Mark 1:4-11
“Inspired”
January 10, 2021 – Baptism of the Lord
It was hard to find any new inspiration for this sermon. On our Covenant clergy Facebook group Friday, I joined in a conversation with other pastors struggling to get motivated for sermon preparation or other tasks after the sad events of this week. Our thoughts and browser tabs kept returning to the news and the next story to follow as the aftermath of it all unfolds. Mark’s Gospel, after all, starts out, “The beginning of the good news…” But it seemed all I could think about was bad news. I really needed to be inspired.
That’s why it is good that the heart of this text is itself about inspiration, holy inspiration. It’s first and foremost about Jesus Himself being inspired, then by extension about how God inspires you and me.
We read the first five verses of our text, on the second Sunday of Advent last month. As I said to our worship leaders this week, going back over the same ground is one of the frustrations of preaching the lectionary readings in the middle year when the Gospel texts are mostly from Mark. Mark compresses everything so much in his first chapter that we keep returning to verses we’ve already heard recently as we observe different Sundays of the church year. But going back and picking up what we heard before and connecting it to what comes later can be helpful.
For instance, there’s a word simply left out in many translations at the beginning of verse 4 and of verse 9. Literally, verse 4 starts, “It came to pass that John was in the wilderness…” Then, after we hear John’s message, verse 9 literally begins, “And it came to pass in those days that Jesus came…” Mark is marking for us the key events in the story with that little forgotten word which means, “It came to pass.” It’s first John, then Jesus, the stars of the story.
Which means that Mark has skipped over the star in the sky and pretty much everything that has had our attention for a few weeks now. There are no angels nor shepherds, no star and no magi, no virgin mother and no baby in a manger. Mark begins with two grown men. They’re cousins but Mark doesn’t even tell us that, just that they came one after the other. John baptizes and the first thing Jesus does in this Gospel is get baptized. For Mark, Jesus’ baptism is the start of the story of the Messiah, the beginning of the good news, the inauguration of our salvation.
As I like to show kids in Confirmation class, Matthew, Mark and Luke all give us the story of the baptism of Jesus. John alludes to it, but doesn’t actually say it happened. Other than the brief mention in John, Mark’s version, as it is at other points of the Gospel, is the shortest. Yet in verses 10 and 11, Mark has all the essential elements found in Matthew and Luke, and also includes what might be the absolutely key element mentioned in John’s Gospel. After the baptism, 1) the heavens were opened 2) the Spirit came down on Jesus like a dove 3) a voice came from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” Those three facts about Jesus’ baptism are the roots of our salvation, the elements of just how it is that the man known as Jesus Christ saves you and me.
First, the heavens were opened. From the very first human sin, barriers went up between God and human beings. After Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, an angel guarded the way back. Human beings lived on earth and God in heaven, and they could meet no longer. The door was closed.
Because of the evil and violence done at our nation’s capital the past week, security will be tight for days to come. You can bet that even innocent people who belong there are going to find it more difficult to enter the Capitol building or the White House. Anyone trying to go in will need proper clearance, otherwise doors will remain shut. A heavenly clearance to enter heaven is what Jesus came to offer, otherwise those doors would still be shut.
Verse 10 says the first thing Jesus saw on coming up out of the water was “the heavens torn apart.” Matthew and Luke put it more gently, the heavens “opened.” In any case, it’s clear that barriers put up by and because of human sin came down. The gap between earth and heaven narrowed. Heaven itself had come to earth in Jesus. He saw that with His own human eyes. Held apart by sin, humanity and God finally and visibly came together at that moment. Jesus had come to restore our access to God and His Kingdom.
The second important fact about Jesus’ baptism is the one that appears in all four Gospels, including John. The Holy Spirit came down on Jesus. To put it another way, Jesus was inspired by God. Yes, I know, that sounds a lot more mundane than the picture here, that heavenly Dove descending visibly and beautifully. But that’s actually what the word “inspired” means. It means being filled with spirit, in this case, with the Holy Spirit.
