The passage: John baptized in the wilderness and preached a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. (Mark i. 4.)
God and man must combine for salvation from sin, and the New Testament seems to use the same word, translated remission, for the share of either in the great deliverance.
First, a word about repentance. I would not suggest a mistranslation, but the idea behind the word has been so misunderstood and mistaught that we must look at the word itself to see the moral fact it stands for.
The Greek word of which repentance is the accepted and fundamentally accurate rendering is made of two words meaning together a change of mind or thought. It has no hint of sorrow or shame or the other states that often accompany repentance and have been mistaken for part of its essence. Here the evangelist adds three words, as if he thought it insufficient alone to convey the Baptist’s meaning: ‘preaching a baptism of repentance unto a sending away of sins.’ The phrase [Greek: aphesis amartiôn] may sometimes mean God’s forgiveness, and reading it as ‘repentance to obtain God’s pardon’ would not be inconsistent; but [Greek: eis] is rather unto than for; [Greek: aphesis], translated remission, means fundamentally a sending away, a dismissal; and the writer seems to add the phrase to make certain what he means by repentance: one that reaches to the abjurement of sins. ‘A change of mind unto the dismissal of sinning’ is far more logical than ‘a change of mind unto the pardon of sin.’ The revised version chooses unto but keeps remission, which now means only God’s forgiveness. I think the same word is used here for man’s dismissal of his sins as elsewhere for God’s; in both it is a sending away of sins, differing only in the source of the action. I do not enter the question whether God’s aphesis may mean sending sins out of a man as well as pardoning them; I am sure the one deed cannot be separated from the other.
That the phrase here means repentance unto ceasing from sin, the giving up of what is wrong, I will try to show is at least probable.
First, the user of the phrase either defines the change of mind as aimed at God’s pardon or as reaching to a new life, and the latter seems to me by far the more natural. What seems intended is the kind and scope of the change, not an end to be gained by it: a change of will and conduct, a radical change of life. The man must change his mind not to a different opinion, not even to a mere betterment of conduct, but to nothing less than a sending away of his sins.
Next, in St Matthew’s gospel, the Baptist’s motive for urgency is that the kingdom of heaven is at hand: because the king is coming, give up your sinning. His quotation from Isaiah (‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’) makes the same argument. The only possible preparation for the coming Lord is to cease from evil and do well, to send away sin; they must cleanse not their streets, houses, garments or persons but their hearts and doings. The Baptist did not see that the kingdom was not of this world but in the hearts of men, and in prison his faith failed because he heard of no martial movement or show of power; but he saw plainly that righteousness was essential to it. That he did not yet see that righteousness is the kingdom, and that the Lord was already beginning it by sending sin out of his people’s hearts, is not wonderful. The Lord’s answer to his doubt was to send his messenger back an eye-witness, to wake in him the perception that the kingdom came by other means to another end than John had recognized: wherever obedient love arose in the heart of the poorest he healed or persuaded.
Again, when the Pharisees came to John he said, ‘Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance’: is that not the same as ‘Repent unto the sending away of your sins’?
Note also that when the multitudes, and the publicans and soldiers, the classes most obnoxious to the rest, asked what they should do, plainly recognizing that something was required of them, his instruction went one way: send away your sins, each beginning with the fault nearest him. The kingdom was at hand; they must prepare for it by beginning to do as must be done in it.
They could not rid themselves of their sins, but they could quarrel with them and begin to turn them out, while the Lord came to do his part in the final banishment. Those who had repented he would baptize with a holy power to send their sins away indeed: the will to be rid of them would be baptized with a fire to burn them up. When a man breaks with his sins, the wind of the Lord’s fan will blow them away, the fire of his heart consume them.
I think, then, that what is meant here is the repentant man’s part, not God’s, in the sending away of sins: his one preparation for receiving the power to overcome them, the baptism of fire.
