Exodus, Jesus, and Baptism

Exodus 14:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2014&version=NIV1984

            A little bit of good luck with today’s reading, at least for those readers who are Lutheran and whose congregations followed the assigned lectionary this weekend!  Here we have the original exodus and in the lectionary we had the baptism of Jesus, which was, in some ways, a re-enactment of the exodus.

            The exodus was Israel’s defining national event.  It was their Bunker Hill.  It was the moment in their history that they looked backed to as the moment that revealed their character.  Just like Americans looked back to Bunker Hill and said, “That was the day we proved that citizen militia could stand up to the might an empire,” so Israelites looked to the Exodus.  The imagery of the Exodus, that is, passing through the waters, and the claims of Israel’s God, that He was one who brought them out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm—those images and claims come up time and again in the Old Testament.

            Of course, over the years, Israel experienced a certain shift in understanding.  They lost sight of the fact that the Lord rescued them because He had plans for them for the whole world, and they began to think of the exodus as proof that the Creator God loved them better than the rest of the world.

            1400 years later, enter Jesus.  John the Baptizer was at the banks of Jordan, calling Israel to repentance and a renewed life as God’s people.  Israel, John said, needed to go back into the wilderness to be purified by God (Hosea 2).  Then, they needed to go ‘through the waters’ again, re-claim the land the Lord had promised them, and become God’s unique people.  When Jesus presented Himself for baptism, at least part of what He was doing was accepting John’s call on behalf of Israel.  Israel may have lost their sense of vocation, of calling, but Jesus had not.  He took that calling to be a blessing to the nations on Himself.  “If no one else in Israel will,” Jesus seems to have reasoned, “I will for them.”

            So Jesus’ baptism becomes a sort of re-enactment of the first exodus.  He passes through the waters to become the one who would bless the nations.  Other things would have to be said to fully understand Jesus’ baptism and His vocation, for example, the unique way that He appropriated Isaiah 53 as the lens through which to understand Israel’s calling and His own.  But for now, it’s enough to realize that the Lord delivered Israel through the Red Sea because He had plans for her and that Jesus passed through John’s baptism in the belief that through Him God would accomplish those plans.

            In a sense, too, our Baptism is a re-enactment of that first exodus.  We pass through the waters and are delivered from oppression—the oppression sin, death, and the devil.  I know we still sin after our Baptism; I know that we still die after our Baptism; and I know that the devil still works for our demise after our Baptism.  But Paul is clear in Romans 6:  those things no longer have mastery over us.  Sin is not our master.  Death cannot hold us.  Satan is ultimately defeated.  And we are redeemed for a purpose, too—to reflect the glory of the Lord into His fallen world as an invitation to His renewed light.