Here, we're studying the moral code of Christ, verse by verse. Our reasons are manifold.
We are going at a deliberately slow rate, to ensure that the work will be as exacting as possible. Today, we will take three verses. Sometimes we might take two. Sometimes only one. We'll do no more than three, though, under normal circumstances. The totality of this study will take us years. We work this slowly because we want to be as certain as possible in any conclusions we draw from our study. We work this slow because to work any faster would guarantee our constantly going off half-cocked and unprepared.*
Today is special because today is the first day we will be reading words attributed to Jesus in our study. Those of you who read the Introduction may recall that we quoted Jesus in passing there, but that does not count.
Soon we will number the sayings of Christ and break them apart into single ideas. There will be a separate page here at The Moral Vision which you will have access to by a link at the bottom of the text. The page will contain a running list of the sayings of Jesus by number, along with a few data points i.e. "Does the saying endorse violence?" "Does the saying endorse human authority?" "Does the saying have Jesus claiming he is God?" "Does the saying endorse materialism?" The list will also cross-reference the saying with its analogues in the opposing three Gospels. We will attempt to keep that page up-to-date as much as possible, but updating may occur in fits and starts.
Some of you may have noticed that we've mentioned "red letters" a couple of times without taking the time to explain what "red letter" means exactly. Some of you may know what we mean off-hand, and some may have no idea, but you can purchase Bibles that have the words of Jesus printed in red text, so that it stands out from the rest of the text. They call them "Red Letter Bibles." They are helpful. This study itself will be in red letter.
Ok. I think we're ready. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my excited pleasure to introduce to you the subject of our study, Jesus Christ.
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Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.
14 John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?”
15 Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.
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Yay! We're here, finally!
We don't want to get all over-spun, so we'll take this a verse at a time.
Recall that we last left Jesus still a baby in Matthew 2:21. The narrative jumps from Jesus being a baby, freshly returned from his exile to Egypt (which likely never actually occurred), to Jesus being one of the many adult Jews who are going out to receive John the Baptist's baptism. The time span between these two points, or Jesus' formative years, we know next to nothing about. Matthew certainly gives us little clue. In Matt 3:13, Jesus simply leaves Galilee to get to where John the Baptist is, on the river.
We should take the time to avail ourselves of a map of Palestine the way it was in the first century, which is easily available online. On a map, we see that Galilee was bordered, for a very short distance along its south-eastern limit, by the Jordan. This is right where the river flows out of the Sea of Galilee. The river flows due south where it eventually becomes a tributary of the Dead Sea.
The wording in Matt 3:13 gives us an indication that Jesus had traveled south far enough that he was no longer in Galilee. John could have been baptizing, then, anywhere between thirty and seventy miles from Nazareth. Remember, Nazareth is where we last left Jesus and thereby assume he journeys from. If Jesus walked, it could have been a two to four day trek out to John. If Jesus took a camel, the journey would likely have been a day or two at the maximum. We aren't told how Jesus travelled, but it can be assumed that we meet him at the end of a lengthy journey.
Matt 3:13 explicitly calls out the purpose of Jesus' journey to John the Baptist. It is the same as that of most of the people crowded around John by the Jordan: he makes the journey to be baptized.
What is John's baptism, again? A washing away of impurity. A washing away of sin. John's baptism is of repentance. Jesus, who people normally think of as "without sin," nevertheless travels this distance - probably a multiple day ordeal through unforgiving desert heat - explicitly "to be baptized by [John]."
Why would someone who is above sin need a baptism of repentance from it?
Some might say that Jesus is identifying himself with humanity for humanity's sake. "He is sinless, of course, but has come to humans in the form of a human to have a human experience before their eyes, so he starts it off in this human way: asking for a baptism of remission from sin." This reads a lot into the text that isn't explicitly there.
Matt 3:14 has John the Baptist experiencing parallel confusion. He doesn't feel capable of baptizing Jesus, for some reason. He says "you should wash away my sins, not the other way around."
One interesting thing about Matt 3:14 is that it seems to pre-suppose a relationship between Jesus and John. John sees Jesus and immediately says "no, you're too good to be baptized by me," as if he is already familiar with the character and nature of Jesus. This could certainly be seen as evidence that Jesus had spent some of his "formative years" with John the Baptist. This is interesting because it contradicts the The Gospel According to John, which has John the Baptist claiming that he "did not know [Jesus]." It also begs one-thousand difficult or unanswerable questions: "where did John and Jesus meet up, prior to the Gospel accounts?" "What did they do together when they met?" "Were they students in a common school of thought together, or co-creators of a school?" Etc... And, again, these questions are all contingent on the supposition that the two did, indeed, know one another prior to their meeting in Matthew chapter 3.**
We should also recall that this "baptism in the desert" situation was atypical for the Jews. Their traditions didn't call for an immersion for the cleansing of sins, and, if they had, they would have likely performed such rituals in Jerusalem where all the other traditional rites were performed, not out in the middle of the desert away from civilization and security. It was not as if you might, as a person from that region, assume that everyone around at the time had gone out, or would go out, to receive John's baptism. It's likely that many wouldn't have even known John's name.
Since the baptism John offered was a new one that existed outside of existing Jewish law and tradition, we can assume that John's group of followers would have been comprised of people who had been left somehow wanting by the existing law and tradition. It's safe to assume that most of the people that went out to John sought drastic change in their lives. More often than not, those seeking drastic change are the poor, the marginalized, and the disaffected.*** It was these that John primarily baptized, with the occasional upper-class elite venturing out "just to see," like we saw The Sadducees and the Pharisaic elites do.
Finally, in Matthew 3:15, we get Christ's response, and his first words, so-to-speak. When John the Baptist has resisted baptizing Christ, Christ responds “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” John the Baptist responds with reflexive obedience and baptizes Jesus.
Notation in The New American Bible says "Here... righteousness seems to mean the saving activity of God. To fulfill all righteousness is to submit to the plan of God for the salvation of the human race." It would seem as likely that Jesus merely meant "everyone else is out here getting baptized, and it's the normal thing to do among your audience, so just baptize me."
It would seem just as likely, too, that these words didn't actually even get spoken. You'll notice that they do not occur in any of the other Gospels. In our effort to find the truest knowable Jesus, we will constantly be checking to see in how many Gospels his sayings are repeated, and if there is any wild variation between the iterations. Generally, albeit not always, the more times the saying was recorded, the more likely it was to have been historical. The fact that the dialogue at hand today is unique to The Gospel According to Matthew gives us some cause to be wary as to its historicity.****
These verses are denser than what we were used to, early on. When Jesus speaks, which is a good percentage of the upcoming text, we will always find this kind of scholastic density, so it works to our advantage that the story is told four times over. We have plenty of time to unpack everything.
We'll take our leave of it here, today. Join us next time when a full-on miracle including a "voice from the heavens" will unfold.
Thank you for reading.
Please share this writing.
Love
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* We will still go off half-cocked, mind you. Just not as frequently as all that.
** We will learn more about this when we read Luke's portrayal of the life of John the Baptist, which is the most detailed.
*** Why would one want a change if one had no want?
**** Historicity means "historical authenticity."
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