Hi everyone!
I’ve been a lurker for quite some time and have learned much from this forum. I have a question that I’ve been wondering about lately. I hope this is the right forum.
Welcome to the Forum, WD.
Why did John the Baptist baptize Jesus?
I think this explains the reason well:
“In presenting Himself to receive the baptism of John, Jesus submits to the will of His Father (Mt. 3:14f) and humbly placed Himself among sinners. He is the Lamb of God who thus takes upon Himself the sins of the world (Jn. 1:29, 36). The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan announces and prepares for His baptism ‘in death’ (Ll/ 12:50; Mk. 10:38), which indeed frames His public life between two baptisms. This is what John the Evangelist means when he reports that water and blood flowed from the pierced side of Jesus (Jn. 19:34f) and when he says that the Sprit, the water and the blood are intimately connected (1 Jn. 5:6-8),” Xavier Leon-Dufour, Dictionary of Biblical Theology.
What strikes me in the above is the imagery of Our Lord, the innocent Lamb of God, entering the water in which sinners have entered as a sign of repentance and comes out of the water bearing the weight of those sins - and also cleansing the water, the material that will be used to bring about sinners’ rebirth in Christian baptism (the Church Fathers speak of this).
What was he baptizing people in? I know water - what I mean is - we now say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” What did John say?
No words of his are recorded in this regard, but we know that the Triune form and the reality it signifies was not part of the baptism that John performed. The baptism performed by John is “a unique baptism in the desert in view of the repentance and pardon (Mk 1:4p). . .The baptism of John set up only a provisional economy: it is a baptism of water which is preparatory to the Messianic baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire,” Xavier Leon-Dufour, ibid. It was an external ritual signifying an effort of conversion of the baptized (much as many Protestant denominations look upon baptism today).
The baptism of John was the “mikvah”, a ritualistic bath which was a common “rite” in Jewish worship. However, in the case of the baptism of John, he was applying the mikvah in a particular sense: a sense of conversion TO Judaism. What do I mean by this? Quite simply, when one becomes a Jew (even today, in Orthodox Judaism), one has his head shaved and his fingernails and toenails closely cut - as if one is a baby again; and one is immersed into the mikvah (the ritualistic bath) so as to emerge and be “reborn” as a Jew. This is exactly what John was doing as the precursor to the Messiah.
Was John the Baptist a follower of Jesus? Why does Matthew 16:14 say " And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets” Was John already dead? And even so, they lived at the same time. Wouldn’t people have known Jesus and John the Baptist as two separate people?
John was the Herald of Jesus, a believer in Him, but did not live to see the fruition of what he heralded. The question Our Lord asked in Matthew 16, “who do the people say that I am?” was His “lead-up” to His question to “who do
you say that I am?” The first question indicated the confusion of some of the people on His real identity: Was this Elijah who was to come before and announce the Messiah? Was this John the Baptist come to life again? (Yes, John had already been beheaded by the command of Herod Antipas. And some of the people may have conflated the two identities into one, having seen neither Jesus nor John.) The second question prompted the full realization of St. Peter of Jesus’ identity and of Peter’s role in preserving that identity in the teaching of the Church.
) I would greatly appreciate it! I hope I am not posting something that has been discussed at length. I did do a search.