What comes in the name of the gospel must often seem, even to one not far from the kingdom, no good news at all; it wakes no hope in him, and the God it tells of is not one he would draw nearer to. But when such a man sees that God must be his Life, and that in rousing himself to put away evil and do the duty at his door he may fearlessly claim the help of him who ‘loved him into being,’ then his will sides with his conscience, and he begins to try to be, first of all by ridding himself of what is antagonistic to all being, namely wrong. Multitudes will not even approach the appalling labour and pain of being. God is doing his part, in an age-long creation, endowing men with power to be; but few yet take up theirs and put forth a divine effort after real existence. To the many the prophet’s spirit cries: ‘Turn, and change your way! The kingdom of heaven is near you. Let God throne himself in you, that his liberty be your life and you free men. Clear the house for him; send away the bad things out of it. Depart from evil and do good. The duty at your door, do it, great or small.’
For in this region there is no great or small. ‘Be content with your wages,’ the Baptist told the soldiers; to many now the word would be ‘Rule your temper,’ ‘Be courteous to all,’ ‘Let each hold the other better than himself,’ or ‘Be just to your neighbour that you may love him.’ To make a highway for our God in the desert we must bestir ourselves on the very spot where we stand and cast away the evil thing that blocks his chariot-wheels; otherwise those wheels will never roll through our streets, nor our desert blossom with his roses.
John’s message was then, and is yet, the one message to the world: ‘Send away your sins, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’ Some of us (I cannot say all) who long ago began to send away our sins need fresh repentance every day, God knows how many times a day, so ready are we to take a path that seems parallel to the narrow way and not notice its divergence. When we find we are out of the way, what is there but to bethink ourselves and turn? By those ‘who need no repentance’ the Lord may have meant those who had repented perfectly and were with him in his Father’s house; also those who have never sinned, and those who no longer turn aside for any temptation.
We may now be able to understand the Lord’s own relation to John’s baptism.
He came to John to be baptized, and most would say John’s baptism was of repentance for the pardon of sins. But he could not be baptized for remission of sins, having never done a selfish, untrue or unfair thing, never wronged his Father or any brother or sister; there was nothing to forgive. Nor for repentance, which in him would have been turning to evil. Where then was the propriety of his coming to be baptized and insisting on it? It must lie elsewhere.
Take John’s words to mean ‘the baptism of repentance unto the sending away of sins,’ and remember that in Jesus repentance could not be, since what repentance must bring about in man already existed in him. Then, altering the words to fit the case, ‘the baptism of willed devotion to the sending away of sin,’ we see at once how his baptism was right and fit.
That he had no sin to repent of was not because he was so made that he could not sin; it was because, by his own will, he sent sin from him with the full energy of his nature. God knows good and evil and, blessed be his name, chooses good; his righteous anger will never make him unfair to us or forget that we are dust. His son, like him, chose good, and in that choice resisted every temptation to help his fellows otherwise than as their father and his would. Instead of crushing evil by divine force, destroying the wicked, making peace by the rule of a perfect prince, or gathering the children of Jerusalem under his wings whether they would or not, he let evil work its will while it lived. He contented himself with the slow, unencouraging ways of essential help: making men good, casting out and not merely controlling Satan, carrying to perfect issue on earth the principles for which the Father honoured him, anointing him with the oil of gladness above his fellows because he loved righteousness and hated iniquity. To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it; and to win its true victory he, like his brethren, had to send away evil. All his life he resisted the impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good, strong perhaps when he saw old age, innocence and righteousness trodden underfoot. What else gives reality to the temptation in the wilderness, and to the devil’s coming again after leaving him for a season? In the whole attitude of his being he was driving sin away from himself and, as Lord and saviour of men, from others, bringing them to abjure it like himself. No man, least of all any lord of men, can be good without willing to be good, setting himself against evil, sending away sin. Other men send it out of them; the Lord sent it away from before him, that it should not enter. So the stand against sin is common to the captain of salvation and the soldiers under him.
