The Life Aquatic – Underwater Ministry

The Baptism of Jesus is an event that, in many Churches, is passed over in relative silence. At most, they treat it as an act of obedience or humility. Christ is clearly not in need of repentance (He has no sin), and yet He insists that John should baptize Him. The Holy Spirit is seen to descend and rest upon Him at the completion of this act. That, in sum, is almost everything said about His Baptism throughout much of the Christian world.

Not so, in Orthodoxy. The feast of Christ’s Baptism (known as Theophany), is one of the three greatest feasts of the year: Christmas, Theophany, Pascha. The three feasts are similar. Their iconography has intentional “rhyming” elements, and the liturgical pattern is similar. Pascha is, of course, the truly Great Feast, the other two being lesser, or little “Paschas.” Christmas is sometimes called the “Winter Pascha.”

In the cultures where Orthodoxy dominates, Theophany sees large public gatherings. In Greece, young men dive into the waters to retrieve a Cross that is thrown as part of the Blessing of the Waters. In Russia, people plunge themselves into the icy waters of her frozen rivers. Everywhere in the Orthodox world, the Feast centers around water. It also initiates the season in which priests visit the homes of the faithful in order to bless them (with water). That such festivities are absent in Western Christian traditions is of note. It signals that some fundamental understanding that permeates the Orthodox world is largely absent elsewhere. Something essential is seen as peripheral.

Be warned that Freeman's allegorical approach to interpretation of scripture is not one which inspires credibility, although that nonliteral tack has been employed since the time of Clement of Alexandria to explain to the gullible ones some aspect which the professor does not really grasp or understand. So in this matter, Freeman's exposition is an interesting, but quite ungrounded hypothecation of the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth.

This staging of a full water-immersion ritual, an introduction of his cousin as The Holy One, conducted by John, a God-appointed prophet ("Thus sayeth the LORD, . . .), a preacher of sin, repentance, and righteous living, occurs after a hiatus of some 400 silent years in the holy writings.

In that unique scriptureless period Jehovah Elohim maintained silence toward mankind, a time in which no Spirit-inspired utterances were given or written down. John Baptist's father Zachariah was the first of this generation of New Testament prophets, and his son John was a principal one, who had the single most important task in history: that of identifying God Present In Human Flesh!

How we know this is: first, that his appearance was predicted by the major prophet Isaiah:

Is. 40:3-5 (AV)(cf. Mal. 3:1; Mt. 11:10; Mk. 1:2-3; Lk. 1:76, 7:27-28)

³ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. ⁴ Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: ⁵ And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

This ritual of immersion in water was prefigured by customary mikvah bathing prior to entering the Presence of God, symbolically washing away of sin, a ritual applied by John as an authorized Levite to his hearers who had professed a repentance, an irrevocable pledge of turning to God from sin and a sin-filled life. But John, while preaching and ritually recognizing a commitment to a change of mind (Greek μετάνοια = metanoia, pronounced met-an'-oy-ah. meaning a reversal of mind-set), had a much greater purpose, and that was to identify the Messiah in human form in the course of administering the immersion ritual:

Jn. 1:23-27,29-34 (AV. my bolding for emphasis)

²³ He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias. ²⁴ And they which were sent were of the Pharisees. ²⁵ And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet? ²⁶ John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; ²⁷ He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose.

²⁹ The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. ³⁰ This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me. ³¹ And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water. ³² And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. ³³ And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.

³⁴ And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.

Now, there, isn't it completely clear that the predominant reason of John's action of giving his converts a ritual bath was that he was ordained to use it for the means of identifying the prophesied appearance of God's Christ (see Psalm 2:2,7), His Messiah? But indeed, it was this extra kink that many were not aware of, not anticipating, and not appreciative of (but John was) that the Christ, the Anointed One, would appear not as a theophany, like Melchisedec (Gen. 14:18; Heb. 5:6,7:1), but a Being made in the likeness of man, God completely integrated with the flesh of a human, and able to suffer physical death.

This was the purpose of Jesus' baptism by John, for this purpose:

Mt. 3:13-17 (AV):

¹³ Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. ¹⁴ But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? ¹⁵ And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him. ¹⁶ And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: ¹⁷ And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

Thus, this baptism was significantly an event illustrating God's primary righteous attribute in action in dealing with humans, fulfilling righteousness in Jesus His Only Begotten-in-the-flesh Beloved Son, both Lord and Messiah (Anointed One, Christ in Greek) and Son of Man:

o The righteous fulfillment of the prophecy of God to the Serpent (Gen. 3:15).
o The righteous fulfillment of certain prophesies of the righteous Isaiah (Is. 7:14, 40:3-4, Mk. 1:3, etc.)
o The righteous confidence of John Baptist in fulfilling his Providential deputation to live cleanly (Mt. 3:4, Mk. 1:6) in preparation for his singular ministry.
o The righteous appointment of John Baptist as the greatest of unregenerated humans ever (Mt. 11:11) to validate the identity of the Messiah and proclaim His identity to the public (Jn. 1:34), thus fulfilling the righteousness of their Holy Scriptures in this matter.
o The righteous humility of John Baptist to point out the Lamb of God to his own disciples (Jn. 1:35-40), and to release them when chosen by Jesus to transition into His intimate Company Of The Committed Disciples.
o The righteous appearance of Jesus as Messiah and Lamb of God in the fullness of time as the first step of beginning His public ministry of God on Earth in Person, leading to Calvary.
o The righteous sealing of His Commission by the descent of the Spirit, a visible phaneresis, to accompany and energize Him throughout this role.
o The righteous vocal proclamation of His Father regarding Their relationship and its nature, for all observers to hear, believe in, and report as fact. Th

You the reader should take careful consideration that a literal, historical, grammatical, cultural, contextual hermeneutic of Scripture results in one and only one interpretation. There may be related applications, buyt only one meaning. Jesus' declaration that the purpose of this baptism was to show that as much of the specially revealed Righteous Will of God as they presently had in the Written Word of God was at that moment in a brilliantly focused assertion of His Presence as God Manifest In The Flesh among men, a part of the ongoing fulfillment of righteousness. It was, of course, pointing toward His fulfillment of The Law by His Own Righteousness, and the abrogation of that Law by /his Righteous life and substitutionary Cross-death, that humans be freed from the condemnation of Adam's sinning conferred on them all.

This "Reverend" Freeman has tried to offer an allegorical explanation of the meaning of John's batism of his cousin Jesus, and it falls just as flat as it does in the development of Romanistic and other Orthodoxen dogma and rituals which have no salvific or sanctifying effect, for which there is no scriptural basis. Any allegorical approach leads to an indefinite non-objective disorder, open to argumentation without conclusive results. As he has openly pointed out in this miasmatic screed.

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