‘By his descent into the River, Christ marries a world of promise to one of reality, transposing the future tense of prophecy into the present. He is conscious of his passage through the waters as ‘fulfilment’ (Mt 3:15), and so is the Baptist, himself a bridge (on one bank the greatest, on the other, the least), who testifies to the horizontal, historical axis of the event. Christ utters no word, makes no gesture, and the action he performs is not in itself extraordinary. He follows a throng of anonymous others. But while they drown individual loads of guilt in the Jordan by intention, he carries the totality of sin in his body and for real (cf. John 1:29). The categorical ‘in him’ that underpins the Christology of the Pauline corpus with locative force becomes effective here, on the threshold of God’s Israel, as Christ enters fully, freely into his mission. The crossing happens secretly, but silence is broken when the Father’s voice erupts in jubilant approbation. It establishes a vertical axis of praise— praise that, in this instance, resounds from heaven to earth. It reminds us that Christ’s offering is directed, not towards a faceless Transcendence but to a Father who receives it thankfully and seals the exchange by sending the Spirit in the form that once flew forth from Noah’s hand, hovering upon the waters, unable to find rest for its feet in a drowned and stricken world, yet now coming to ‘abide’ (Jn 1:33) on the first fruit of a new creation.’ From an essay on liturgy.