An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Repenting Like Jesus

A sermon on Acts 10:34-43 & Matthew 3:13-17 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the things that many of us have discovered when undergoing some counselling or psychotherapy is that psychology puts a lot of emphasis on our childhood experiences and how those experiences have shaped the individuals we have become and the patterns by which we live. So anyone wanting to do some kind of retrospective psychoanalysis of Jesus wouldn’t have much to go on here. We know surprisingly little about Jesus between his early infancy and his baptism by John at around age 30. Luke’s gospel has one story of Jesus at age twelve, but the others have nothing. Mark and John don’t even have birth stories, and Matthew has nothing between the family’s return from their time as refugees in Egypt and the baptism almost three decades later. So, in terms of introducing Jesus, and making sense of him for us, none of the gospel writers see his early life as shedding much light on who he truly was. But they are all agreed on the importance of his baptism. All four gospels see the baptism as the foundation from which Jesus’s life and ministry are launched. So let’s explore a little of what it meant for Jesus and who he was, and how it relates to us and who we are.

The thing that really stands out about the baptism of Jesus in Matthew’s account of it is the confusion it caused. John himself couldn’t work out why on earth he would be baptising Jesus. Although the baptism that John was offering was a relatively new thing, he and everybody else thought they had a pretty clear understanding of what it was all about and what it meant. It was repeatedly described as a “baptism of repentance” and sometimes as a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and it was all about people preparing themselves for the coming of the messiah, who was expected to be, as John was fond of saying, the judge of all the world who would sort out the wheat from the chaff and baptise with Holy Spirit and fire. No wonder John was confused. If the reason to get baptised was to mend your ways, be forgiven for your sins, and get yourself ready for the imminent arrival of the messiah, what possible reason could the messiah himself have for presenting for baptism? So John objects. “You’ve got it all wrong. I’ve been telling everybody that my baptism is just a preparation for the bigger and better baptism that you will be baptising us all with, so I’m expecting to be baptised by you. It makes no sense at all for me to be baptising you. I’ve been baptising these people in order to get them ready to stand before the judge, but you’re supposed to be the judge, not one of us. It’s time for you to start baptising us, with Holy Spirit and fire! Come on, start with me!”

Now Jesus’s answer doesn’t give us a whole lot of explanation. Basically he just says, “No, you baptise me please, because it is the right thing to do.” He doesn’t go into why, and so in order to understand why, and what it means for us, we have to look more widely at the understanding of baptism that emerges in the rest of the gospels, the other New Testament writings, and the other writings of the early church. Because, you see, even John was clear that his baptism was not the same thing as the Christian baptism that would begin with Jesus, and when the Apostle Paul later encounters some believers who have only been baptised with the baptism of John, he recommends that they be baptised again in the name of Jesus. And yet baptism in Jesus is also spoken of as a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, so if they are different, they are certainly related. And indeed they are, and in many ways the differences must be traced to this story of Jesus confusing everyone by seeking baptism at the hands of John for himself, and thus somehow challenging and redefining everyone’s understanding of what a “baptism of repentance” means. The baptism we now have, the baptism in Jesus, is this newly redefined baptism.

A great deal of this redefinition hangs on our understanding of the word “repentance”. Fundamentally, the word means a change or a turn around, a turning from one path and heading down another. So you can see why, when it is often spoken of as a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, the focus of our understanding of repentance falls on sin, and a turning away from sin. Now that’s not wrong, but it’s not all, and it certainly wasn’t all for Jesus, because it was thinking of it as a turning from sin that caused so much confusion. If Jesus was not a sinner, what could he be repenting of?

But, of course, when you turn around, you don’t only turn away from something, you turn towards something. And there is no question that there is a huge change in the direction of Jesus’s life at his baptism. After thirty nondescript years — nothing worth reporting and no one noticing him — suddenly he is big news all over the country and the crowds are flocking to anywhere he is sighted. That’s quite a turn around. But the turn around in Jesus is not most meaningfully defined by anything he turned from, but by all that he turned to. It is what he was passionately committed to, and what he was willing to pour himself out for. It is his proclamation in word and deed that God loves us and delights in us and desperately wants to welcome us and accept us and heal us and set us free, and perhaps most radically, that this “us” that God so loves is all the world, no matter who we are or what we have done or where we are from. God shows no partiality, but loves us all with the warmth and generous grace that we first saw in Jesus.

