Section IV

the manifestation of the messiah to the people of Israel

(Matt. 4; Mark 1; Luke 3; John 1)

Jesus complied with the call of the law when He repaired to the Jordan to be baptized by John.¹ But in the consciousness of His own purity and divine dignity, He must have deeply felt that on this occasion He only bore the burden of His people. An appointment of righteousness like this, which made Him the associate of the self-accusers and penitents who presented themselves before the Baptist, must have appeared to Him very ominous of the grave character of His future career. But His heart was already accustomed to sympathize with the sufferings of humanity. Even at an earlier period the fact must have become clear to Him, that all the burden of earth fell precisely on His heart, since His heart exhibited the centre and the depths of humanity. But He also had already learnt to know the exaltation which always follows the sufferings inflicted on a child of God. Hence He must have come to His baptism with great expectations, with the hope of a wonderful declaration by His Father, while He clearly perceived what was humiliating in His baptism, the suffering for His people which it implied. As at a later period He met death with the confident expectation of His resurrection and exaltation to glory with the Father, so also He came to His baptism, which was a prefigurement of His death, with the certain expectation that the Father would testify to His honour in the hour of His ignominy.

That Jesus was certain of the divine mission of John, is shown by the decisiveness with which He offered Himself for baptism at his hands. Lately some have wished to make out that He was a disciple of John.² So He was, for a single moment, when He allowed John to immerse Him in the stream, and thus recognized John’s theocratic commission.

But John did not at once fully apprehend the significance of Christ’s person. This is easily explained. He had to testify of one greater than himself with prophetic certainty. Such a task is in itself infinitely difficult, and indeed, without the guidance of God’s Spirit, impossible.

That John and Jesus were acquainted in their youth, may be inferred with great probability from the relation in which their families stood to each other. How many times they might see one another at the feasts in Jerusalem, perhaps look on one another with thoughtful interest! On those occasions John might be much assisted by the utterances of Jesus in understanding the nature of the Theocracy, and in estimating the spirit of the existing hierarchy and their method of guiding the religion of the people. But by such intercourse the consciousness must early have been unfolded in both, that though their lives and spheres of action were to be closely linked, yet they were not destined to coincide. Every superior individuality has a strong feeling of an especial sphere of life, by which its outward relation and conduct towards other individuals is determined; and the purer it is, so much the more decidedly does it follow this consciousness in reference to the historic boundaries and position of its life. There is also in the spiritual world a repulsive force as unerring, and even more so than the centrifugal force of the heavenly bodies, which, in connection with the force of attraction, establishes the organism of the universe. It is too agreeable a view, taken from an inferior sphere of life, to imagine that the great champions of God, John and Jesus, had their paths in life ordained by God to be contiguous, and that these, as their strong natures unfolded, so coincided, that they maintained a close private intercourse, or were associated in outward co-operation. Inward fellowship in the kingdom of God does not as a matter of course lead to an outward companionship. Of John we are informed that he was ‘in the wilderness’ (Luk 3:2). He was of a profoundly earnest, hermit-like, pensively pious character, the last and worthy representative of the Old Testament. The whole bent of his mind attracted him into the wilderness. The Old Testament economy had its birth-place in the wilderness, and thither with John it returned to die. Probably a modest reverence, as a rule, kept him at a distance from Jesus; and among other things, he might feel a sad and sombre estrangement from the cheerful gracefulness with which Jesus entered on His great conflict with the world—an inability to value at once the power of His refined agency, and fully to enter into His New Testament spirit.

But the reverence he felt for Jesus, the youthful anticipation that in Him bloomed the hope of Israel, and even the blissful presentiment that Jesus was the Messiah, could not, after all, qualify him to be a public witness for Him. As the prophet of the Messiah he knew nothing officially of Jesus; he knew Him not, so long as he was not assured by God. No female influence could ever induce him to be precipitate in this matter, and do violence to his calling; not even the judgment of those eminent women, Elisabeth and Mary. Whoever comprehends the significance of a prophetic, divine certainty, would not desire that John should deliver the reminiscences of his youth to the people in the name of Jehovah, and hastily alarm the land and the people with monstrous hypotheses. When Jesus came to him, he might indicate to Him at once his own expectations. The impression which this exalted friend made upon him had perhaps often overpowered him; at all events, it did so now. His own official dignity fell from him at the feet of Jesus; he started difficulties as to baptizing Him. Still he had not yet that final, objective divine certainty respecting the Messianic dignity of Jesus which he required, in order to bear open testimony to Him; and for this reason, because he had received the assurance that God would accredit the Messiah to him by an infallible sign. This sign was granted him when Jesus came up from His baptism.³

