I'll Stand By You

I'll Stand By You--January 14, 2019

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” [Mark 1:9]

If there’s one person in history who shouldn’t have been baptized, it was Jesus. And yet, no one’s baptism is of more importance to the whole of history than Jesus’ was.  How’s that for a paradox?

Most of us church-going folks assume that baptism is a pretty respectable thing to have done.  While we might differ across traditions and denominations about the why and when and where and even squabble over how much water is supposed to be used, pretty much all churchgoers see this act we call baptism as a respectable religious ritual that is just part of what “good people” are supposed to do. It’s a box on our churchy-checklists, a requisite on our religious résumés: something you’re just supposed to “get done” sometime to show the world that you are a good and godly person, and to show God the same, I guess.

Trouble is, that just about completely misses the point of what baptism is about now, and it certainly misses the point of what this guy John was doing in the river Jordan some 2,000 years ago. What John had in mind was anything but respectable. First off, you couldn’t keep your outfit nice and dry—sometimes we modern Christians can be so stingy with the water at baptism that you’d think we just had a 3/4 measuring cup worth to use for the rest of history. But not with John—John went out in the river, took you in hands and brought you under, and then brought you back up you soaking wet, hair-do all undone, mascara streaking down your face and cologne all washed away, and possibly a little river silt in your hair.

But not only was getting baptized by John a physically humbling thing to do, it was a spiritually humbling thing to do. Remember, John was offering this act called “baptism” (which was really not a technical “religious” word, but was just the common Greek word for “dipping”, which means, I suppose, you could conceivably have gotten a “double-baptized cone” at the local ice cream parlor in Judea), as an act “of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” In other words, you went out to John in the river if you were ready to admit (or maybe needed his help in admitting) that your life was at best a mess, and at worst, a mess tied up in a bow to make it look well-put-together.  You went out to John to get turned around again, as a public sign that you were tired of your sin and hypocrisy and wanted a fresh start. That’s not a particularly respectable statement to be making in public, is it? “I’m a sinner. I’m a failure. I’m a sell-out. I need help.” The reason that 12-Step programs are anonymous, after all, is that it’s not a boost to most people’s reputation to confess, “I’m an addict. I need help.” If you went to John out in the river, it was because you had reached a point where you were willing to say that to God and to everybody else and didn’t care anymore who heard it. That’s not respectable religion—that’s raw honesty.

So then… what’s Jesus doing there in the water? We Christians make a big point about Jesus being the “sinless Lamb of God” who is like us in every way, “except without sin,” as the writer of Hebrews is quick to add (Heb. 4:15). But everybody else out there at the shore was a big ol’ sinner….  And everybody else in line to be baptized was there to say it out loud to the world…. And Jesus wasn’t keeping his distance from everybody else, as if to make it clear that he’s not one of them, not one of the huddled masses, not one of the ungodly sinners, those dirty messes who had come to John to get clean.  Jesus was there standing in line with them, alongside of them, to do and say the same as them—why?

There—that’s the reason by itself.  Jesus went and stood in line with all the rest who got baptized by John in order to stand with them.  Jesus, Christians believe, is the one person in history who didn’t need to be baptized by John because he’s the one human life that didn’t have any sins to repent of or be forgiven for in the first place.  And yet, Jesus is the One whom God sent precisely to stand with us—to stand and live and die and rise in solidarity with us, as one of us, with all of us.  And in fact, he was willing to be counted among us as a big ol’ sinner like the rest of us—in fact, as Paul would write in 2 Corinthians, God “made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God.”  Jesus is the one person who didn’t have the need to go under the water and turn from his past. But because he had come to stand with us, that was the one place he needed to be.

This, it turns out, is one of the more difficult things of the Christian faith: we have a very hard time imagining a God who comes that close, who stands with us, and an even harder time letting that God save us by taking a place in line alongside of us, even if it doesn’t seem a very respectable place for God to be. But that is the news we have to bring to the world: that God is not off somewhere else at a distance, keeping divine hands from getting dirt under divine fingernails, but standing with us in our place. Tell someone that news, and it could change their life.  It has already changed the world.

It's the Gospel encapsulated in the famous lyric by the Pretenders, for a world full of recovering pretenders (and still-pretending pretenders) like us: the God of the universe says, "I'll stand by you."

Lord Jesus, come and stand among us, as much as it surprises us to have you come so close.