Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 Commentary

We’re well into the new year now. The decorations have come down, holiday breaks are over, life is getting back to normal and we’re all getting back to it. When it comes to Jesus’s ministry, Luke, it seems, also wants to get on with it: unlike Matthew and Mark and John, Luke puts Jesus’s baptism in the past tense, glossing over the event instead of pausing at it.

Well, that’s not completely true. Luke does highlight Jesus’s experience while praying—that familiar scene of the heavens being opened up and the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus as he hears the Father say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

In effect, Luke gives us all of the same details as the other gospels. And like in the other accounts, we are still unsure of who hears God’s pronouncement from the heavens. This is an especially interesting thing to consider given the context set in this week’s lectionary selection at verse 15: “As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…”

What can we make of the fact that God could have allowed the crowds to hear his proclamation concerning Jesus, thereby bolstering John’s own explanation to the crowds, but seems to have chosen not to? Perhaps it is a reminder that the biblical story is for us, but its protagonist is decidedly not us—God is.

It’s that weird space of being a reader of the biblical text, knowing things that the characters in the story don’t because the Holy-Spirit-inspired narrator is giving us “privileged information.” Is there anything to make of the fact that God wanted later believers to know about this interchange between the persons of the Trinity but not those who were there when it happened?

As we take a metaphorical step back from the text to reflect on these questions, we all of a sudden find ourselves in the position of those who “were filled with expectation… questioning in their hearts…” what is going on. And like John, we might find ourselves boldly expressing our ineptitude to match God’s wisdom and purposes.

In other words, I’m taking a metanarrative approach to our text this week. What I read here reminds me that there will be times when I will be filled with expectation that something is the hand of God and I could find out that I’m altogether wrong—like the people would have been wrong to believe that John was the Messiah. And, there will be times when I will look back and realize there are things that God has done that I have completely missed when they were happening—that even God’s supernatural revelation can be hidden until the Holy Spirit decides to reveal it.

Given the fact that God is an omnipotent protagonist in the story that God is still writing, of course it makes sense that there will be things in this tale that are beyond me or that I will even guess wrong about the part of the story that I am in. It’s almost as though Luke is affirming our smallness while telling us to get on with it—time to live as God’s people, time to keep going even when we’ve been wrong, time to live in awe of what we do know or have learned along the way.

Jesus’s “winnowing fork is in his hand,” after all. And the proof of being the wheat and not the chaff comes in the living of our faith, sprouted in the fire and water of our baptisms by God’s very self, the Holy Spirit. We may not always know what God is doing or has done, but we do know how God does it. Like the Holy Spirit that came down upon Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to us with refining fires and washes over us with God’s story for our lives.

Like Jesus, we are the children of God; God’s beloveds, able to bring pleasure to our Father by our very existence in the world he has created. In each and every one of our lives, God will show that pleasure with untold and unknown mercies. God will and has done great things for which we have not given him due credit. God accompanies us with his love as we go about our lives. God’s way of being around us has the ability to fill our hearts with expectation and questions, but as we get on with our ordinary lives, will we pass it off as something (or someone) else? Will we ignore it and get back to the daily tasks of home and work that populate our calendars? Or will we look up and see the heavens rendered open and God’s goodness come down?

Textual Point

John says that he baptises with water, but that Jesus will baptise with the Holy Spirit. Then we see Jesus be equipped for that work as he is baptised by John. Jesus has the Holy Spirit to give and as the New Testament makes so abundantly clear, he never stops giving the Spirit to us.

Illustration Idea

This video is of a study done in 1999 about “inattentional blindness.” After you watch that video and informally participate in the study, it won’t be difficult for you to imagine how, even if people heard the voice of God from heaven or saw the Holy Spirit come down like a dove, they might have missed it because they were still thinking about what John the Baptist had to say.