It must here particularly be borne in mind, that the reporter respecting this wonderful transaction, namely, John, did not stand on the height of a decidedly New Testament view. The miracle must have assumed for him an appearance which was conformable to his power of contemplation. Therefore the miracle at the baptism of Jesus is narrated according to John’s phenomenology, and not according to the christological phenomenology. And owing to this, it has been possible for the ancient and modern Ebionites, Socinians, and other advocates of a mutilated Christology, to support their views by the letter of this narrative, and to regard the anointing of Christ with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven as contradictory to the doctrine of the eternal divinity of Christ, and of His miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit.⁴

As Christologists, we must assert the fundamental position, that there can be no holier place in the universe than the heart of Jesus. For when in our inner contemplation we contrast the Father with the Son, the Father is without time and place, comprehending and filling all things. Hence it belongs to the phenomenology of the Baptist when the representation presupposes a place in heaven over the heart of Christ, whence the Holy Spirit descends upon Him.

Jesus had immersed Himself by the prayer of the heart in the abyss of Deity, even while He was being immersed in the stream. Baptism was His solemn consecration to God and to death. By this great public surrender to the Father, His consciousness as the Messiah was completed, His calling decided. He was infinitely moved by the fulness of the divine Spirit, and in the illumination of this Spirit the certainty of His eternal unity in God, His Sonship, and the evidence of His calling and course of life, were completely disclosed to Him. The rose at last requires only a single sunbeam to complete its unfolding. The unfolding of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus was completed at His baptism; but equally so the public certainty of His Messiahship; for this the Baptist had to advocate before all the people.

As Jesus rose out of the water praying, the divine greeting from the Father, ‘Thou art My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ went through His soul with infinite power, fervency, and splendour. This inner voice was the central point of the miracle. But it penetrated the Lord not merely in a spiritual manner, but resounded audibly through His frame: it so filled Him that all the chords of His life, even those of hearing, sounded simultaneously.

According to the law of sympathy, this voice must have echoed in the related but weaker person of John with thrilling power, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ He also heard the call, because the voice of God caused his whole life to vibrate. Suddenly he beheld a visible sign. He saw the heavens open, and the Spirit descending in an outward visible form (σωματικῷ εἴδει), like a dove, upon Jesus, and abiding upon Him.

But we must distinguish, as we have already intimated, the essential component parts of this phenomenon from the form which it obtained in John’s contemplation of it. Three particular signs compose the one great sign whereby Jesus was pointed out to him by God as the Messiah. The first is the open heaven; the second, the visible appearance over the head of Jesus; the third is the voice. We believe that from the christological stand-point the order must be reversed. The voice was the greeting, and responsive greeting of eternal love in the heart of Christ resounding in the spirit-world,—the celebration of the perfected revelation of the Father in the Son, of the divine feeling of Christ in His unity with the Father. Now did He begin as a living fountain of the Spirit of God to spread abroad the breath and life of this Spirit; the Spirit emanated from Him as the scent is shed forth from the full-blown rose. But this first great life-stream of the Spirit in Him began in a solemn inspiration which flashed and lightened through His whole frame. At this moment the first rays of Christ’s glorification broke forth. A mysterious splendour, probably a white mild lustre like the flutter of a white dove on the wing in the sunbeams, hovered above His head. John on his stand-point beheld it gliding downwards. But probably an upward and downward movement of this mild lustre took place; namely, a balancing or adjustment of the life of Christ entering into the phenomenon, with that world of light which lies at the basis of the whole phenomenal world, and as a locality forms the first inheritance of His glory. We understand this balancing or adjustment thus—Christ is the spiritual life-principle of the world, and therefore specially the principle of the renovation of the world of men, and of their sphere the habitable globe. At this moment His human consciousness of God was completed. His inner light-nature broke forth in the feeling of triumph which pervaded Him at this instant. It was the foretokening of His transfiguration on the Mount and at the Ascension, and consequently of the transfiguration of humanity in the new world by His glorification, as well as the transfiguration of the earthly sphere, as that must supervene with the glory of Christian humanity. But when this ray of the world’s transfiguration breaks forth from the life of Christ, the discord ceases which existed between this earthly sphere and the heavenly light-sphere, which as an ideal region forms its opposite in the universe, making up its life. Christ Himself in His corporeal nature had a share in this discord, since this nature, although pure and complete as an organ and image of the divine Spirit, yet was incorporated with actual humanity, and by His whole life-communion with it shared in the darkness and heaviness of its corporeity. As therefore the life-fulness of the Spirit streamed forth from the consciousness of Christ, the transforming power of this life broke through the earthly obscuration of His organism, and by this sacred emanation of His ethereal life-power, the relation to that region of light was called forth. A downward streaming of its light met the upward shining of the light-life of Christ. But after the first festive meeting of these lights, the relation was continued in a more quiet form. The assimilation effected, of the nature of Christ with the region of His glory, allowed the reciprocal acting to retire again into the invisible, till a new enhancement of the same relation caused it to come forth at a later period still more powerfully. This adjustment between heaven and Christ may also be simply regarded as an adjustment between heaven and earth, since Christ is the principle of the earth’s glorification. And whoever is inclined to the Christian expectation, that the earth must one day be changed into a heavenly world of light by the energy of Christ, that a transformation of it into the imperishable is approaching through the palingenesia which the Spirit of Christ effects—let him so conceive it, that in that moment in which the heart of Christ enjoyed the full unfolding of His heavenly consciousness in conformity to the intimate connection of the spiritual and corporeal, the bloom of this world’s glorification glistened on His head. But in the glorification of the world the alternation of day and night will hereafter vanish; the earth will be seen as a star encircled by the great family of stars. In their new light-life the sun will no more quench the radiance of the surrounding stars, while the earth will be free, as a co-enlightening star, from the sun’s overpowering light.⁵ And therein will also one day appear the signs of the Son of man in heaven (Mat 24:30); so that, by means of the great transformation of the earth, the stars will begin to be constantly visible to the earth as clearly as sometimes on the high mountain tops the stars blaze like torches on the dark blue expanse of heaven. But it is well known that even now there are moments in the day-time when single stars are visible. Such a moment probably was that, when Jesus and John from their stand-point beheld the great adjustment between heaven and earth. In the undulation of the light-world between the head of Christ and heaven, the depth of heaven was opened. They probably, therefore, saw the stars come forth in the dark blue, and as it were joyously enwreathe the earth, which now, as thus encircled, seemed the holiest spot in the universe. So in this world-historical single moment, that transformation of the world which it establishes and brings about as a principle, was exhibited in a passing but grand foretokening to the actor and the witness of the moment.

