"THE GOOD SON"
The Baptism of Our Lord (transferred)
January 14, 2018
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
A voice came from heaven, "You are My beloved Son, with You I am well pleased."
Mark 1:11 (ESV)
Anyone who is a parent or has ever been a parent no doubt has at least some understanding of parental pride. We can deny it all that we want, we can criticize other parents for it, but we all have a certain degree of pride in our children. We are proud of them (or at least we want to be) and, consequently, we have very high expectations of them. A lot of parents see their children as an extension or continuation of themselves and of their own lives. I'm not here talking about the phenomenon of parents trying relive their own lives through their children; I'm simply saying that our children are our legacy. They are what we leave behind in this world when we move on to the next. If things go the way that most of us expect, our children are what's left of us after our life is ended and we are dead and gone, because they will continue to impact the world that we have lived in long after we are no longer able to do so.
Strange as it may seem, God apparently has a sense of parental pride Himself. We find the evidence for this in the Biblical account of our Savior's Baptism, as recorded in this first chapter of Mark's Gospel. (The story also appears in the third chapter of Matthew, the third chapter of Luke, and the first chapter of John.) Like any proud father, the Lord lets it be known that He is proud to claim Jesus as His Son, that He loves this Son dearly, and that He is happy with His Son. Perhaps His Parental pride is manifested most clearly in that God says all of this in a miraculous way and in the presence of witnesses. This, in fact, proclaims the theme for the entire season of Epiphany: The word "Epiphany" means "revelation" or "manifestation." The glory of God is revealed or manifested to the whole world in the life and ministry of the incarnate Son of God. The words spoken from heaven about Jesus at His Baptism say something to us about both the Father and the Son.
What does this divine statement say about God the Father? For one thing it speaks of the Father's great love for His Son. It may seem to be so obvious as to be ridiculous to say that God the Father loves His Son, but take a minute to think about all that this implies. The full significance of God's love for His Son is to be found in this: Only by meditating on this parental love of God can we come to appreciate how difficult it must have been for the Perfect Judge of all to offer up His own beloved Son on the cross at Calvary to make atonement for the sin of the whole world. It could not by any means have been an easy thing for Him to do. Nevertheless, Scripture tells us that "He . . . did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all" (Romans 8:32). That statement doesn't mean much unless you look at it in terms of the Father's great love for His one and only Son--the love that He declared at the Baptism of Jesus.
Another thing that this statement from heaven says is that the Father is pleased with the life that His beloved Son is living. This is a vital and essential part of our redemption, and yet it is one that we so often forget about. The center of the Gospel of Christ is our belief that Christ justified us in the sight of God. He did this not only by suffering the just punishment for our sin but also in that He perfectly fulfilled the Law of God by offering to the Father a perfect life on our behalf. If all He did was to do away with our sin, there would still be nothing positive about us that would make us acceptable to God. But because the Father is "well pleased" with the Son, and the Son's perfect righteousness becomes ours through faith, God the Father therefore accepts us as His beloved children in whom He is "well pleased." The perfect Judge's requirement that we be perfect even as He is perfect is fulfilled for us by the good Son who in His life of perfect righteousness has made us all good and righteous in the sight of God.
The Father's statement at Jesus' Baptism also says something about the Son. It says that the Son belongs to God. That is something that all of us need to remember, especially in this age of spiritual indifference where religion has all too often been reduced to nothing more than empty tradition. When we think of our own Baptism or that of our children, we dare not forget that Baptism means something. When we were baptized, we were given to God. We died to ourselves in order that we might live for Christ. And when we chose to have our children baptized, we likewise handed them over to the same spiritual death and resurrection. In a spiritual sense we no longer have any claim on our children or even ourselves. In Baptism God claims the one being baptized as His own, so that that person might be a son or daughter of God.
The Father is "well pleased" with His Son because the Son of God reveals the glory of God. To be sure, God's glory is revealed in many ways. We see His glory in nature, in the order of creation, in our own physical and emotional makeup, in our conscience. But He has revealed Himself most clearly in His incarnate Son. Jesus is His fullest and final Self-Revelation. Here we see God-in-the-flesh, living as One of us in our world, enduring all of the same hardships and temptations that we must face. Here we see how God handles our everyday experiences. There is nothing that can happen to us that He doesn't understand or relate to. And He went through all of it unscathed--untouched by sin--emerging victorious over all of the forces of evil. He won that victory for you and me, so that we might know God through knowing His Son. This is possible because of who the Son is. Jesus reveals God's glory so clearly because He in fact is God in human form.
We've heard a lot this morning about the Father and the Son. You might begin to wonder: What about that Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit? He is here at the Baptism of Jesus too, for we are told in the verse that precedes our text that "the Spirit [descended] on [Jesus] like a dove" (Mark 1:10). It is the Spirit who reveals Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God. He does this through the means of grace, which are the Word of God and the Sacraments. Without the Spirit we could not know Jesus the Son of God, and without the means of grace we could not have the Spirit. But, thank God that, through no merit of our own, we have that Word--that Spirit--that Christ--that glory of God. And God the Holy Spirit will keep us always in His grace so that we may always see the glory of the Father revealed in the good Son.
Amen.
May the God who caused light to shine out of darkness cause you to increase and abound in love toward one another and toward all people, as His love abounds for us; and may the glory of His Son be manifested to you and in you, that you may be witnesses to all nations now and until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.