First Sunday after Epiphany
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Lectionary A
Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17
Psalm 29
Imagine how John felt. The moment Jesus approached the water, his heart skipped a beat.
No, it’s not supposed to be this way! This was the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world. Surely he knew that the message of repentance was not for him.
“He is not supposed to be baptized by me. It’s…I…who should be baptized…by him,” John possibly thought.
Then Jesus spoke. And all John could do was obey.
In the modern sense of the word, this was John’s epiphany. John had been calling people to repentance with bold words and firm conviction. Yet, as Jesus approached the water, John came face to face with his own brokenness, weakness and sin. All the bravado, even from a prophet, could not stand in the face of the Messiah. Christ came in the context of repentance; even today he calls each one of us to live as face to face with the one who came to remove our sin.
The Gospel of John tells how the Baptist didn’t know this was the Messiah until the moment that Jesus approached the water. John was shocked. He was not at all comfortable with this arrangement. He tried to stop Jesus. Yet, though he did not understand, he knew and trusted in God. Christ gently called John out of his preconceived notion of what it meant to serve the Messiah. Christ comes to us and calls us out of our comfort zone and into faithful service to him.
And so John obeyed, and he entered into the water with Jesus. And what followed was nothing short of miraculous. He and everyone else present saw God descend on Jesus in the form of a dove. And then he spoke. All apprehension now set aside, John witnessed the power of God firsthand. Because when Christ shows up, he is not alone but is accompanied by the power and presence of the God’s Holy Spirit.
May we regularly come to the waters of Jordan and be shaken and challenged out of our comfort zones and into the presence of the power of God in new and richer ways every day.