Mark’s own language here suggests that “inspiration” is a good word for what happened to Jesus. We almost always picture it like Matthew does, that the Dove came down and “alighted on Him.” But the preposition Mark uses is most naturally translated not as “on” Jesus, but as “into” Jesus. Of course it’s awkward to image an actual dove entering a human being, so we make it “on” in English. But Mark wants us to know that God’s Holy Spirit didn’t just land on Jesus. It went into Him. It inspired Him.
In the Old Testament we see the Spirit coming and going. In our text from Genesis 1, He hovered with God over the waters, but then the Spirit seems to leave the story. He shows up occasionally to inspire a judge or a king or a prophet. The Holy Spirit of God appears and then is gone. In Psalm 51 verse 11, after his sin, we hear David praying, “Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.” That’s what sin does. It makes it impossible to be inspired by God’s Spirit. When the Spirit came down into Jesus, He came to stay. Jesus brought the Holy Spirit into human life more permanently.
John the Baptist insisted that the baptizing Jesus would do would be better than his own baptizing. John baptized with water, he says in verse 8, but Jesus was coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself received a baptism just like that, first with John’s water, then with that Holy Spirit Dove coming down upon and into Him.
We catch another glimpse of all this from a different angle in that odd little story from Acts 19 we heard today. Even after Jesus came and died and rose again, there were evidently disciples of John who hadn’t got the whole story. They were baptized in John’s water, but not in Jesus’ Holy Spirit. They had gotten wet, but they hadn’t gotten inspired. So Paul filled them in, and they got filled with the Spirit.
The wonderful and amazing thing is that Jesus is able to transfer His inspiration to you and me. He was filled with the Holy Spirit so that He could in turn fill you and I with that same Spirit. By becoming one of us, He opened for us the possibility of the continual presence of God, the constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit and an eternal relationship with God in a heaven come down to earth.
Jesus’ inspiration of and by the Holy Spirit is absolutely crucial to third part of the story that is common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. A voice spoke from heaven, the voice of God the Father, declaring “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” With the Holy Spirit filling Jesus, His heavenly Father could be nothing other than pleased with Him. And John’s Gospel alludes to that third piece too, because it tells us John the Baptist was absolutely assured and confident that Jesus was God’s Son.
As many of you have experienced, as parents or grandparents, or on the receiving end as children or grandchildren, one of the delightful, pleasing things about looking at one’s offspring is to be able to see a little of yourself in them. That can be both in physical attributes and in personality. You smile when someone says about your child, “He’s got your nose,” and are pleased when a grandchild enjoys something you enjoy, whether it’s reading The Chronicles of Narnia or eating spaghetti.
Those children don’t need to be exactly the same as you. You don’t need to be a copy of your parents. An identical clone of yourself would be a science fiction nightmare. But the fact that parents and children and grandchildren are definitely different while still being similar in many ways is a joy. That’s how it was with the Father and Jesus. God the Father, whom no one on earth had ever seen, spoke from heaven. A human person named Jesus was just different enough to be His Son rather than the Father. But Jesus was filled by God’s Spirit to make Him so like His Father that it was wonderfully and divinely pleasing.
In our sin, we constantly fail to please God. Yes, you and I can and everyone on earth can do some good, can manifest some kindness or love or wisdom, can please God a little. But it’s always mixed. Over and over, we do that which disappoints those we love, even disappoints our own selves. We do that which displeases God and hurts those around us. Because of sin, we are a constant disappointment to our holy and perfect Father. To God we’re like that disappointing child or grandchild who breaks your heart. But you also know that you keep loving that child. God does so even more.
God loved us enough to come Himself to inspire us to be something better, to fill us with His Holy Spirit who can and will make us something better, something pleasing to Him. As we’ve just been celebrating over Advent and Christmas, God sent His Son.
