish ablutions, this view of the subject is not confirmed. On the other hand, his remark, which regards baptism as a rite going beyond simple ablution, as far as it involves an immersion of the body, altogether confirms it, if only it is borne in mind that this modification must be considered as a prophetic elevation of the legal form of sacred ablution. According to Ebrard, the baptism of John presents a sign ‘that man altogether deserves death.’ Yet we cannot admit that John baptized with this consciousness, without maintaining that there was in his baptism an anticipation of the Christian. But his baptism was certainly a typical sign of the death of Jesus, and consequently also of mankind’s desert of death.

5) [Ewald calls this ‘the birth-hour of Christianity.’—ED.]