How much time in a given week, in a month, in a year, or how about over your lifetimes, have you spent striving to accomplish goals? Maybe these have been goals tied to educations, jobs, families, owning a home, or maybe it’s been about getting fitter or thinner, or happier, or nicer, maybe sober, maybe making it to a milestone. Make no mistake about it, human beings are all about goals and achieving accomplishments.
But what if the greatest thing you could possibly desire, is not something you could accomplish? What if in fact, setting goals, rules, practices, or even mission statements, actually caused you to refashion that greatest desire into something you were capable of attaining, so that you thought you’d achieved or obtained it when you’d altogether missed your greatest desire altogether?
This is basically what John the Baptist is warning the Israelites of his day about, and so also all of us today. We’ve been hearing this same story for the last six weeks for a reason: human beings are actually pretty stubborn when they think they’ve got things right. We really like to dig in and hold on and not let go, no matter how dire the warning. So John says to people: repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And yes, some folks - maybe the simple or naive or those who have some natural inbuilt humility - come to be baptised by him. But he says, “I’m only baptizing you with water.”
I can only baptize you with water, because I can only tell you to prepare your hearts, to repent and confess of those things that are separating you from God - whatever those things are for you: persisting in selfish pursuits, in coveting what others have or don’t have, in greed, or arrogance, or even self-hatred - repent of these things so you can prepare yourself for God’s coming.
But, John says, I’m not worthy to untie the thong of the Messiah’s sandal. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. That is, even though I’m a messenger, I can’t accomplish what God desires of me, or of you. Only God can accomplish this. So if you want to be perfect as God is perfect - that is, perfect for the person God made you to be - then make room in your hearts to receive God himself.
This my friends, is why Jesus is baptized. Jesus asks John to baptize him to fulfill all righteousness. To be righteous is to open himself - to obediently submit himself - to his Father. He knows that we cannot be reconciled to God through our own births. We can only be reconciled to God by receiving him into our hearts and allowing him to nurture and reform us according to his will; a will we often stubbornly resist. To be reconciled then, is to be obedient - to listen, watch, and seek God above all else, even our own desires, even past our own fears and frustrations, so that we aren’t left as we are but reformed into Jesus’s likeness of constantly seeking and so finding the Father’s perfect love.
Jesus comes into the world and lives the same kinds of experiences we have and so he identifies with us not simply in our struggles, our hopes and desires, our confusions and frustrations, but most fully, in our continuous need for God’s love to nourish us through trials - all those we face that are summarized for us by Jesus’s own temptations by Satan in the desert.
And finally, we see Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s divine plan of reconciliation. ln In the genealogy of Abraham to whom God promises to reconcile all nations, Jesus, a human being just like us, tempted like us, and yet fully God, one with the Father, manifests God’s own presence with us: as with the Transfiguration we hear God the Father proclaim, “you are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased,” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus and the heavens are opened up so that all human beings now joined to Jesus have access in him, to God the Father as they are gathered from the four corners of the Earth by the Holy Spirit.
He is the way - the only way - to God. This is perfect love: not that we love God perfectly, but that God loved us perfectly in sending Jesus into the world to take on our sins so that we don’t suffer their consequence of death at the end of our lives. But instead, we are forgiven and made perfect to have life eternal with God.
Do you believe this? That’s what John would appear to be asking the Israelites who come to be baptized by him. In the midst of an empire, in so many ways like the one everyone lives in today, comes this one who shows us that no matter how many stones we use to build, no matter what we own or accomplish, or think we’re worth, it will all come down. Where then is our hope? It is in fact not in us, but in our obedient submission to seeking Christ’s way. Letting go of our demands, our agendas, our entitlement, the ways we want to hold to, and asking God what he requires of us, here and now, so that we can work not towards the goals of this shadow world of ours, but towards the goals of receiving and sharing the perfect love of God. AMEN
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