Luke 3:21-22

The following are text excerpts from Volume I, chapters 10: “From Nazareth to the River Jordan,” pp. 208-212.

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LUKE 3:21–22 The Baptism of Jesus, According to Luke
21Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven,

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

  1. What do you notice about the similarities and differences between Mark’s version and Luke’s? What might they signify?

As with Matthew, Luke has already taken Jesus to Nazareth. Our most recent episode pre­sented him as an adolescent, returning home an obedient child after first taking leave of his parents. The reason for his absence: Jesus was about his “father’s business” in the Jerusalem Temple.

The parallel paths of John and Jesus, brought forth from the beginning of Luke’s gospel, are moving toward this moment—but they do not quite intersect. Luke does something with John that our other two synoptic evangelists do not. He has already reached a point in his narrative when John has been shut up in prison. Even so, the current segment is still (at least partially) about Jesus’ baptism. With John in prison, how does the baptism occur?

Luke’s Jesus has participated in a large, general baptism. There is no mention of him seeking out John, or of John having baptized Jesus. Nor do we witness the baptism itself. It is described in the past tense. It is not clear from the text itself whether it is the immediate past, or a lengthier period has intervened.

Luke also subtly shifts away from baptismal images and leaves us with another one: Jesus praying. For Luke, prayer is the time when God’s revelation occurs. He frequently connects important episodes in his story with Jesus praying.
Jesus’ prayer is answered by a remarkable communication with God. As in Mark, the voice is in the second person, telling Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” God’s words of favor are directed at Jesus, with no indication that others can hear them.

In Luke, then, we have another gospel story, containing another version of the baptism and description of the Spirit moving toward Jesus. Yet, even Luke does not exhaust all possibilities. The early Church had many different accounts of the baptism.13 The Gospel According to St. John even goes so far as to omit any reference at all to Jesus being baptized. John the Baptist is simply described as witnessing the Spirit in the form of a dove coming from heaven and resting on Jesus (See John 1:19–34).14

Why do we see all this contradiction and controversy around the baptism of Jesus? In addition to the theological reasons we have explored, there may be issues rooted in cultural history. Baptismal practices first arose in Eastern mystery religions that involved images of a god’s and his followers’ deaths and resurrections.15 By contrast, Jewish rites that involved administration of water were, at first, limited to issues of ritual cleanliness. Only later did Judaism adopt baptism. Even then, Jewish baptismal practices were reserved for Gentile converts. Because they viewed themselves as children of Abraham, Jews did not practice baptism of their own people. That tradition changed with John.

Ironically, these discrepancies in the various baptismal traditions do not lead scholars to doubt the historical probability of the event. Quite the opposite, as both mainline and cutting-edge scholars consider the baptism to be among the most probable events in Jesus’ life. There are so many signs that point to John having baptized Jesus that the question is not whether it took place, but how we understand it.

Even with all the theological and cultural challenges that the traditions of John baptizing Jesus create, it remains the defining moment of Jesus’ first public appearance. If we do not try to sidestep the baptism, or explain its difficulties away, we can see different approaches to understanding it. We have already compared Mark, Matthew, and Luke. But differing traditions exist within the Lukan corpus itself. There are textual variations among the ancient Luke manuscripts. In some, the heavenly voice says: “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” (Emphasis added; See Gospel Parallels, §6, and sources cited therein). Because the emphasized words do not appear in all manuscripts, the discrepancies within the Lukan tradition may be quite intentional. For instance, they may reveal a tension in the early Church between groups who understood the virgin birth as an historical event, and those who questioned or disputed it. The latter group believed God adopted Jesus as his Son at baptism, rather than miraculously conceiving him thirty years earlier by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What may really lie at the bottom of all these diverse texts is the faith story of different people struggling mightily to find proper words and images that describe the reality of Jesus’ relationship with God. The controversy around his baptism served as a lightning rod to bring that relationship into focus.

Some New Testament writers portray how Jesus’ identity as the Son of God is revealed a little differently. The earliest NT writings are those of Paul. In his Letter to the Romans—one of Paul’s later works, though written before any of the canonical Gospels—Paul describes the “gospel concerning [God’s] Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:3–4). To Paul, the resurrection is the defining event of Jesus’ Sonship. We have seen that Mark, who begins his gospel at around the time of the baptism, suggests that the baptism is the critical moment for declaring Jesus’ identity. Luke and Matthew go back to Jesus’ birth to establish his Sonship. Finally, The Gospel According to St. John—“The Mystic’s Story” of The Four Witnesses16—reaches far beyond, into eternity, and proclaims the preexis­tence of the divine logos, or word of God, that was made flesh in Jesus Christ (See John 1:1–18).

Seeing the difficulty the early Church experienced in coming to grips with the precise meaning of both baptism and sonship, it might be helpful for us to refocus on core truths rather than going too much further when considering important, but potentially speculative, questions about “what really happened.” The connections among sin, repentance, forgiveness, and baptism are complex. We cannot reproduce with absolute certainty either the verbal interchange between John and Jesus, or the precise way in which Jesus (and perhaps others) experienced the heavenly voice. What we can do, though, is remember that the adult Jesus went to the desert as a preliminary step in a journey toward his ultimate destiny. That there he met John, a man living out the prophetic tradition. That Jesus waded into the river Jordan to be baptized. That, in doing so, he voluntarily aligned himself not only with John’s move­ment in the desert with all it entailed, but also with a humanity in need of cleansing. And that he submitted to the baptismal rite as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. We will see, in the next volume of this series, that he emerged empowered to be with and among his people, and us as well, during our own journeys into the kingdom, the destiny toward which God calls us all.

  1. This section discusses the idea that the diverging baptismal traditions nonetheless have a unifying force. Do you agree? Or, does that notion gloss over material differ­ences among the stories?
  2. What core values or meanings do you find among the different versions of the baptismal story?
  3. We have now met the adult Jesus, who has identified himself with a Judaic movement back toward God. Where will he take us?

✝✝✝

In the baptism of Jesus, we encounter the manifest presence of the Trinity. The voice of the Father; the decisive and participatory action of the Son; and the physical embodiment of the Spirit converge in the river Jordan. It is a critical moment in our history; one difficult to encapsulate fully. Even as we search for our own words, we can still hear the heavenly voice of the baptism echo the ancient biblical words of Psalm 2:

7I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
8Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.”

Amen.

✝✝✝

13See generally Gospel Parallels, at §6, and sources cited therein. Some of these ancient witnesses contain: (a) detailed discussions about whether and why Jesus was to be baptized (See The Gospel According to the Hebrews, a text used in Greek-speaking Jewish Christian circles around Egypt); (b) more expansive words from the Heavenly voice (See The Gospel of the Ebionites, a text used by Jewish Christian groups who denied the virgin birth and believed Jesus’ sonship to God was dependent upon the work of the Holy Spirit at baptism); and (c) additional signs being given at the baptism (See again, The Gospel According to the Hebrews).
14In the fourth gospel, John the Baptist’s description of Jesus is mystically theological. He denies having known Jesus, except as divinely revealed.
15C.S. Lewis saw the hand of God in these mystery religions, foreshadowing the coming of Christ and preparing the world for God’s definitive revelation. See Mere Christianity at 39.
16See chapter 2, supra, regarding the book The Four Witnesses.