Why was Jesus baptised? That may not seem to us to be a very significant question and yet in trying to answer it I hope eventually to make a link with the more pressing question about the cartooning of religious faith.

             Mark’s gospel tells us that John the Baptist baptised people who came to him confessing their sins – their immersion in water was thus a symbol of their being cleansed from sin. Jesus comes to the Jordan and is also baptised by John. Mark states the fact and moves on to the moment in which Jesus has a vision of the Holy Spirit and hears the voice from heaven affirming him as God’s beloved son.

             When Matthew comes to tell this story he has begun to worry about the implications of this scene. How can the greater man submit to the ministry of the lesser? And perhaps he is also wondering about how the Son of God can have any sins to confess. So he adds a little dialogue between the two of them. John says to Jesus that it ought to be the other way round. Jesus should be baptising him. But Jesus says – let’s do it to fulfil all righteousness, by which he simply means God wants us to do it this way. Luke doesn’t include that conversation but he does do his best to play down the embarrassing moment. The fourth gospel makes no mention of Jesus being baptised at all.

            So why was Jesus baptised? To work out an answer we might look at  two seemingly contradictory texts from scripture and try to reconcile them. The first from Mark 10:18 where Jesus says to a man who asks him rather effusively how to gain eternal life, ‘Why do you call me good – no-one is good except God alone.’ And the second text is from the epistle to the Hebrews 4:15 which describes Jesus ‘as tempted in every way just as we are, yet without sin.’

            The  text from Hebrews gives rise to the doctrine of the sinlessness of Jesus, sacrificed for us like an unblemished lamb. To the modern mind the sinlessness of Jesus is a difficult concept to understand especially when Hebrews says that he was tempted as we are yet without sin. Surely to be tempted is to have sinful thoughts. And Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t help us. There he says that to look at someone lustfully is as bad as adultery, to feel anger is as bad as murder.

            Perhaps at this point we might find helpful  the example of GK Chesterton’s Fr Brown. He has been asked by a group of friends how he is able over and over again to identify a murderer. He takes them by surprise by saying that he committed all the crimes himself.  He then explains that his ability to solve a murder depends on his being able to feel exactly like the murderer by working out what state of mind could lead someone to do such a thing. Perhaps we might envisage Jesus’ knowledge of humanity working like that – he could imagine what it would be like to be tempted to do the things human being are tempted by and yet he did not consent actually to do these things. He remained as Scripture says ‘obedient’ to the Father – his relationship with God the Father was  so strong that he could never act out what he nevertheless understood in his mind and heart. So when he says to the man who calls him ‘Good teacher’ , that no man is good but God alone, – Jesus is not saying that he does bad things but rather refuses to be flattered – he refuses to think of himself as good because that way leads to the sin of vanity.

            Why then was Jesus baptised? We might think of it as an outward expression of his ability deeply to understand all those thoughts and actions for which humanity needs to repent. That is certainly something which undergirds a Christian sense of our relationship with Jesus. Jesus shows us the potential for our humanity on the other side of sin, something we might all reach out to, and yet we do not see him as a remote or unfeeling character, someone whose goodness sets him apart.  Jesus is recognizably someone we might sit next to at a meal and whose stories we might laugh at. And this is the point at which we begin to approach the question of religious cartoons. Why is it that on the whole contemporary Christians may well be less aggressively sensitive to the possibilities of our faith being mocked?

            First it is possible to see Jesus’ parables as verbal cartoons – cartoons in which God is represented as an unjust judge, a corrupt landlord or a doting father. Jesus’ parables often have the potential to shock us because they can parody our religious attitudes or jolt us into think about God in new ways. Certainly some of his contemporaries thought that his views of God  and the Jewish clergy were disrespectful to say the least. And yet Jesus was also clearly a part of that Jewish tradition which could use humour to talk about God.

            And then second,  as Christian tradition developed, those who believed that it was wrong to represent Jesus in art lost the argument. Christian art developed over the centuries to express the faith pictorially in numerous different ways – some of them provocative of serious but rarely violent debate (except in specific circumstances as under the Puritans).

            And then third, Jesus teaches us to expect mockery – the servant is not greater than his master; if they mock and persecute Jesus then his followers are to expect the same. Certainly the church in the times of its greatest political strength, has not always treated its opponents calmly and tolerantly. And yet at the heart of the faith there is a belief that God cannot ultimately be mocked. God’s rule will be established in his own way and in his own time and in the meantime his church can survive the world’s scorn and the secularist’s jibe, whether it be in the Life of Brian or Charlie Hebdo.