The Baptism of Christ, 11 January 2026
Readings: Isaiah 42.1-9; Acts 10.34-43; Matthew 3.13-17
Theme: To fulfil all righteousness
For most of us baptisms are family occasions. They are times when family and friends gather together to welcome a new-born into the fold. These moments celebrate new life and give thanks to God for the beauty of a new child. As we recite in the Nicene Creed each Sunday, part of this Christian ceremony is the washing away of sin, often anticipated at this stage since the baby is so young but recognized as that aspect of us which turns away from God. This is, as we Christians believe, not the case in the situation of Jesus, he is sinless, so, why does Jesus get baptized by John in the river Jordan?
In the Gospel of Matthew, for this festival of the Baptism of Christ, the question of John the Baptist, “Shouldn’t it be you baptizing me?”, and Jesus’s answer, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness,” reveal this event as unfurling the prophetic fulfilment, in Jesus, of the ancient promises made to Israel to redeem them from injustice and death. The baptism of Christ communicates this fulfilment through the echoes of scripture, contained in the central biblical concept of ‘righteousness’, that would have resonated loudly in Jewish ears at the time. There are four such echoes in this concept.
The first is the fact that in Greek, the concept of ‘righteousness’ can be used as a verb. It can be an individual or collective act. This is not easy to do in English. We need to use it with auxiliary verbs such as ‘to do’, ‘to be’ or ‘to make’ in order to achieve this neatly, so we say, ‘she was made righteous’, for example. Some translators of the New Testament attempt to make ‘righteousness’ do this verbal work of an action on its own and use the rather untidy verbal-forms of, ‘to righteous’ or ‘to rightwise’, to get around these translation problems. A tidier way is to use the term ‘to rectify’, which carries over important semantic elements of the verbal meaning and also allows the sense of ‘making right’, ‘fairness’, and ‘equity’ to be brought into the frame, as in the third and fourth senses discussed below.
The second echo is that, like in English, Greek uses the concept of ‘righteousness’ as a collective noun. ‘Righteousness’ designates a set of instances, in the way a noun designates a collective reality, such as the use of the noun love in the 1965 Deon Jackson song, ‘Love makes the world go round’, for example. English, like Greek, can also use this in its distinctively adjectival form, so ‘a righteous woman’ qualifies the singular noun ‘woman’ by the particular characteristic of being ‘righteous’.
The third is revealed by knowing that the meaning of the Greek, ‘dikaiosynē’, can be translated by two distinct concepts in English. It can mean ‘justice’ and it can mean ‘righteousness’. So, the ‘justice of God’, for example, is often associated in the Bible with the way that God acts to restore, redeem, save, and indeed to reward or punish Israel, as in Psalm 72, where it says:
“O God grant your judgement to the king
And your righteousness to the king’s son,
To judge your people with righteousness
And your poor with justice (Ps. 72.1-2).
Psalm 72, in its Greek Septuagint version, also highlights the fourth aspect of ‘righteousness’, that we should be aware of; namely, it also carries the connotation that this is something specifically ‘of God’; God grants God’s ‘righteousness’. We share in God’s ‘righteousness’, in God’s ‘justice’. This conveys the adjectival echo, noted in the second element discussed above, but now specifically attributed to God.
Having an awareness of these echoes we are in a better position to understand just why it is that Jesus being baptized by John is the prophetic fulfilment of the ancient promises of ‘righteousness’.
‘Baptism’ means to be covered, as in being submerged in water. In this Gospel passage it is used by Matthew as a symbol of Jesus accepting his death (submergence) in order to rise again in Resurrection (re-emergence). Through the act of his obedient death, we are saved from injustice and the punishment of death that was due to us because of our disobedience. Jesus’s obedience overcomes and substitutes for our disobedience.
God’s righteousness, enacted in this saving obedience of Jesus, is the fulfilment of the prophetic promises made to Israel through the covenant that one-day God would redeem his people. Words and actions that would have echoed loudly in the ears of his early Jewish followers as they witnessed this baptism of Jesus by John at the Jordan, fulfilling this ancient prophetic promise.
So, even though the baptism of Jesus may not be one of washing away sin in the case of Jesus, there is something in common with our ordinary family celebrations. Jesus is the one who restores our families to righteousness. That is to say, he is the one who rectifies all the brokenness of our relationships, the injustices of our behaviour, and the alienation from God which our sin represents.
This baptism of Jesus by John is the moment when Jesus is recognized as the Messiah, the one who does all of this. He is recognized as the Son of God by the Trinitarian presence in this gospel passage today of the Spirit of God descending on him and of the voice of the Father declaring him as such. Such is this family of the Trinitarian God which is the one that we are welcomed into today with all the nations and especially with our brothers and sisters in the Jewish faith who gave us the Messiah. It is the recognition of this anointed one, as the one who brings righteousness to all the nations, that we commemorate on this beautiful festival of the Baptism of Christ.