Repent and Believe; Receive and Deliver
I remember so clearly seeing the movie Titanic in the theater and the sinking feeling that something bad was going to happen. We had been sitting near the front, and theaters slope down, so after the movie I felt like clawing my way through the crowd just to get out.
It was an epic film about an epic tragedy and a huge hit. At the time, it became the top box office movie because it so effectively bound the tragic story of that ship to the love story of Jack and Rose. We felt the breaking and sinking of the ship, which broke and sunk so many lives, so many futures.
As the ship was sinking, our hero Jack has been accused of a crime and handcuffed to a pipe on one of the lowest decks. Rose cannot leave him to such a horrible fate. Risking everything out of pure love, she breaks away from everyone trying to restrain her and goes down, down, down into the depths of the sinking ship.
There she finds the water is already nearly waist deep. She plunges into the water and gasps in shock. The danger wasn’t only in the possibility of drowning. The night Titanic sunk the North Atlantic was freakishly calm. There were no waves. It was “like a millpond on a windless day,” as they described it. Those who got into the lifeboats were quite safe and in a few hours would be rescued.
The worse danger was the terrible cold of the North Atlantic Ocean. On the night the Titanic sunk, the North Atlantic would have been closer to 28° – below freezing for fresh water (not salt water.) Those in the water would quickly freeze to death.
When Rose plunged into the cold water filling the ship, she gasped, and we gasped with her. She took the plunge and freed Jack. He asked her who told her that he was innocent and she said, “No one. I just knew.” She took the plunge to save Jack because she loved him.
When we are baptized, we take a plunge of a different sort. We might very well sign up for the Baptism of John. His is a baptism of repentance, pure and simple. Any of us can and should take an honest look at ourselves and see that we’ve got some regrets. That was true then and it’s true now. And if we stayed with that, well, you might want to get baptized a lot. Like a physical bath, depending on how dirty you get or how much concern you have over the way you smell. You don’t want to wait until someone else says you need one. Once a week, whether you need it or not, right?
Jesus’ baptism is different, for him and subsequently for us. John even protests at first because Jesus has no sin to repent. He doesn’t need to wash at all. Jesus tells him its “to fulfill all righteousness.” There are a couple of ways we can understand him:
First, consider the possibility of human righteousness, that people can actually love God and our neighbors as ourselves. When we hear that phrase, which Jesus will cite later in Matthew’s Gospel, it immediately strikes us as both absolutely good and true, yet impossible. We need help. Jesus submits to baptism to demonstrate his humanity, his binding to us. He is truly with us, truly one of us, fully human in every way and he will bear our sin to the cross. Baptism is, after all, a ritual putting to death of our sin and sinful nature.
In this moment we see Jesus enact for the first time the formula for Christian baptism: water, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. At the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commissions his disciples to carry this blessing “to all nations.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
By his grace, by his sacrifice, he has bound himself to us and becomes the means by which we are saved to be a part of God’s great plan.
Second, consider God’s righteousness, that his creation will be restored according to his will, that what has been wrong and broken will be set right. We hear that vision in today’s passage from Isaiah that God will work through his chosen to make them a “light to the nations.”
Jesus said he would be baptized “to fulfill all righteousness.” “All” means both our righteousness, which is God saving us, and God’s righteousness, which is God working through us to complete his work. And they work together. The fulfilling of human righteousness is our ongoing development internally toward loving neighbor as self. The fulfilling of God’s righteousness is his movement through the Body of Christ, the church, to reach the world.
This fundamentally changes baptism from John’s “repent and restore” to Jesus’ "repent and believe; receive and deliver.”
Remember we were like our hero Jack, handcuffed to the pipes. The ship was sinking. Despite all of our personal gifts, talents, and possessions, we were stuck. We had no hope of breaking the bonds of sin on our own strength or merits. The water was rising. As it rises, it hurts. You know that in time it will cut off life.
Jesus, out of pure love, went down, down, down into the depths of the sinking ship and plunged into a world of sin and death. He endures the shocking pain to rescue us, to save us, and to involve us in God’s plan to reconcile the entire creation to the Father.
This is huge, enormous, stupendous! You might even call it Titanic. It is, after all, a love story; our love story, on an epic scale and yet so intensely personal.
What should we say to the One who rescued us? Thank you, Jesus. Praise you, Jesus.
What shall we do for the One who rescued us? Whatever he asks.
AMEN!