We have already noticed on what account John necessarily saw this transaction through an Old Testament medium. But it attests the vivid anticipation of the New Testament life in the soul of this great man, that he compared the Holy Spirit to the image of a gentle dove⁶ gliding down from heaven, as he designated the Son of God by the title of the Lamb. This heavenly power of Christ’s infinitely gentle Spirit-life, which John most wanted in his own life, so full of passionate zeal, but yet in the spirit of humility knew how to value in another. It was exactly those features of Christ’s life in which he was most decidedly surpassed that filled his soul with the profoundest reverence; he therefore designated Christ ‘the Lamb,’⁷ and the spirit of His life a ‘dove.’

John was now most certainly convinced of the Messiahship of Christ by the testimony of God, and in the blessedness of this new great certainty he could deliberately say, in reference to his former way and manner of contemplating Him, ‘I knew Him not.’ It was now that he first knew Him as a prophet, so that he could with confidence testify of Him in Israel. But this was decisive in a man whose private life was so perfectly identified with his public calling, and who wished to be only ‘a voice’ to proclaim the coming Messiah. Filled with astonishment at the glory of this revelation which had been imparted to him, and at the glory of the personage in whom he now realized the hope of his life, he could say with the deepest emphasis, ‘I knew Him not.’ The conscientiousness and critical judgment of the man were great, like himself,—the last of the old prophets, who spoke not of their own will or opinion, but as they were moved and actuated by the Holy Ghost.

Thus was Jesus now made manifest to the people of Israel as the Son of God and the Messiah. For John represented the theocratic majesty of Israel, the true host of the people. But whether on this occasion the two men of God were surrounded by many witnesses or few, was in this case of no special importance. At all events, the bystanders could only share in their experience in proportion as they were qualified by the sympathy of a life and disposition in harmony with John and Christ.

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Notes

1. The objective truth of the testimony which the Baptist has left behind of the mysterious transaction at the baptism of Jesus, may be inferred from the Old Testament colouring which it must have gained in his contemplation of it, the effect of which has led into error minds that were deficient in New Testament depth or ripeness.

2. The effulgence (Verklärung) will come under consideration in the sequel. As to the adjustment (Ausgleichung) between the earthly nature of Christ and His light-world (Lichtwelt), the idea of such adjustment or equalization already exists in natural philosophy, though it is applied with uncertainty to the mysterious phenomena of nature-life. Thus, for instance, Faraday conjectures that the electrical equilibrium of the earth is restored by the aurora borealis, by its carrying the electricity from the poles to the equator. According to others, the aurora borealis is a streaming of light from the earth to the sun, while the zodiacal light is an opposite current which connects the sun with the earth.

