The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

The Transformation Jesus Brings, Part One

          ‘…baptizing them...’ (28:19)

          Something happens to us when we enter the reign of Jesus.  Jesus wanted us to understand it, so he left us with a peculiar symbol:  baptism.

          Apparently Jesus continued the practice of baptism from his cousin and predecessor, John the Baptist.  That wild-looking fellow, John, used to stand in the Jordan River decrying the corruption and injustice around him and calling people to be symbolically ‘cleansed’ of all that filth by being dunked in the water.  That’s a pretty effective symbolic gesture, isn’t it? 

It’s even more effective considering the story that the Jewish people understood. God called forth life from water. Three epochal examples form the framework. In creation, God’s Spirit hovered over the primordial waters and brought forth land, life, and humanity. But Adam and Eve failed. In Noah’s time, God’s Spirit hovered over the floodwaters and brought Noah and his family from out of the bloodshed of their time to emerge as a ‘new humanity.’ But Noah failed. In Moses’ time, God led Israel out of their old life of Egyptian slavery through the waters of the Red Sea and into a garden land to be another ‘new humanity.’ But they, too, failed. Finally, one man was baptized in the waters of the Jordan River: Jesus of Nazareth. He was the one man who did not fail.

Time after time, God pushed back mighty waters to bring forth new human life. So what more fitting symbol than baptism? It’s all about being God’s fresh, new humanity. You make an individual choice to submerge yourself under the waters. Then you rise up, breaking through the waters as if God were calling you up out of primordial waters of old. That’s what baptism means. It symbolizes a ‘dying’ and a ‘rising.’

When we get baptized, what does it symbolize?  The dying and rising of Jesus.  I notice two main reasons in the New Testament for this.  First, we become spiritually linked to Jesus’ own death and resurrection, the most pivotal transformation any human being has ever experienced (Rom.6:1 – 11; Col.2:12).  For example, in his water baptism witnessed by John the Baptist (Mt.3:13 – 17), Jesus confessed the sin present in his own humanity, not because he sinned, but for us, to lead us into confession.  He drowned its resistance to the love of God, for us.  Throughout his life, Jesus poured out the wrath of God onto his own humanity, within his own divine-human person, by preventing his human nature from sinning.  He finally killed it on the cross, his baptism into death.  He completed God’s judgment on the flesh and came out the other side, into the new life of his resurrection, in a God-soaked human body that would never play host to sin or death again.  So a spiritual connection with Jesus is what allows us to participate in this new life he has.  Jesus died the death we were already dying, to give us the life we could never live on our own.  We die and rise with him when we believe in him. 

Second, something very core and fundamental to us dies when we bow before Jesus:  our self-centeredness above all.  When I came to Jesus, it was a bit painful.  I had to admit that I was wrong, that I couldn’t live my life by myself any more, and that I had hurt people and I had to stop denying it.  It felt like I was dying, a little bit.  Jesus himself said that it would feel that way (Mt.16:24 – 26; Mk.8:34 – 36; Lk.9:23 – 25).  But I also experienced fresh, new life, something Jesus also spoke of.  I felt like a new person with Jesus. 

Notice that Jesus did not die instead of us, where we watch from a distance.  And it’s not that God just changed His mind about us while leaving us the same old people we always were.  Rather, Jesus died ahead of us, to rise ahead of us, and then he pulled us through that dying and rising, so that we become new with him and in him.  The more I get to know Jesus, the more I understand what in fact happened to me when I first believed in him, the more I live as a new person.

          No wonder baptism symbolizes our ‘dying and rising’ experience with Jesus.  It reminds us and others who watch that Jesus has changed us.  He is still changing us, true, and he is certainly not done!  But something in us has so profoundly changed that our core identity is now washed clean, and made new, by Jesus.  We could hardly have a better symbol; we have only to understand and explain it:  ‘You, too, can be made new!’