If I were a high school English teacher, I would have a bone to pick with some of St. Matthew’s writing. Of course, he was writing in a completely different language, so perhaps my pickiness is not entirely fair. It should be directed at the English language translators of Matthew’s Greek. But then again, they were simply trying to render Matthew’s Greek as carefully as possible in English.
The bone I want to pick with Matthew is that he sometimes uses vague pronoun references. Ambiguous antecedents run rampant. We must sometimes reread a particular passage to understand whom a pronoun refers to. There’s a particularly good example of this in today’s Gospel passage, although its ambiguity makes for an interesting theological discussion. It’s unlikely that St. Matthew deliberately intended this lack of clarity, but in both the English and the Greek, it is possible to read part of the passage in two different ways. Maybe Matthew’s unintended meaning is a gift of the Spirit inviting us deeper into the text.
Jesus comes to John the Baptist at the Jordan and asks John to baptize him. John objects, recognizing that he, John, is not the Messiah. Do you see how I had to clarify my own pronoun usage there lest you think I was saying something heretical about Jesus? John’s objection is that Jesus is the one who should baptize him. But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented.
Who consented? Matthew could have learned a lot from my high school English teachers. I admit that when I first read this passage, I thought that he referred to Jesus. After all, Jesus had just finished speaking, so the he that follows could logically be connected to Jesus as the subject. Jesus consented to be baptized.
But this is most assuredly not what Matthew intended to say. John consented to baptize Jesus. This makes more sense in the original Greek. But we are not reading and hearing Greek, so let’s play a bit more with this possibility of an ambiguous consenter. Who consents? Jesus or John? Or do they both consent? Is it mutual consent?
In some sense, Jesus does consent to be baptized. He has no need of baptism. He is true God and true man. He is sinless, and he certainly doesn’t need a baptism for repentance, for he has nothing of which to repent. To be baptized, Jesus must consent to be baptized, and he insists on it. On the one hand, Jesus’s baptism is completely unnecessary, and on the other hand, it is absolutely necessary. Jesus makes salvation possible precisely because he assumes human finitude with all its temptations, sorrows, joys, and frustrations. By consenting to be baptized, Jesus says to the whole human race that he will not ask us to do anything he has not already done. He goes first where he is asking us to go.
But what if John had refused to baptize Jesus? We should consider this seriously for just a moment. For the Savior of the world to be baptized, one of the many persons whom he came to save must consent to do it. John must consent to do it. John’s consent is like Mary’s response to the angel at the annunciation: let it be with me according to thy word. And at the Jordan River, Jesus’s Let it be so now must be matched by John’s let it be so. This is the moment of mutual consent. And only after both parties have consented do the heavens open in a theophany, as the visible presence of the Holy Spirit is seen, and God’s voice is heard. Jesus is manifested to the world as God’s Beloved Son.
For ages, scholars have noted St. Matthew’s discomfort with the fact that Jesus was baptized by John. If this baptism had been a mere ritual cleansing it might have been one thing. But the fact that this baptism was a baptism with water for the repentance of sins is a wholly different matter. Matthew must have been concerned with defending Jesus’s sinlessness, and so he goes out of his way to explain how Jesus requested his own baptism. And then he portrays the moment of consent when John allows it to happen and when Jesus himself consents to take on the fullness of our humanity.
But what if we pressed Matthew’s discomfort a bit further? Doesn’t it make all of us a bit uncomfortable to know that our Lord and Savior was baptized by a sinner, however holy he may have been? Put yourself in John’s shoes. Would you have consented to baptize Jesus? Isn’t there some instinctual aversion to recognizing the full humanity of our Lord? Isn’t there some visceral desire on our part to protect him from the human condition, which seems beneath him, or to keep him domesticated in a bubble that is only fully divine?
There is a startling tension that we must recognize on this Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. Every year it recurs and challenges preachers and worshippers in the pews. Is the celebration of Jesus’s baptism about him or about us? For some, it seems blasphemous to recognize our own belovedness in God’s eyes because Jesus was recognized as beloved by his Father. It is, of course, true that only Jesus is the Beloved Son of God in that unique sense. But isn’t it also true that because Jesus went down into the Jordan River and because he identified so fully with our humanity we have the privilege of identifying with him?
This is a scandal of proximity. Jesus comes so close to us so that we might draw as close to him as possible. Jesus humbles himself so fully that we might dare to participate in the divine life. And this shocking possibility makes John the Baptist uneasy, as it may very well make us uneasy.
It's well worth exploring our own spiritual discomfort with Jesus’s baptism. In doing so, we might find that beneath our discomfort is a false humility. Our protests of allowing Christ to stoop so low among us may be more about protecting ourselves from what Jesus’s baptism, life, and death demand from us. If we are humble enough to allow Jesus to get frightfully close to us, then we will be challenged to be like Jesus. As John shows, it’s disconcerting to permit Jesus to be the one who goes into the waters of the Jordan for our sake, because we know that he will soon be thrust into the desert to be tempted by Satan for forty days and nights. We know that Jesus will come to his own people, and they will receive him not. We know that Jesus will eventually suffer and die, and even in his moment of death, he will forgive his enemies.
This is far too close for comfort. Jesus’s consent to come among us as one of us and still live without sin must be met by our own consent to follow him by forsaking sin and evil. And that is a tall order. Are we prepared for the pernicious testings by Satan, which are real and alive in our own world? Are we equipped to face rejection and persecution for following our Lord? Are we willing to love so completely that we would forgive even our most hated enemies? Can we give ourselves to Christ fully and unconditionally? Do we love him enough that we would die rather than forsake him?
On this feast, we rightly celebrate the unique status of Jesus as God’s only begotten Son. But we also must wrestle with our tendency to object to Jesus’s proximity to us. The question before us today is the question before John: will we allow it? Will we let it be? We must come face to face with all that keeps us from letting Jesus get too close to us. We must reckon with our pride, our false humility, our desire for comfort, and our pious adulation of Jesus’s divinity without also embracing his fully humanity. We must let Christ himself break down the defensive walls we build around ourselves and justify through sanctimonious language that excuses us from the mutual consent that is part of our salvation.
But once the walls come down, we will ultimately discover a gift. A door opens to a place of great freedom. We are invited to move into the place where Jesus has been so that we might take our own rightful standing there. Where Christ has interceded for the wholeness of the world, we move to pray for that same wholeness. Where Christ has groaned and sighed, we move and allow the Holy Spirit to pray within us with sighs too deep for words. Where Christ has been praying Abba to his heavenly Father, we dare to take our place as the beloved children of that same Abba. We do so with great humility but also with great joy. For the One who has called his Son Beloved, also looks on us as beloved children. This God invites us to call him Father, knowing that one day, where Christ has gone, we shall go, too. And we can only go there because he has gone there first.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 11, 2026