When heaven opened and God looked down upon that scene in a little river flowing south through Palestine, God saw for the first time since creation a human being that completely pleased Him, that totally and without reservation delighted Him. That pleasing human being was His own Son, filled and inspired with His own Spirit. In that moment things changed for everyone. God meant to be pleased not just with Jesus, but with anyone who through Jesus would receive and be inspired by that same Spirit.
Jesus saved us by making possible a wonderful, heavenly, Spirit-filled destiny of pleasing God for eternity and enjoying God’s divine approval. By giving us the Holy Spirit, by inspiring us like He was inspired, Jesus makes you and I pleasing to God as well. And that is the gift of life.
Those of you who work in medicine know well that the words “inspiration” and “inspire” have additional meaning in your occupation. They are the words you often use to talk about the simple physical act of breathing. You count inspirations per minute and worry about whether they are deep and filling enough to sustain life. You know that if inspiration stops, the end of life is not far behind. That’s true also for spiritual life, for the breathing into ourselves of that same Holy Spirit who inspired Jesus. We cannot please God, we cannot be freed from our sins, without constant inspiration of the Spirit.
That’s why it is important to remember this week in our country at least one aspect of who and what the Holy Spirit is. Any of those Jewish witnesses, even Jesus Himself, who saw the Spirit come down like a dove, would have remembered the other appearance of a dove in the Scriptures. It was a dove which came as a sign that the great Flood had ended, that God’s judgment of the world in that time was over, that peace was returning to the earth.
The Old Testament dove of peace was also in the minds of some of the earliest Christian thinkers as they considered this passage about Jesus’ baptism. Tertullian and Chrysostom and Augustine and the venerable Bede all connected the Dove who descended upon and into Jesus with the dove who came to Noah on the ark. Chrysostom wrote,
Since then the Spirit, too, is “a Spirit of gentleness,” he appears in the form of a dove, reminding us of Noah, to whom, when once a common disaster had overtaken the whole world, and humanity was in danger of perishing, the dove appeared as a sign of deliverance from the tempest, and bearing an olive branch, published the good tidings of a serene presence over the whole world.[1]
As we think about disastrous turns of events in our world, let us remember that Jesus came to receive and pass on to you and me that holy Dove of peace, that “serene presence over the whole world” from its very creation. If you and I want to be truly inspired as Jesus was inspired, then we will be filled with that same gentle Dove of peace. Bede said, “The dove is a stranger to malice. So may all bitterness, anger and indignation be taken away from us, together with all malice.”[2]
Like physical breath, breathing in that Dove who came down and inspired Jesus is a matter of life and death for God’s people. If we forget who we are and succumb to bitterness and anger, or even like supposed Christians who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, to violence, then we will begin to choke and die as followers of Jesus. We will stop breathing in His Spirit and breathe in other false and evil spirits of the world.
Jesus’ inspiration was the living breath of peace, the heavenly Dove who comes down to bring peace with God and peace with each other. Let you and I be inspired by that same Spirit as we confront these days ahead. But let us also remember that it will not be simple nor easy. We will return to this same place in Mark at the beginning of Lent to remember that right after Jesus’ baptism and inspiration by the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit “immediately drove him out into the wilderness,” to be “tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts.”
Like our Lord, the Spirit in us will call us into confrontation with the evil spirits of Satan, with wild beasts who bite and tear those around them. We can’t be filled with the Spirit of peace unless we are willing to join Jesus in confronting and calling out the evil in the world. That too is the work of the Dove of peace. We have much of that active, truth-telling work of peace to do in the days ahead.
Let us be inspired, then by the Holy Dove. Let us be gentle. Let us be people of peace, inspired by the Holy Spirit of peace. Let us be truthful. Let us be inspired by the Spirit who filled Jesus and who has filled men and women down through the ages as they went out into the world to bring His word and filling of peace to all people. Let us be hopeful. As our psalm concluded today, “May the Lord bless his people with peace!”
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II Mark, p. 13.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.