2. When Jesus comes to be baptized in Jordan, the remarkable phenomenon is that what for others is a baptism with water coincides for Him with a baptism in the Holy Spirit. According to Mk 1'", as Jesus ascends from the water. He sees the heavens cleaving and the Spirit as a dove de- scending upon Him. In the earliest Evangelist this is the experience of Jesus only : it is He who sees the Spirit descending. He to whom the heavenly voice is addressed. The later Evangelists may have conceived it otherwise, and extended the vision and the hearing of the voice to John the Baptist or even to the bystanders : it is indifferent here. All agree that on this occasion Jesus received the Holy Spirit, and in it the attestation of His Son- ship, the call to His unique task, and the endow- ments needed to discharge it.
Critic's have sir,'crfstert that the curiously indirect way in which 111'- lixi'Ti-Hi nt Jesus and the descent of the Spirit are mention' i in 1.1- --'■ i^ 'lue to tlie writer's desire to slur over sonietliinu vvliirh is really inconsistent with his account of Jesus' l-irtli : Init even if Lulte liad difficulty in adjustinj? these two thniirs, as Liie Fourth Evantfelist ni.ay have had difficulty in adjusting the incarnation of the Eternal I^rfigos in Jesus with the descent of the Spirit upon Him in manhood, it is clear that for hoth the baptism was so securely fixed in the Gospel testi- mony that they had no alternative but to set it unambiguously down (ct. Jn l3l-3J).
Have we any means of saying ■what is meant by such words as the Evangelists employ in this connexion? Can we interpret Jesus' experience by what we read of spiritual gifts or states in the Primitive Church ? Is it right to look in His life for such phenomena as we find, e.g. , in Acts or in 1 Cor. ascribed to the Spirit? May we look for such sudden accesses of feeling as we connect with scenes like Ac 2^ 4" 13'? Can there be such a thing as the rapture or ecstasy which seems to be meant by being 'in the Spirit' in Rev 1" 4= 17" 21"? These are not questions to be answered a priori. There must have been sometliing in the life of Jesus as determined by the great experience of His baptism akin to the experiences which Chris- tians subsequently ascribed to the Spirit, or they would hardly have traced both to the same source ; and the more closeljr we look into the Gospels, the less does the emotionally colourless Saviour of popular art seem to correspond to the historical reality. The experiences of Jesus at the Baptism and the Transfiguration were not those of everyday life; they belong to 'pneumatic' as contrasted with normal conditions. So again it might be said that if the cleansing of the temple (Mk IP^"'-), the cursing of the fig-tree (11"), the excitement (appar- ently) with which, on the way to Jerusalem, .Jesus took the lead of His disciples, to their bewilder- ment and fear (10''-), had been told of anybody else, that other wofild have been described, on each occasion, as 'filled with the Huly S]iiiit.' How- ever this may be (see J. AV«mss, Ji',, ]■,-, ilnit Jesu vom Reiche dottci, p. 54 n. ; (.1. Ilultzninmi, War Jesus Elcstatih-r ?), the Evangelist inakr- no refer- ence to the Spirit in this connexion. He leaves us to infer from the life which Jesus lived in the Spirit what the Spirit itself was. But it may fairly be said that some of the ideas which Chris-
tians subsequently connected with their own bap- tism were not \\-ithout relation to the baptism of Jesus and to the interpretation which tliey put upon it. It was the facts of His baptism which led them to believe (a) in a normal comcidence of baptism with the Spirit and water-baptism, instead of in the displacement of the latter by the former ; (6) in the Spirit received in baptism as specifically the spirit of sonship ; and (c) in that same Spirit as one consecrating them to God and to service in His kingdom.
3. The first light is thrown on the nature of the Spirit as received by Jesus in the narrative of the Temptations. It is the Spirit which sends Him out to the wilderness, there to engage in conflict with the power of evil. The word iK^iWei (Mk 1'-), though it must not be forced, suggests a DiWne impiilse which could not be resisted. Jesus was Divinely constrained — for the Spirit is always Divine — to face the ultimate issues of His work from the very beginning, to contemplate all the plausible but morally unsound ways of aiming at ascendency over men for God, and to turn from them ; to face the Prince of this world, and to demonstrate that that Prince had nothing; in Him. The most elementary notion of the Spirit may be that of Divine power, but where we see it first at work in Jesus it is Divine power which is at the same time holy ; it is at war, in principle, with every- thing which is unworthy of God ; the kingdom -which the Son of God is to found in the power of the Spirit is one which can make no kind of compromise with evil. It iinist lie spiritual (in the complete Chris- tian sriisi I ill its nature— not based on bread; spiiitu.il ill its methods — not appealing to miracles which only dazzle the senses or confound the mind ; and spiritual in its resources — not deriving any of its strength from alliance with Satan, from borrow- ing the help of the evil which wields such vast power among men, or from recognizing that it has a relative or temi)orary right to exist. 'The spirit,' as Mk. calls it {V"-^^), while Mt. has 'God's spirit' (3"*), and Lk. 'the holy spirit' (3~) or 'holy spirit' (4'), is the Divine power with which Je.sus was endowed at His baptism, and which committed Him to an irreconcilable conflict with evil. It is the conscioiLS and victorious antagonist of another spirit, of which all that need he said is that it is not of God.