What Is Baptism For?

During my first week as a student at the University of Virginia, I was invited to play a round of disc golf on campus with some upperclassmen. On the second “hole,” I somehow broke a window in the Rotunda, the domed icon designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. I was mortified but, when showing up the next morning to turn myself in, the window was already fixed. Unsure of what to do, I did nothing and figured it wasn’t a big deal.

Last week, nearly twenty years after the incident, as my boys and I kicked a soccer ball on the lawn in front of the Rotunda, I still felt a tinge of guilt. I figured it would be nice to enjoy its splendor in good conscience. So, later that day, I emailed the University president and made my confession. After all that time, I still felt the need to come clean.

There is likely something for which we each feel the need to turn ourselves in; skeletons in our closets we’ve been meaning to clean out. After all, to be a human being is to be perpetually in need of cleaning and being clean. Whether it’s our house, clothes, children, car, body, teeth, fridge, or iCloud storage, it is a never ending struggle and, ultimately, a losing battle.

I don’t need to belabor the moral implications of cleanliness. Even the phrase “to come clean” about something or when addicts say that they “got clean” implies that cleanliness is a matter of the heart. In first-century Judaism, cleansing rituals were a major factor in worship. If you touched something that was unclean, if you contracted a disease, if you were going to worship at the temple, you would be required to perform certain cleansing rituals to make yourself presentable to God. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness.

These days, we seem even more consumed with varying degrees of self-sanitation. Many of us are currently undergoing some kind of post-holiday cleanse. After all the chocolate, candy canes, cheese plates, bacon-wrapped amazingness, and second helpings of resentment, January is the month of purifying juice cleanses, gym memberships, resolutions, and ozembic. We need to purify ourselves from the inside out. The songwriter Chuck Prophet has a song called “Soap and Water” in which he says, “Soap and water, my oldest friends. Nobody knows quite where we’ve been.”

One can be quite orderly — shoes put away, magazines stacked on top of each other — but being tidy is not the same as being clean. Tidiness rearranges what’s there, but cleanliness removes the contamination that shouldn’t be there. We can tidy up our lives, organizing our schedules to be a better worker, friend, spouse, or parent, but only purification can resolve the years of accrued negligence. That fancy window can be restored, but the guilt still remains years later.

To my surprise, a few days after I emailed my confession, I received a reply from UVA’s president: “Hi, Sam. Please consider yourself absolved and enjoy the lawn with a clear conscience. Also, if one of your sons chooses UVA, please let us know — just in case we need to reinforce the windows!” Just like that, I had a clean slate.

This universal need for more than tidiness is part of what makes the baptism of John so appealing, and why his message found an audience high and low. John was not afraid to call the religious leaders out on the distinction between tidy and clean. In those days, Jewish leaders declared that only Gentiles had to be baptized because they were considered unclean. And yet, John gave no special treatment. According to John, everyone needed a baptism of repentance. John confronted the Pharisees saying, “You may look like you have it all together. You might be tidy, but you’re not clean.” Apparently, this message hit home. Both Jew and Gentile came out of the woodwork to finally come clean.

And yet, John the Baptism saw the limitations of his own ministry. Repentance might be well and good, but he foresaw the need for a deeper cleanse than mere water. Where soap and water may clean the surface, only fire is capable of cleaning the entire substance. Only after metal is completely melted down does the dross rises to the top to be removed. John believed Jesus would bring the fire of God’s wrath to burn away all sin and iniquity for good. A judgment that reduces to ashes all that we think we are: our career, our marital status, our criminal record, our triumphs and our trip-ups — it is all consumed by the fire of God. After that fire has done its work, we are nothing more and nothing less than a beloved son or daughter of God which, when it comes down to it, might just be all we ever wanted to be.

John was right about Jesus, just not in the way he thought.

In her children’s book, Out of the Woods, Rebecca Bond tells the story of her grandfather Antonio who grew up in a hotel run by his mother that was in a small Canadian town on the edge of a lake. Living in the hotel, Antonio got to know all kinds of people (the maids and repairmen who worked there; the outdoors men and the lumberjacks who were guests), listening to stories spoken in all kinds of languages (English, French, Native American). Outside of the hotel, he saw signs of the elusive wildlife — tracks of foxes or moose fur rubbed off on a tree. One day, during a dry summer, a raging fire swept through the surrounding forest. The wind pushed the flames in every direction so fast that there wasn’t any time to outrun the fire. There was only one place to go. Here’s how Rebecca Bond tells the story:

All the people — hotel guests, trappers, silver miners, cooks, Antonio’s mother and Antonio — went into the lake. There was even a baby, not half a year old, held in his mother’s arms. They stood in the water up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders and stared as the fire came closer and closer.

As the forest burned around them, the group of people saw something astonishing. Out from the woods and into the lake came the elusive wildlife. “Wolves stood beside deer,” she writes. “Foxes beside rabbits. And people and moose stood close enough to touch” as the smoke darkened the sky so much that no one could tell if it was day or night. When the flames finally died down and the sky began to clear, every creature returned from where they each had come.

The baptism of Jesus wasn’t a baptism by fire, but a baptism from fire. Plunged into waters of Jesus’s death, the fire of judgment burns, but does not singe. Covered by God’s mercy, we are safe. Through it, we are saved.