At the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, he walked into the Jordan River to be baptized by John. But why would the sinless Son participate in a baptism of repentance? This surprising start to Jesus’s ministry carries at least five meanings: he fulfilled old-covenant expectations, consecrated himself for his mission, represented those whom he came to save, identified himself as the beloved Son of the Father, and anticipated the final baptism of the cross. He was baptized for us, so that we might be baptized into him.

In addition to the Lord’s Supper, Jesus gave every Christian an intimate, tangible link to himself. He prescribed a sensory experience to join us to all he undertook for us. Yet we seldom draw upon it! Believers have been baptized. Jesus was baptized. Our individual baptisms echo Jesus’s baptism on our behalf. Though properly we receive baptism only once, we can yet have a continuing connection to this powerful sign. The key, though, won’t be found in digging out some record of a personal event we might not even remember — or in asking to be rebaptized. Rather, questing into the event of Jesus’s own baptism can lead us into the mystery that we have been “baptized into Christ” (Galatians 3:27).

Let’s excavate the meaning of this episode of Jesus’s life among us as we follow five aspects of this story: expectation, consecration, representation, Trinitarian identification, and anticipation.

1. Expectation

At the dawn of Jesus’s public ministry, great crowds of people were coming out to the wilderness by the Jordan River where Jesus’s cousin, John, preached and baptized. “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he urged as he quoted the prophet Isaiah (Mark 1:3). John considered himself to be the herald of God’s long-expected arrival in the person of the Messiah. He called the people to repent through deliberate acts of love and equity toward their neighbors (Luke 3:10–14). The people, in turn, confessed their sins and then went down to the river to be symbolically washed clean for a fresh start. The act symbolized dying to the old patterns of sin and rising to a fresh start in living righteously for God.

John considered his baptism to be not definitive but preparatory. He was getting people ready to perceive and then accept the Christ of God, who was about to appear on the public scene. And the people poured out for John’s severe, bracing preaching. They undertook this definitive act of commitment because they were longing for their covenant Lord to come reclaim and redeem his people.

What deep need lay beneath this enthusiasm for John’s message and the pride-breaking baptism he demanded? Hundreds of years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah expressed the great longing of God’s people under the judgment of exile for their sin. They yearned for God himself to come and set things right: “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 64:1). Isaiah confessed for the people that “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). God’s people had no cache of worthiness to which they could appeal. The only claim they could make was to familial loyalty: “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter. . . . Remember not iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people” (Isaiah 64:8–9).

The ancient longing was twofold. First, we yearned for God himself to cross the divide between Creator and creation, which Jesus did in the incarnation. At the same time, we ached for God to cross the divide of sin, to come from his place of holiness to our place of sin, which sundered our fellowship with him. And we desired that he somehow do this in a way that would not tarnish his perfection yet would cleanse us from our impurity. We required a true way to make us right again with our God.

Jesus’s baptism represented God’s crossing of this divide. Mark’s account uses the same word for rend as the Greek version of Isaiah 64:1: “When he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove” (Mark 1:10). The root here is schizo, to tear apart (hence why the term schizophrenia is applied to a mind divided by mental illness). God answered the cry for the heavens to be rent open when the Spirit came down upon Jesus as he came up from the waters. But why did the act of descending into the Jordan elicit such a dramatic heavenly response?

2. Consecration

At his baptism, Jesus offered himself without reservation to his Father as he began the public phase of his redeeming mission. What might Jesus have been praying as he waited with the others to descend from the banks into the Jordan? The author of Hebrews places Psalm 40 on Jesus’s lips, and the beginning of his ministry seems like an ideal time for Jesus to have made this prayer his own. Quoting from the Greek version of Psalm 40:6–8, Hebrews declares,

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” (Hebrews 10:5–7)

We can see the connection with the inauguration of Jesus’s ministry even more clearly if we continue the psalm, in the translation from the Hebrew:

Then I said, “Behold, I have come;
in the scroll of the book it is written of me:
I delight to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart.”
I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation. (Psalm 40:7–10)

Jesus arrived at the Jordan to declare his full solidarity with both us the sinners and his holy Father. Son of Man and Son of God, Jesus came “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). We can imagine Jesus praying this psalm as he gets ready to go into the waters of the Jordan to be baptized. He has come to do his Father’s will. We feel his sense of mission as he says, “Behold, I have come.” He knows he is fulfilling the prophecies of Scripture. He is the one man of whom it can be truly said, “Your law is within my heart.” His delight in his Father would lead him to speak of such steadfast love to the multitudes that would come to him.

3. Representation

Being baptized by John meant admission of sin and the need for forgiveness. But Jesus was sinless! How could he confess sin, even by gesture if not by words? Jesus’s baptism represents his total identification with the people he came to save. Paul tells us that God made him who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians 5:21). This taking of our sin was not just for three hours on the cross. Jesus’s whole ministry involved his taking our place.

The fourth Gospel records John the Baptist making a declaration that we might think fits more naturally at the crucifixion. But it was at the baptism that John shouted out, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Though he had no sin, Jesus identified with sinners. He said, in effect, “I will live where they live. I will go through what they go through. I will not be above them. I will be with them. I will take the cleansing waters as one of them. I am on the side of sinners.”

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