The Baptism of Jesus

One Man's Web > Dialogue with Mark >  The Baptism of Jesus Mark 1:9-15
February 5 2006

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.  Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

When Jesus comes to be baptised, the heavens open. Jesus is affirmed by the story we are reading, and by John, but in the end he has only his only experience. It says he saw the heavens open, not everyone else. The voice from heaven speaks to him. This is where his authority comes from; his own experience of God. He is not the Messiah because someone in the church chose him or gave him authority.  He has authority from himself and his experience of God.  Whatever confirmation and support we receive from our community, it is finally the same for us.  It is this experience that forces him into the wilderness. 

Forty days is shorthand for a long time.  It was also forty years Israel spent in the wilderness until it was ready for the Promised Land which John's baptism was recalling by being done in the Jordan.  The call, the challenge, even the blessing of God, leads to a wilderness experience until we are ready to live out the calling.  The message here for me is that it takes time to answer the call.  It is not easy to answer the call.

The presence of the wild beasts and the angels in the wilderness says something about the basic, raw, existential nature of the temptations. They are real temptations. They are not some head thing, but a very real struggle between answering the calling of God and the desire to go another way. But the struggle is in the presence of God; this is the message of the angels.

The Satan which opposes the call of God is a real force. We may not choose to personalise the Satan in our time and world view, but we are making real choices when we choose to answer or ignore the call. Its not a game. And only when Jesus has conquered the temptations of Satan does the Kingdom of God come near. Only then can he proclaim it.

Luke's Gospel has a certain realism. In Luke's version Satan leaves Jesus until an opportune time. But the ideal of the message is in Mark. If we are divided about our call we cannot reject the Satan.  If we are divided, the Kingdom will not come near, or stay with us, to proclaim from the seat of our reality. 

I understand by "the kingdom" what people often call "the realm of God."  It is the counter cultural, outside of Jerusalem, against Jerusalem and the "powers that be" living of life in the way that God wants.  What God wants, is what the Jesus story will show us.

Spong says somewhere that Joshua parted the waters of the Jordan when the Israelites entered into the Promised Land.  When Jesus goes down to the Jordan and is baptised, he does not part the waters; the heavens are parted. This second Jeshua / Joshua / Saviour is much greater than the first.

Direct Biblical quotations in this page are taken from The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.  

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