What did Jesus come into the world to do? The will of God in saving his people from their sins: not from the punishment of their sins, that blessed aid to repentance, but from the sins themselves, the paltry as well as the heinous. His whole work was and is to banish sin from the earth, to cast it into the abyss of non-existence behind the back of God. His was the holy war: he resisted unto blood, and taught the soldiers who followed him to resist also unto blood, striving against sin; so he became the captain of their salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered for others. This was the task to which he was baptized, and it is still his labour. ‘This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many unto the sending away of sins.’ The new covenant was that God would put his law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts, and be their God and they his people, not according to the covenant they broke.
John baptized unto repentance because those he was sent to had to repent and send away the sin in them. But a man aware of no sin in him, yet aware that life would be no life unless sin were kept out, would be right to receive John’s baptism unto the continual dismissal of the sin ever wanting to enter at his door. The object of the baptism was the sending away of sin; repentance was its object only where needed to introduce that. He who needed no repentance was baptized for the same object, the banishment of sin from his Father’s dominions, and first by his own sternest repudiation of it in himself. Thence came his victory in the wilderness: he would have his Father’s way, not his own. Could he be less fit for the baptism because its object was no new thing to him, who had been about it from the beginning, indeed from all eternity? We shall be about it, I presume, to all eternity.
Those baptized by John were initiated into the company whose work was to send sin out of the world, first out of themselves. Their earliest endeavour would, as I have said, open the door to the help without which no man could succeed in so arduous a task: the work must be wrought in the roots of his own being, where, knowing nothing of the secrets of his existence, he can do nothing immediately, and only his maker is potent and present. The change that must pass in him more than equals a new creation, being a higher one. But its necessity is involved in the former creation, so we have a right to ask our creator’s help, for he requires of us what he has created us unable to do without him. Nay, could we do it without him, it were a thing to leave undone. Blessed fact that he has made us so near him: that we are completed only by his presence in us, are not men without him, can be one with our self-existent creator, and in him must share infinitude or be enslaved by the finite! The patent of our royalty is that not for a moment can we live our true life without the eternal life present with our spirits; without him at our unknown root we cease to be. A dog cannot live without the presence of God, but I presume a dog may live a good dog-life without knowing it; man is dead if he does not know the Power that is his cause, his deepest selfing self, the Presence which is not himself and is nearer to him than himself, infinitely more his very being than he is. The being of which we are conscious is not our full self; our consciousness is infinitely less than we, and God is more necessary even to it than self-consciousness is to our humanity. Until a man becomes his own God, the sole thing necessary to his existing is the will of God, and to its well-being and perfecting, that he should know his maker present in him. All that the children want is their Father.
The one true end of all speech about holy things is to persuade the individual to cease to do evil, to set himself to do well, and to look to the lord of his life to be on his side in the new struggle. Supposing my suggestions correct, I do not care that my reader understand them unless he turns against the evil in him and begins to cast it out. If he does not, it is of no consequence whether he agrees with me; if he does, it is equally little, for, setting himself to do the truth, he is on the way to know all things.
I am not sure what the Lord means by ‘Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness’; baptism could not be that! Perhaps he means: ‘We must by a full act of the will give ourselves altogether to righteousness, making it the business of our lives to send away sin and do the Father’s will. That is my work as much as the work of any man who must repent before he can begin. I will not be left out when you call men to be pure as our father is pure.’
To be certain whom he means by us might help: all of us men, or ‘my father and me,’ or ‘you and me, John’? If the saying means what I suggested, the us applies to all who know good and evil: ‘Every being that can must devote himself to righteousness; to be right is no adjunct of completeness but the ground and foundation of existence.’ But perhaps it was a lesson for John himself, who, mighty preacher of righteousness as he was, did not yet count it the all of life. I cannot tell.
Note that when the Lord began his teaching, neither using nor inculcating any rite, he used John’s own words: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
That kingdom had been at hand all through his infancy, boyhood and young manhood: he was in the world with his Father in his heart. Lonely man on the hillside or boy the cynosure of doctors’ eyes, his Father was everything to him: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s things?’