Justice Demands a Baptism of the Lord

“I should come to you” John the Baptist said to Jesus. John the Baptist had difficulty understanding why Jesus would come to him for baptism. Most probably the first church had also problems understanding this undeniable historical fact, that Jesus, equal to us “in all except sin” would come to John to receive a baptism of repentance.

Jesus gives a precise but mysterious answer to this question in the gospel of Matthew: “justice demands it”. What kind of justice demands that an innocent person passes as a sinner?

The first reading gives us the answer: the justice that the Servant of the Lord will bring is “true justice, divine justice”. Our justice is not perfect. It is, at best, good. Doctors amputate gangrened limbs and removed cancerous tissue to heal. That’s not true healing. Truly restoring the patient would mean truly healing the part that has been damaged. Our imperfect medicine cannot afford perfect therapy; at best, we can only have good therapy by performing a surgical procedure on the patient to hopefully prevent the sickness from destroying the patient.

Our system of justice is not perfect. A criminal kills somebody and our justice neither brings the dead person to life nor transforms the criminal into an innocent person. At best, our justice hopes that by punishing the criminal he will repent, transform and hopefully, satisfy the offending party.

The style of God’s justice is far different. When, in the parable of the weeds, the workers asked the owner of the field to allow them to uproot the weeds from the field, the owner refuses that option. “No,” he says, “because in uprooting the weeds, you will also uproot the wheat.”

Actions and agents are so intimately identified that they affect each other. Good actions make us good; good people make good actions. Unfortunately, this is also true for wrong actions. And it is impossible for us to destroy the sin without destroying the sinner. God has his own style of dealing with this. His Servant will not be aggressive or invasive, but gentle and patient. “He will not break the crushed reed, nor extinguish the wavering flame.” He knows we are delicate like crushed reeds and wavering like small flames.

God’s justice is a justice that is true yet gentle. In the words of theologian H. U. v. Balthasar, the whole mystery of redemption can be summarized in these words: “To absolve the guilty justly, the innocent had to be condemned justly”. The innocent had to be baptized with a baptism for sins to show his commitment and solidarity with sinners. The Word did not become flesh to be a “tourist” on earth, but to be identified so intimately that he could substitute the sinners. This happens on the cross, but at the beginning of Jesus ministry, the Father wants to make known that his Son is not a “tourist” in our world but someone who came to take “the sin of the world” upon himself.

The birth of Jesus (Christmas) needs to be shown to the world (Epiphany), but his ministry needs to be proclaimed as “something to do with sinners” (second epiphany or Baptism of the Lord). The flow of the liturgical time is the true time. The one, who came to be with us, came to be for us and suffer, instead of us, the extreme effect of sin, being separated from God. The baptism of the Lord, points towards the Lord’s words, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me!”

When we are familiar with the style of God’s justice, we can learn to deal with our brothers and sisters, who are also “crushed reeds”, as God would deal with them.