Thoughts for the Day

Luke 3:21b-22a Jesus was baptised too.  And as he was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove.

A third clue to Jesus’s continuing confidence in his identity and mission may be found in his dependence on the Holy spirit.  Whatever Jesus’s relationship may have been previously, we are given this incredibly vivid and visual description of the Holy Spirit’s descent on to Jesus at his baptism by John.  And, within a few verses, we read of Jesus being full of the Holy Spirit, being led by the Holy Spirit into the desert, returning from the desert in the power of the Holy Spirit, and declaring in the Nazareth synagogue that Isaiah’s words “the Spirit of the Lord is on me” have now been fulfilled in him.  Later, in the context of even earthly fathers giving good gifts to their children, Jesus asks rhetorically, “How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”  I wonder. If Jesus had hesitated after the word ‘give’, how would those in the crowd have finished his sentence?  How would I have finished his sentence?  Indeed, how might I finish it if I were to pray today, “Lord, if even I give good gifts to my children, please will you give me X”?  But Jesus knew the real value of this gift.  As he prepared the disciples to receive this gift that would launch his church at Pentecost, he knew all that could flow from being filled with the Holy Spirit, because he had lived it and demonstrated it throughout his own ministry.