3. On the significance of the dove in the Hebrew symbolic, see Strauss, Leben Jesu, i. 416. Von Ammon, i. 276: ‘The dove was universally considered by Jews and heathens to be an emblem of purity and chastity.’ Yet John needed not to take the symbol from tradition; he was great enough to form on his own authority a symbol of this kind, especially in allusion to Solomon’s Son 2:14.

4. The voice of God cannot proceed from any particular place, since God is omnipresent. It is a living and definite expression of God; a special word of God, which creates its own voice in the sphere wherein it sounds, as the general word of God has created its sound and echo in the universe. But this voice has a full reality, since it is an expression and operation of God. It is consistent with this immediateness of the divine voice, that God speaks in the language of the persons to whom His word is addressed. Every one who can conceive the difference between Judaism and Heathenism ought to know that the Hebrews never imagined the divine essence to be confined in a dwelling-place above the firm vault of heaven. So also the way and manner in which the speech of God is articulated, and becomes the language of a particular country, must be plain to every one who is not disposed to regard the manifestation of God in the flesh as ‘monstrous.’

5. The question, whether the manifestation was designed for Jesus, or only for John (see Neander, Life of Jesus Christ, p. 70 [Bohn]), loses sight too much of the peculiar life of this singular moment, in which one of the two prophets could receive no revelation without its also being imparted to the other. Jesus was the centre of the miraculous transaction; but John stood most of all in need of this manifestation in order to fulfil his calling.

6. The message which the Baptist sent from his prison to Jesus must, according to Strauss, imply a contradiction to the confidence of the Baptist, as here described in reference to the person of Jesus. In the sequel we shall consider the question, whether the human weakness in the life of the prophet can be taken as evidence against his utterance in the elevated hours of his divine assurance.

1) [Tradition gives us the 6th January as the day of the baptism ; and for a description of the place by Arculf, see Bohn's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8. ED.]

2) [So Renan, Vie de Jésus, p. 107: ‘ Loin que le Baptiste ait abdiqué devant Jésus, Jésus pendant tout le temps qu'il passa pres de lui, le reconnut pour supérieur et ne développa son propre génie que timidement. Il sembla en effet que, malgré sa proa Jésus, durant quelques semaines au moins, fut l’imitateur de Jean,’—ED.]

3) [The apparent inconsistency between Matt. iii. 14 and John i, 33 has tested the sagacity of interpreters. Alford is of opinion that already John regarded Jesus as the Messiah, and could not but do so from the nature of their relationship, but that he still required the sign from God which would justify him in announcing Him to Israel. Ellicott, in a characteristically cautious note (Hist. Lect. p. 107), seems to ascribe too little to John’s former acquaintance with, or at least knowledge of our Lord; and Ewald certainly does so (Geschichte Christus’, p. 163, cf. 185) when he supposes that John’s shrinking was due to what he learnt of Jesus when He came to his baptism, by conversing with Him as he conversed with all who presented themselves for baptism. Riggenbach (Vorlesungen iiber das Leben des Herrn Jesu, Basle, 1858, p. 240) here, as frequently elsewhere, follows Lange.—ED.]

4) [The Gnostics believed that Jesus was one person, Christ another; and that these were united for a time at His baptism, but again separated before His crucifixion. Full information on this point is given in the very learned and careful work of Burton, An Inquiry into the Heresies of the Apostolic Age (Oxford, 1829), pp. 186 and 469.—ED.]

5) Rev xxi, 23. See Göschel, Untérhaltungen zur Schilderung Gothescher Dicht- und Denkweise, iii. 191.

6) That we are not to think of an actual dove gliding down on the head of Christ, the theologian ought to’ know from the fact that the Israelites were forbidden to regard the cry of birds as an omen (Lev. xix. 26), [‘The form was real’ (Ellicott) ; it was not only the manner of descent, but the descending bodily form which was like that of a dove. It was not a dove which had been before this time living somewhere on earth (Paulus thinks it was a dove accidentally passing by), any more than the human forms of the angels appearing to Abraham were real men, though they exercised the functions of substantial bodies. It was a real appearance assumed (how we know not) for the time being, like the tongues of fire afterwards chosen to symbolize a special gift of the Holy Ghost.—ED.] ,

7) [This, of course, does not exclude the sacrificial significance of the name, a3 brought out in the preceding section —ED.]