Crowded with events as was our Lord's brief life, He was never hurried; not one hasty or ill-considered remark fell from His lips; nor do we once read that He ran, as if late for His duty. When His "time" or "hour" came--to quote one of His favorite expressions--He was always in His place, and His every decision was right, not only in itself, but as an example of providential punctuality. The daughter of Jairus was at the point of death, but Jesus could still spare a word and His own energy, for healing the woman who touched the hem of His garment. And He devoted two whole days to the issues involved in bringing back Lazarus, His intimate friend, from that life beyond, where Lazarus would be free of pain and sorrow. Others hastened to Him--fell at His feet--beseeching Him--impatiently drove the children from Him--talked excitedly about Him, as did the leper--woke Him suddenly, when the boat was sinking--and were constantly betrayed into thoughtless blunders. But even on those days, when He had no leisure, not so much as to eat, He was ever active, yet ever calm.
Standing unknown among John's disciples, for many weeks He could ponder the evidences of that great man's success and failure. The decision that He then took was as momentous as it was unexpected. Silently, He came forward, and offered Himself, not as John's Master, to teach, but as John's Disciple, for baptism. John did not then realize what was meant by Jesus as Messiah. But of Jesus, his Kinsman, the Son of Man and Elder Brother of the family at Nazareth, he knew enough to be astounded at the situation thus disclosed.
The Sinless Saviour
For us, the question is how sinful men may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At His baptism, our Lord demonstrated how a Sinless Man was to live within the Empire of Rome. Evil is so engrained in our race that we must allow for it in all our institutions, so that we cannot have justice without prisons, homes without bolts and bars, or prayer without confession. Jesus could not attend a synagogue without hearing a penitential psalm; and at His birth His most blessed Body was, as a matter of course, subjected to a rite which Paul did not impose on the humblest Gentile. On His behalf, as well as her own, Mary, as mother, made in the Temple the prescribed offering for sin. In reality, she was inaugurating a drama at which, we are told, the angels themselves gaze in amazement. What Jesus sacrificed for us was not birth alone, or property, or home, but what a good man values most of all, His reputation. In Paul's historic phrase, He who knew no sin, was made sin for us.
No wonder that He became a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Constantly, they accused Him of keeping evil company. Constantly, they charged Him with blasphemy. They told Him that He was a glutton and a wine-bibber. They held that He broke the Sabbath. They declared that He had a very devil within Him. They suggested that He was insane. And many of those who, like I-CIS brethren, were attached to Him by special ties, were inclined to believe a part, at any rate, of the slanders. All this suffering He could have avoided if, like the priest and the Levite, He had left mankind, wounded by the way, and passed by on the other side. Instead of this, He became "at one" with us, accompanied us to our Jericho, left His Jerusalem behind, and paid our bill at the inn. This was, in faint parable, what theologians call His Atonement. And of that Atonement His baptism was preliminary.
The first man who felt a difficulty about the Atonemen was not the modern freethinker, but John the Baptist, who thought as freely as any freethinker, and could not understand why Jesus should be baptized. The second man was Peter, who bluntly rebuked the Saviour when He talked about going up to die at Jerusalem. And the third man was Paul, who would say nothing on the subject until he had spent three years in the deserts of Arabia, meditating over it. None of these men, each of whom has left his mark on history, dismissed the Atonement lightly, or received it superstitiously. Slowly but surely, they recognized Incarnate Love, and worshiped.
By refusing baptism, Jesus could, as it were, have asserted His sinlessness. He was the one Man who had a right, without boasting, to use the Pharisee's words, and to thank God that He was not as other men are. And John would have upheld Him. Though He had not yet uttered one syllable of all His wonderful teaching or performed one miracle, it was not the Divine Disciple who confessed His " need " when He applied for baptism, but the Baptist himself. At that moment our Lord could have taken John's place, and eclipsed all his glory; but He humbled Himself, and became obedient, not indeed to immediate death, yet to the river Jordan, which, symbolically, meant the same. Because He had done no wrong, therefore, unlike the multitudes, He had nothing to confess; but His very innocence expressed itself in His readiness to submit all that He had been and done to the judgment of His Father, and to be satisfied with no acquittal, save by the Highest Among men, He had, as we have seen, grown in favor. John already worshiped Him. But He took not one step forward until He heard with His own ears that God was Himself well pleased--that He had fulfilled His trust, not only as Son of Mary, but as the Beloved Son of a Heavenly Father. To be righteous is not enough. He must fulfill righteousness, absorb it into Himself, so that henceforth we may love what is right, which means what is humble and good and obedient, by loving Him, in whom these things lived.
