Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Jesus is now about just one thing: proclaiming the reign of God. He travels through Galilee in a restless itinerant course, totally and utterly surrendered to God’s will and plan. He lives for Israel, for the eschatological gathering of the people of God. He spreads blessing and salvation around him but also the blade of decision. In word and deed he makes the reign of God present. He now lives definitively that final and radical filial obedience to God that was already glimpsed in the story about the twelve-year-old and that extends deeper than all ties to a natural family.

Apparently this sloughing off of his old ties began when, one day, he went with many others to the Jordan where John the Baptizer was preaching and baptizing. Mark recounts the decisive events that, besides his crucifixion, are among the most historically certain in Jesus’ life; the account is as brief as it possibly could be: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan” (Mark 1:9). This is the precise beginning of Jesus’ public history. He must have heard about the Baptizer and his preaching of repentance, and he must have been deeply moved by it. He leaves his parents’ house in Nazareth to be baptized by John. That created enormous difficulties for the early communities. How could he who was much greater than John have gone to the Jordan and joined the Baptizer’s renewal movement? How could Jesus put himself within the crowd of those who publicly confessed that they wanted to change their lives? How could the Sinless One subject himself to a “baptism for the forgiveness of sins”? The enormity of these difficulties is evident from the fact that Matthew builds into the baptism scene a little dialogue in which John at first hesitates to admit Jesus to baptism at all (Matt 3:14-15).

The apocryphal “Gospel of the Nazarenes” (first half of the second century), which survives only in fragments, proceeds much more radically. According to that gospel, Jesus was urged by his mother and brothers to go to the Jordan with them: the whole family want to be baptized by John. But Jesus refuses, saying, “How have I sinned, that I should go there to be baptized by him?” (Jerome, Adversus Pelagianos III, 2). That is freely imagined, but we see in it the problem the early church had with Jesus’ baptism.

How could the Son of God be baptized? In the past it was often said, in answer to this difficulty, that Jesus wanted to give the people a good example. But that kind of song and dance is woefully inadequate. Jesus went to the Baptizer because he sensed that God was acting through him. Israel was now entering the crucial phase of its history. For him that meant he had to be at the place where the fate of the people of God was being decided; he had to be on the spot where God was now acting in Israel. He had to be where the eschatological gathering and renewal of Israel was beginning. So he listened to God’s appeal. The moral question of whether he considered himself a sinner is not to the point. Jesus’ concern was with God’s plan, with the Father’s will. By being baptized he surrendered himself wholly to that plan.

Jesus’ Temptations

According to the narrative sequence of the first three gospels, immediately after his baptism Jesus was driven into the desert by the Spirit of God to be tempted there (Matt 4:1; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-2). In Matthew and Luke the story of the temptations that then follows is an artistic composition. Let us be plain about it: it is a fictional story. But it was this use of fiction that presented the possibility of telling something that was full to the brim with reality: Jesus was tempted more than once.

The end of Mark’s much briefer story echoes the theme of Paradise. He writes that angels served Jesus in the desert (Mark 1:13; cf. Matt 4:11). There were already Jewish legends circulating in New Testament times that told how the first humans in Paradise were served by angels. So Mark intends to say that because Jesus followed the will of God without reservation, Paradise was beginning to dawn. But in the midst of this dawning of Paradise he is tempted just as everyone else is tempted if she or he wants to serve God alone. He is tempted to will not God’s plan but his own.

In Matthew’s and Luke’s versions the tempter approaches Jesus three times. Three times he tries to get Jesus to fall away from his assigned task. Three times Jesus answers with a saying from Scripture and thus shows that he is remaining faithful to his duty. These are not primarily temptations to which everyone is exposed, such as greed or pleasure or the arrogance of power. Instead, they are about the basic sin of the people of God, the specific temptation with which believers in particular are confronted.