To appreciate the link between baptism, identity and mission, we enter into the heart of the matter which the early Church had to contend with. There was confusion about who this Man was. Was He sinful or was He truly sinless? Matthew himself registered this in the reluctance of Baptist who said, “It should be me (the sinful one) asking You (Sinless One) for baptism and yet You have come to me”. In fact, Luke’s Gospel today speaks of John’s expectation of the “Sinless One” who would baptise with Holy Spirit and fire. Instead, the One without sin submitted Himself to a baptism meant for sinners.
Such a theophany is significant in an era where biology was not fully grasped. Paternity was an important criterion in establishing one’s identity. Pregnancy itself is proof of maternity but paternity must be publicly acknowledged. We heard this as Jesus emerged from the waters of the Jordan when a voice thundered from heaven: “You are my beloved Son. My favour rests on you”.
If His identity flows into His mission, that is, who He is flows into what He does, then at His Baptism, His mission is to identify with us, that is, what He does is to be who we are.
How so and for what reason?
He who has no sin has chosen to identify with sinners. This is where it gets a bit complicated. We labour with an assumption that experience is the exclusive route to knowledge. If not, we tend to equate feelings with insight. Listen to this sentiment, “How do you know since you have not experienced it or have never felt it?”. If experience or feeling is the sole medium of knowledge, one can reasonably ask how Jesus can know what it means to be truly human if He has no sin? How does He know how to be like us when He does not sin?
How should we understand Jesus’ humanity in relation to our sinfulness? Firstly, we associate being human as fallible and this is borne out by our experiences. For example, we hear it expressed that “to err is human” or “to be human is to err” meaning that one should not be surprised that a human being sins. While concupiscence may explain why we sin but it can never be an excuse. Why? It does describe fallibility as part of the human condition but what has happened is that we take it to mean that when one has sinned, blame it on concupiscence, or one’s “human condition”. “I am only human” feels almost as if our humanity is an excuse for sin.
Secondly, sometimes we narrowly confine sin to commission or omission of wrong doing. But sin is deeper than this action or that. Instead, sin is tied to the rejection of who we truly are, which is, human. Man’s first or original sin was to exercise his freedom separately from God. Sin resulted from the attempt to establish an autonomy[1] independent of our creatureliness. To be human means to be dependent on God but that dependence is not because we are useless or incapable. It is precisely because we are capable, made in the image and likeness of God, that we have been put in charge of creation. Our “dominion” over nature is more a service than a lordship. “Dominance” describes our stewardship because the only Master of creation will always be the Creator Himself, God. Adam forgot this and Man’s history of salvation has been his record of forgetting that it is God who has been in control all along.
There is a chasm between the Creator and the creature. If our preoccupation is equality, then that gulf between the Divine and the human will always be interpreted as a form of imposition upon us or a curse on humanity. We will always be driven to dissolve the divide. Hence, when the Word became flesh, He came to reclaim the humanity we had rejected so that we will not look at the gap as an inequality but will appreciate that fullness of life comes from a true dependence on God. The Baptism of Jesus was an act of solidarity through which He showed us what it meant to be truly human. Since our identity plays a huge part in deciding how we ought to live, therefore, Jesus has come to show us that our true identity is found in our creatureliness as humans. True dependence is the start of our human transformation.
In terms of the realisation of true humanity, the liturgy throughout Christmas, Epiphany and the Baptism expresses the “wonderful exchange”, in which God becomes Man in order that humanity may become divine. This wonderful exchange of God’s abasement for man’s perfection becomes our pilgrimage of change or transformation. In this “admirabile commercium”, we become partakers of His Divine Nature.
Jesus’ true identity as both God and Man is the foundation of His Mission here on earth. In other words, identity leads to mission and not the other way around. [2] There in the waters of the Jordan, in revealing His identity as Son of God made man, His mission as God is to save humanity while His mission as Man is to show how humanity can be saved—by being human in everything except sin and by reclaiming who we truly are in relation to God. Through our baptism, in Christ Jesus, we are restored to the relationship with God in becoming His sons and daughters. And as brothers and sisters of Christ, we share His same mission to the world through our dependence on God and our collaboration with His sanctifying grace. In the Baptism of Jesus at the Jordan, man’s journey back to God through this world has begun.
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[1] Autonomy is over-rated. We stress on the agency to act according to our personal dictates. Yet, search engines and social media, Google, Facebook, Twitter, seem to have channelled our thoughts to focus on certain topics. Man in the past travelled untrammelled. They may not have the freedom of movement the way we believe we possess. Yet today, we not only need a passport to cross border, but we now require vaccine passports to travel. How “autonomous” are we compared to the “restricted” man of the past?
[2] Who we are determines what we ought to do! Not the other way around. You hear it sung in hymns like “And they will know we are Christians by our love”. Does love make us Christians? Not necessarily because there have been many a great person who loves but is not a Christian. Instead, what the hymn is trying to point out is that “If you are Christian, you should be loving”. Who we are determines our behaviour! A man who buys flowers for a wife does not a husband he makes. He could be doing it out of guilt. If you are a husband, you are faithful, you love your wife, you defend her honour, you lay down your life for her and your family.
