January 11, 2026
Epiphany 1 and the Baptism of Our Lord
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17
As a priest, someone who has studied scripture pretty extensively, folks will often come to me with questions about what the bible says, and there are some particular topics that generate the most comment:
- Why did God direct Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, when he was never going to have to go through with it?
- Why did Jesus have to die?
- Did God really order the genocide of Canaanites and Amalekites?
- The bible says that God is love, and if that’s the case, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?
- If Jesus was without sin, why did he have to be baptized by John?
Apparently, John had the same question. Why are you coming to me to be baptized? You’ve got it all backwards. And Jesus offers a cryptic response, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 13:14). Something tells me that if any of you came to me with the question about why Jesus had to be baptized, you probably would not be satisfied if I told you it was to fulfill all righteousness.
And while it’s easy to gloss over this statement from Jesus, the idea of righteousness is central to Matthew’s gospel. You may remember a few weeks ago on the 4th Sunday of Advent, I preached about Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, being a righteous man. He followed the requirements of Jewish law, studied Torah, kept kosher, attended the festivals, and all the rest. But the righteousness was not because he did all the things required of him by the law, but he went beyond what the law required. He showed compassion toward Mary when he could lawfully have set her aside.
In a few weeks, we will read the Beatitudes and other portions of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, and Jesus says there, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20). He’s contrasting following the letter of the law with following the spirit of the law. The law says not to commit murder, but I’m telling you not even to be angry. The law says not to commit adultery, but I’m telling you not to be unfaithful even in your heart. The law says to seek equal retribution – an eye for an eye – if you are harmed, and I’m telling you to turn the other cheek. Righteousness, then, is doing more than what is required, not because you have to, but because the Law of God is a Law of Love.
So back to Jesus and John. If Jesus is without sin, why does he come to be baptized? What righteousness is being fulfilled here? It’s simply this – he didn’t have to do it. He did it because all the people were doing it, and Jesus wants them to know that he is one of them. It wouldn’t be until John’s gospel that we get the bit about the Word made flesh and God’s coming to pitch a tent among us, but this is that idea in an earlier iteration – I am not above you, Jesus seems to be saying. I am in solidarity with you.
It might also be helpful to know that John’s baptism is of a different character than Jesus’s. Washing away impurities was a ritual practice of Jews. These people being baptized by John in the Jordan are engaging in a ritual, but enacting this ritual once is not sufficient. Ritual cleansing was – and still is – an ongoing part of Jewish life. By the time Jesus’s followers are baptizing, it is something different altogether. Except for a brief passage in John that indicates that Jesus baptized, we have no scenes of his actually baptizing anyone although he instructs his disciples to go into all the world to do precisely that. And once is sufficient with this baptism with water and the Holy Spirit.
Right now, though, I am struck by another difference between these two baptisms. In Judaism during what is known as the Second Temple Period (which includes the time of Jesus), the cleansing ritual that was required by the purity codes wasn’t just about the impurity of the individual. If people were impure because of bodily functions or work that they did or something that they encountered in their daily life, if they did not wash it away ritually, these individual impurities collected in the temple. My personal uncleanness added to the pollution of the Holy of Holies, and so once each year on the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the blood sacrifice for the sin offering was believed to clear away the accumulated junk. All of that was symbolically placed on a goat – a scapegoat – who wandered out to the desert with it. And then the cycle starts all over again.
There was and is an awareness that each individual’s personal piety affects the health, the ritual cleanliness, of the whole community.
In our tradition, we are baptized as an individual, sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own, and our salvation then becomes about us, about how well we live into our baptism as individuals. And I don’t think that demonstrates the kind of solidarity Jesus showed at the Jordan. To fulfill all righteousness as a follower of Jesus is to live in solidarity with those Jesus loves (hint: that’s everyone). To fulfill all righteousness is a community event, not an individual one. Joseph might have had an easier time of it if he had just done what the law required, but he was a righteous man, and in doing more than just what was required, he saved Mary and Jesus and, by extension, all of us. If you want to go with an eye for an eye, everyone ends up blind, but if we can forgive and work toward reconciliation, the bonds between all of us are strengthened. My salvation is wrapped up with all of yours. There is no real peace and joy for me unless there is peace and joy for all of you, too.
This is a hard sell in our world these days. We are so intent on deciding who deserves our care and our protection, who belongs and who doesn’t, that we have lost sight of this truth: the kingdom of heaven that Matthew spoke of does not have insiders and outsiders. Everyone and everything belongs – the children under the rubble in Gaza and in Kiev; Spanish speakers from Central and South America fleeing drug lords and death squads that our intervention helped spawn; a mom of three serving as an observer of ICE actions in Minneapolis who ends up dead at the wheel of her car. Looking away or acting as if it doesn’t concern us is not fulfilling all righteousness. All of it is contrary to the kind of human flourishing on offer from the God who loves us, who calls all of us Beloved. And if we are beloved, then everyone else is, too.
In just a moment, we are all going to renew our Baptismal Covenant and be reminded of our baptism when we died to sin and rose to new life, life not just for ourselves but for those we promise to seek and serve and respect and for whom we strive for justice. And it includes a promise to persevere in resisting evil wherever we find it. This is what it means to fulfill all righteousness.
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness. (Isaiah 42:6-7)
Where are the shadows and dim corners crying out for your light to shine? Where is the evil that we are called to resist? That light, that love and mercy shown to us when we are called Beloved in our baptism – they are not for us to hoard, but to share. That most amazing thing about God’s love is that the more you give away, the more you have. It’s the craziest math of subtraction you will ever find.