Sunday, 9 December 2007

Matthew 3: Why did Jesus himself get baptised?

I'm not going major on this at church tonight - but I have a few thoughts on this one. Has anyone done some thinking on this one?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I take it as Jesus identifying himself with Israel. Baptism being a common practice for post-exilic jews, I guess that Jesus wanted to show himself to be right ('fulfill all righteousness') in terms of being able to represent Israel. Only by being able to represent Israel was he able to give meaning to his fulfilling the requirements of the law and his representative death.

I think this idea is consistent with the proceeding passage of Jesus' temptations in the desert, where Jesus is able to wander in the wilderness without disobeying God - unlike Israel in the desert for 40 years in Numbers.

That's what I think anyway :-)

Anonymous said...

Well, according to AB's sermon and my Matthew commentary, it seems that John was a pioneer and that baptism wasn't a common practice, so there you go!

Though, I still see Jesus being baptised as an action where he is identifying himself with the jews or John's followers in some way. Maybe he's identifying with John's message of repentance in response to the coming Kingdom of God. So he's saying 'this guy's got it right'. What was it that you said in church AB?

Unknown said...

I think you're right about Jesus being the new Israel. I think you may also be right about Jesus 'backing up' John's preaching. I've never thought that before. What an endorsement of his ministry.

Paul said...

Browse down to "I believe that Jesus’ baptism was a high priestly baptism..." in this article: Baptism by sprinkling

Tis interesting!