And almost by way of a side note, one of the things that that “turning towards” should alert us to, is the rather prevalent problem of Christians who seem to be entirely defined by what they are against. Far too many Christians present themselves as being against this and against that, and anti this and anti that. And we’re seen as a bunch of wowsers and nay-sayers with nothing positive to offer to the world. And that seems to be a million miles away from the sort of reputation that Jesus himself had. Surely, like him, we are to be known for all the positives that we are passionate about and committed to, rather than just the things we throw a wet blanket over. However, I can’t hide from the fact that this baptism of repentance does still have a negative or turning away from something side, because Jesus himself clearly links it with his death, and the church has always followed suit and spoken of us being baptised into Jesus’s death. And in line with what Jesus later says about taking up our crosses and leaving ourselves behind, this death has mostly been spoken of as the death of the self.

This is perhaps where the Christian faith most clearly parts company with pop psychology. So much of the teaching of popular self-improvement gurus is about getting in touch with your true self and learning to be true to your true self, but Jesus teaches us to surrender our selves, true or otherwise, and to consider our old selves dead in Christ, that we might rise with him and receive a new life, a new self, that is defined, not self-referentially, but as a gift given to us in our new connectedness to Jesus.

One of the consequences of this for our understanding of repentance is to think about the orientation of this new self in the new life that we now live in Jesus. Our good friend Michael Hardin points out that the Greek word for repentance is metanoia, and he argues that the linguistic opposite of metanoia is paranoia. Now, while I’m not totally convinced by the linguistics of that, I think the contrast still makes sense and offers valuable insights. What it suggests is that the self that resists repentance turns in on itself, fearfully protecting itself from a multitude of perceived threats. But the self that has been surrendered to death in baptism into Jesus has nothing to fear and nothing to protect, since it has already died. Reborn to unquenchable life in Jesus, it is free to give itself away with extravagant openness and generosity; the same extravagant openness and generosity that so clearly characterised the life and ministry of the one who, in baptism, gave us our new selves.

Unfortunately, we don’t have to look very far to find churches that seem to have a paranoid stance towards the world around them. They are always perceiving new enemies and new threats and talking about how their values are being threatened and eroded and how we have to fight to protect the Christian way. And similarly we find many individuals, even Christians, whose whole life seems to be about clinging to their sense of self and defending their way of doing things against a range of perceived threats. But we don’t seem to see any of that disposition in Jesus himself. do we? Where does he ever shows signs of acting fearfully or defensively? And since everybody was out to get him, he could have easily defended paranoia on the grounds that in his situation, it was just good sense! But instead his whole life, and even his death, are characterised by the most radical openness and generosity and self-giving.

So while this new understanding of baptism that Jesus gives us does have a negative side, a turning-from side, it is not a turning from that is all about setting us against things. It is a turning from a defensive obsession with our selves, not for its own sake, but in order to free us to receive the gift of our new resurrection selves and to enable us to freely give ourselves, openly and generously for the world. This new generous self is a strong self. As we have seen in Jesus, it has the strength to hold true even in the face of the most vicious rejection and physical assault. But it is not a strength that is constantly needing to prove itself by proving everyone else weak and wrong. That is merely paranoia masquerading as strength. Jesus instead models for us a strength that is bold and unapologetic, but confident enough to celebrate the gifts and successes of others and to give itself in generous and gracious partnership. When Jesus is repeatedly criticised for risking being contaminated by the evil of those with whom he associates, it is clear that he is perfectly confident that his truth and love are far more contagious than anyone else’s corruption.

Can we follow Jesus in this? Can we rise from the baptismal waters, relinquishing our defensive obsessions with our own selves, and walk confidently in the footsteps of Jesus? Can we approach the world around us, unafraid and unapologetic about our commitment to Jesus and his ways, but generously looking for the good to celebrate in the gifts that others bring and joyously open to sharing with others wherever we recognise the traces of grace and love and righteousness? Given the way Christians have mostly been perceived and the paranoias for which we have too often been known, such a confident offering of ourselves in Christ to the world might cause just as much confusion as Jesus presenting himself for baptism at the hands of John. It’s not what anyone expects, and it seems to make a nonsense of much conventional thinking. But it is the way of Jesus, and as he put it, “it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.”

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