When we read about the bewilderment and indignation of John the Baptist, who did not want to let Jesus be baptized in the Jordan, it becomes clear to us: John recognized Him. Participation in this baptism was supposed to testify that a person confesses his sinfulness to God, admits that he is not right; and now in the river stands the One who is right before God.

Yet Jesus still receives baptism, which means that God has another righteousness besides rightness before Himself. This is the righteousness of love, which is "fulfilled" when the righteous One decides to share life with the unrighteous, the sinless One with sinners. This may be incomprehensible and unpleasant; it may contradict our ideas about justice, but Christ enters the water together with everyone, and it turns out that the Father's beloved Son is one of us.

Just before the Baptism, in response to John's attempt to stop Him, Jesus utters mysterious words: "Let it be so now, for thus we must manifest righteousness in all its fullness" (the Synodal translation offers the wording, "for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness"). When it comes to an ordinary person, the connection between the cleansing washing, or "baptism," and righteousness is obvious: according to traditional Jewish ideas of Gospel times, it is precisely the cleansing ritual that frees the sinner from the consequences of the sin he has committed, of course only when this ritual is accompanied by repentance. But Jesus had nothing to repent of and nothing from which to be cleansed. His righteousness was always full and perfect.

The point could evidently only be that this righteousness, previously hidden from the world, should now be manifested to it. Such a manifestation could and had to be connected precisely with what John was calling the people to, namely conversion. Indeed, conversion presupposes not only repentance for the sins committed by the one who is converting. Repentance here is not the goal, but only the means. The goal is the establishment of relations with God, without which there can be no question of any righteousness.

Jesus' conversion, then, was not so much the establishment of such relations, since He had them from the beginning, as their demonstration, a witness to what they should be and what they can give to the one who converts. And then to all who witnessed what was happening there was opened the Kingdom that Jesus brought into the world, because the fullness of relations between God and man is this Kingdom. A Kingdom made accessible to everyone through the ministry and sacrifice of One.

Few of us today think about the paradoxical nature of such a Gospel event as the Savior's baptism. What we customarily call baptism was a cleansing washing that freed the one washed from the consequences of a sin he had committed. In the context of what John the Baptist called people to, the washing became something more than simple cleansing; yet even in that case it was still a matter of liberation from sin and of a new conversion, which, according to the prophet's word, everyone needed.

What kind of cleansing and what kind of conversion could the One need who was not subject to sin, the One who brought the Kingdom into the world? What cleansing could be in question here? John himself understands everything perfectly and says to Jesus: You should wash and cleanse me, not I You. Jesus answers him with words that are not very easy to understand: let it be, because in this way we must reveal the fullness of truth. By "the fullness of truth" He means the Kingdom that He brought into the world and that now, with the beginning of His earthly ministry, must be revealed to the world.

Why does this happen through a cleansing washing that He Himself does not need at all, at least not in the sense in which a sinful person needs such a washing? If the washings mentioned in the Old Testament books had been no different from those known to the pagan world from the most ancient times, there would most likely simply be no answer to this question. Before the Savior's coming into the world, they were no longer a magical ritual like pagan washings, but a manifestation of the power of God. Water served only as a physical mediator, a natural conductor of its effects on the person whom God wanted to cleanse from the consequences of the sin he had committed.

The manifestation of the Kingdom is also the manifestation of God's power, and in a fullness that the world had not known before. The cleansing effect of this power now proved qualitatively different, incomparably deeper, so deep that it overcame the consequences of any sin committed by a person, if only the person repented of what he had done, even if the sin had been committed consciously. This was something never seen before, when one could be cleansed only from the consequences of a sin committed involuntarily, through weakness or ignorance.

Jesus calls the cleansing power of the Kingdom, which frees the world from the power of sin, the fullness of truth. The cleansing of the world is the first step toward its transfiguration, which will be completed only when the world becomes an inseparable and organic part of the Kingdom. Without this first step there will be no later steps: sin is incompatible with the Kingdom. The washing of the world, its liberation from sin, begins with the washing of the Savior Himself, when the water with which He washed became a river of living water that opens the Kingdom to the world.