The Dove and the Lamb
Then it was that John's view of Jesus changed. He saw the Spirit descending on our Lord, not, as he had imagined, in flames, which happened to the Apostles at Pentecost, but in bodily form as a Dove, which, to his priestly mind, meant the bird of sacrifice, devoted to death, for iniquities not her own. To John, the symbol was as legible as, let us say, the Royal Standard fluttering over Windsor Castle would be to us. We should say at once that the King was in residence; and John, seeing the Dove, declared that here was One who should be led like a lamb--the Lamb of God--to the slaughter, bearing away the sins of the world. In one tremendous phrase, John summed up the vision of Isaiah and the terrible ritual of the scapegoat, drawn forth by man, loaded with man's guilt, to die alone, beyond the city walls. John's words were a flash of intense lightning, transfiguring the ancient ceremonies with a fearful and present meaning. Such a Man, submitting to such a baptism, could not fail to go much farther along the valley of humiliation.
Most of us know how Paul was changed when he saw Christ, but we do not appreciate the similar upheaval in John's character which was wrought by the mere fact of our Lord's constant and sympathetic presence. We hear no more of his denunciations, just though they were. Even the baptism by fire, noble as was that truth, was overshadowed. It was the heroic submissiveness of Jesus that captured John's strong soul. He spent his days, saying simply, "Behold the Lamb of God" and he was not satisfied until his followers did behold. Andrew and the other John went after Jesus, and at His invitation spent their first evening with Him. Andrew at once told his brother Simon that he had found the Christ, and brought him to Jesus. Our Saviour claimed the man, by changing his name--not that the change was immediate; it was, for the moment, prophecy, and Simon again returned to his fishing. Jesus Himself found Philip, who lived at Bethsaida; and as His ministry was to be in Galilee, where Philip would be useful, He took him from John and the Jordan, and thus, quietly yet inexorably, asserted His paramount claim on every disciple of every human teacher. Philip discovered his friend, Nathaniel, and shared with him the news, his message on what especially weighed with an Israelite like Nathaniel--namely, the law and the prophets--and Nathaniel promptly raised a demurrer, namely, Nazareth. Apparently, he knew nothing, whether of Bethlehem or of Egypt, nor did Jesus argue the point of geography. Sweeping all that aside, He welcomed the heart in which was no guile, and Nathaniel, in words now immortal, exclaimed, "Whence knowest Thou me?"
The Insight of Christ
It was not Philip who told Jesus about Nathaniel. To Him, who loved to the uttermost--for comprehension is the eyesight of love--seeing a man was knowing a man, and Nathaniel, sitting under the shade of a fig-tree, was understood from his leisure. And Nathaniel, on his side, thought that the character reading of Jesus--itself a condemnation of palmistry, phrenology, and all other fortune-telling--was itself a miracle. The Saviour was Rabbi--Son of God-- King of Israel. And the Lord did not deny it. On the contrary, for the first of many times He answered with that "Verily, verily--Amen, Amen, I say unto you"--which was in every case a declaration of supreme authority. Nathaniel would see heaven open, and God's messengers ascending from and descending to the Son of Man. That was the good which would arise out of Nazareth and return thither. That was the new geography of faith.
John the beloved, Simon Peter, Andrew, Philip, Nathaniel--these all were taught by the Baptist, and came from him to Jesus. So did the baptized publicans, Nor was there one hint that John would found a rival sect to the Church. Years later, at Ephesus, Apollos and other Jews only knew John's baptism, but they readily accepted Paul's fuller gospel; whereas the Jews, in the same city, who did not follow John, hardened their hearts against Jesus. After John's burial, it was to Jesus that his followers came; and from Him they learnt, not to repent and confess merely, but to pray.
And John accepted the position. He realized that as his Divine Disciple increased, so must he, the human teacher, decrease. The other day, I counted the churches in London that are dedicated to the Baptist and found how few they are. St. George himself is a more popular, if somewhat mythical, patron. Jesus had stood and listened to John. And John's "joy was fulfilled" when, in his turn, he stood and listened to Jesus. As he listened, he uttered the majestic parable in which Jesus is the Bridegroom, while those who love Him are the Bride, and John is the friend of the Bridegroom, who rejoices only in Another's joy. It was a singularly tender simile in the mouth of the fierce and lonely man who had thundered against the generation of vipers, but the words were noted by one at least of the Baptist's listeners. The other John, who wrote the Gospel, was gripped by this great idea of the Church as "the Bride," which filled his mind even when heaven was revealed to him. As for the Baptist, energy and assertiveness mellowed into humility, and having been faithful in rebuke, he rose to the grander faithfulness which is unto death.