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In the mid 1400s, Johannes Gutenberg developed an invention that has impacted all of our lives. It was a new form of printing. Previously if you wanted to print a book, you had to create a block for each individually page, which was tedious and expensive. Gutenberg’s printing press used movable type, which allowed books to be produced much more quickly and less expensively. It led to an outpouring of books throughout the coming centuries.
Because of the expense of books before Gutenberg, only the few and highly educated would have read, and even been able to read them. With Gutenberg’s press, books were made much more accessible for all people. Without this invention, the vast majority of us here would not be able to read. We wouldn’t have Bibles, hymnals, and Prayer Books in our pews. We certainly wouldn’t have the bulletins to follow along with the service that have become much more a custom in the past decade.
One of the first major books published on Gutenberg’s press was the Bible. It made it so that this ancient tome of knowledge was made available to all of us. Even with something so new, the knowledge of the past was able to be preserved and move forward. The same is true even today.
The story of Gutenberg and the printing press can help us understand the Baptism of our Lord. On the surface, this seems like a strange event. John’s baptism was one of repentance. Jesus was without sin; he didn’t need to ask for forgiveness for anything.
Yet Jesus tells John that His baptism is needed to “fulfill all righteousness.” With Jesus’ life, death, and ministry, He created all things new, as Isaiah says this morning, but what about what came before? What of all that God had worked in the world prior to this? In Advent and the Season of the Nativity, we got to see how Jesus fulfilled all the Law and the Prophets. We saw how He fit into God’s Salvation of the world foretold by those before. We hear that truth again today in the words of Peter in Acts.
Jesus’ baptism is a bridge. It is a bridge between what is past and what is new, just as Gutenberg’s press preserved the old in knowledge to make way for the new where we could all be educated. Jesus had to be baptized by the Baptist in order to show that John, the last of the Law and the Prophets, was truly pointing the way to God and the Messiah. Without this event, there is no connection to what has come before. Otherwise there would be no clear sign that Jesus isn’t just something completely different but instead is the final result of what God has been working in this world for some time, since the beginning of the Fall of Man even. That is why God the Father appears. That is why He tells the world that Jesus is His “Son’ with whom I am well pleased.”
When we are baptized, we are baptized into Jesus. We become part of His body, meaning His Death and Baptism. In Revelation, we are told by the Lord, “Behold, I make all things new.” We are part of that newness, just as Isaiah tells. Said slightly differently through Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians, “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” In Baptism, we are the ones being made new through Jesus.
Yet in our baptism, we also recognize the bridge. We note God’s working in the world for almost the entire existence of humanity. We find the root of Salvation History, God’s plan moving throughout our time to the moment Jesus came into this world. We come to understand the greatness of what God has done and all that went into it, even God’s own death in this world on the Cross.
Through Baptism, we become part of God’s work as the finished result, the very thing made new. That work started through the Law and the Prophets. The work of the Prophets of Old came to an end with John the Baptist. All of that labor came to fruition in Jesus, the fulfillment of all the hopes and dreams that had come before, hopes that we now receive. The Baptism of our Lord acts as a sign of that bridge for us. It reveals God’s working in this world for all who witnessed it and all who hear of it now.
We must not forget all that God put into Salvation History for us. We also must remember that through that labor, God has created something new inside us. Because of what all has gone before, we have been made new, and yet, as Jesus shows us, that new creation preserves the memory of all that has gone before.