"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.... In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan." [Mark 1:4-5, 9]
This is a strange sort of first impression, if you think about it. There are contradictions and tensions all over the place, but Mark our storyteller doesn't seem to blush about them. Here's what I mean.
This scene is literally the first time we "see" Jesus in the flesh in Mark's version of the story. Even though we are used to the familiar beats of Luke's nativity story with the angels and the shepherds, or even Matthew's version with the Magi and a violently insecure King Herod trying to cling to power through trickery and violence, Mark doesn't give us any of that. Instead, he just declares, "What I'm about to tell you is the good news of Jesus, who is the Christ and the Son of God," like the opening crawl of text in a Star Wars movie, and then the scene fades in on John the Baptizer at the water's edge, dunking people in the Jordan and pulling them back up to start over in their lives. And then, as the camera pans through the crowds lined up to be baptized by John, Mark zooms in on the face of Jesus, otherwise unnoticed and mixed in with everybody else. There is no halo over his head, and Jesus doesn't radiate a soft glow of golden light like in so many paintings. He is just a face in the crowd, there waiting to take his turn to be brought under the water and pulled back up by John.
And I've got to tell you, that strikes me as a pretty strange way to introduce the world to Jesus, at least if you have gone out of your way to tell us that this is a story ABOUT Jesus. He enters in from the margins, just outside the field of our vision, like a non-speaking extra in a movie scene you didn't notice was even there at first. We live in the age of heroic backstories for our beloved characters--we need little Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents' murder in Crime Alley in Gotham City so that he can vow to wreak revenge on villains as Batman! We want the origin story of Tony Stark becoming Iron Man, or somebody getting bitten by a radioactive spider! My goodness, we even have a Willy Wonka origin story at the movies right now, too. But when it comes to meeting Jesus, Mark the storyteller just casually mentions, "Oh yeah, Jesus was there, too," while telling us a story that looks, at first, like it's really about somebody else.
And while we're on that subject, here's the other oddity about first introducing us to Jesus as he waits to be baptized with everybody else at the Jordan: Jesus seems to be the one person who shouldn't be there! Right? Mark tells us that people went out to John to be baptized as a sign of their "repentance" and to be assured of "the forgiveness of their sins." In other words, people went out to John when they realized they had messed up in their lives, possibly had hit rock bottom, and wanted to start over in a new direction, back toward God. Mark was pretty clear about what John was doing: "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins," and the people who came out to be baptized by him sure seem to understand that, too, if they came, as Mark says, "confessing their sins."
So... what is Jesus doing there?
Why is Jesus, who is "the Son of God" (Mark told us so in his opening sentence), there to be baptized "for the forgiveness of sins"? Does Jesus have sins to repent of? Is Jesus lost and estranged from God? It would seem that Jesus is the one person on planet Earth who doesn't need to repent and doesn't need to ask for forgiveness because he doesn't have any sins to confess, right? So, which is it, Mark--is Jesus the Son of God and Messiah who doesn't need to repent, or is he an ordinary fellow who is wanting to turn his life around and make a fresh start from past mistakes and sins? It seems like we have to choose one or the other here, and the tension is heightened all the more because Mark chose to tell his story like this.
I want to suggest to you that what first seems like an either/or choice turns out to be a both-and paradox. I think Mark has set up this curious first impression, not to deny that Jesus is really the Son of God, but to show us how Jesus fulfills that role. Jesus' way of embodying that identity, as both Christ and Son of God, is to identify in solidarity with all of us human beings--even getting into line to be baptized "for repentance and forgiveness of sins," even though doesn't have any sins to confess. I'm convinced that this is the true wonder of the Incarnation--that in Jesus, God completely and totally identifies with us and casts God's lot with us, even saying, as it were, "Count me with them--the sinners, the losers, the people at the end of their rope, and the ones who feel like they are at a dead end. Count me with them."
In that light, it makes total and perfect sense why we are first introduced to Jesus as one more face in the crowd--that is how Jesus comes! He has come to be among us, as one of us, taking all of our sin into himself and taking his place at our side, no matter the cost to himself. He has come to completely identify with us, so in a sense this is exactly where the Messiah of God should be--not sequestered in some pious bubble of holiness, not hermetically sealed off from being associated with sinners, but standing in line among us, saying to the world (and to us), "I'm with them."
This is how we meet Jesus, dear ones: not looking down at us from on high with an angry scowl over our inadequacies, but as the face beside us, saying to us with his eyes, "I'm in this with you for the long haul." This is the Jesus we are invited to know, and to walk the road with.
Meet Jesus, the one who shares our humanity.
Lord Jesus, give us hope and direction from your sharing of our humanity with us.
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