Luke 3:15–22
The Baptism of Jesus is always a curious text. Baptism is something the church does (or at least, should be doing). But when we baptize a person in our churches, it doesn’t look like the baptism in the Jordan. John the Baptist isn’t there with me on Sunday morning. The heavens don’t open.
Baptism has been incredibly divisive in the history of the church because of this disconnect. Schisms took place over believer’s baptism or infant baptism. Schisms took place over baptism in moving water versus still water.
And yet we come back to the river, to the water, to the savior willingly receiving the washing of another. Luke doesn’t spend too much time on the act of baptism itself. Jesus is baptized with the crowd. As Katherine Sonderegger writes,
He stood with all sinners when He awaited John’s baptism, the washing in the Jordan as sign and act of repentance. He did not hold Himself apart and aloof from this evil generation; rather He joined it. Not for his sake. For ours. (Sonderegger, Systematic Theology I, 217)
All of this gets us to abolition because if baptism is true, if Jesus is true, if Jesus stood with sinners, if Jesus stood with us, we must with all. The baptism of Jesus did not take place in the middle of Jerusalem but on a margin, outside the city, at a location that looks a lot like where many of our prisons are located today. Out of sight. The kind of society that hides people, that dehumanizes people, that shuts them up far away, this kind of society does not believe in the power of baptism.
Did the heavens open? Did Christ stand with us? Then let us not rest in the brokenness of society that we ourselves have built. Let us dismantle it to offer new life fully, honestly, transformationally to all.
Rev. Wilson Pruit is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.