I wonder how many of us do our banking online? I’m a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to technology, but I got into this quite early on and find it very convenient. I know that it has led to many bank branches closing, which is a real issue for small businesses, older people and in rural areas. However my bank has only ever had one branch in the city, and only one in Ipswich where we were before, so my conscience is clear!

I do have to say, though, that the process of logging into my account is a bit of a palaver, although I’m used to it. First I have to get to the right section of the bank’s website – two clicks on the computer keyboard – and then enter my unique 10-figure customer number. I then have to enter my date of birth, followed by the last four digits of my debit card number. I must next take my little card reader machine, insert the debit card, and enter my PIN number. The final stage is to copy the 8-digit number from the card reader display into the website, and press “enter”. If everything matches up then I’m “in”; if not, it’s a case of starting all over again. Believe me, the process is far easier and quicker than it sounds!

But why should people have to go through all this rigmarole? The simple answer, of course, is that the bank needs to be sure it’s really you who is accessing your money, rather than some scammer or fraudster. This is a serious issue both for ordinary people like us and for the banking industry, which reports that fraud losses on UK-issued bank cards of all kinds amounted to nearly £575 million in 2020. This was a 7% fall from the year before although the trend was reversed in the first 6 months of 2021 when almost 180,000 instances were detected. Sadly nearly half of the frauds were perpetrated on people aged 60 and above.

There are many other instances where you want to be sure of a person’s identity. For instance, you presume that the lady driving your bus does have the correct licence to do so, and didn’t get a friend to take her test on her behalf. You believe that the surgeon who’s about to start messing about with your insides really possesses the qualifications he says he has and didn’t learn his craft by watching YouTube videos. You expect the Sunday School teachers in a church to have complied with the DBS system which shows that they are safe to work with children. You trust that the person who knocls on your door during Christian Aid Week and asks for a donation is bona-fide and will pass on the cash. And so on.

Well, everyone knew exactly who Jesus was – at least in his hometown of Nazareth. Both Matthew and Mark tell us that he was known as the son of Mary and the carpenter Joseph, the brother of James, Joseph, Simon, Judas and also of several sisters whose names we don’t know. When visiting Jerusalem Jesus would have been a nonentity, a random Galilean up from the country; I guess that the same would have been true where John was baptising, 80 miles south of Nazareth at the top end of the Dead Sea. In any case (and unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees who made a point of investigating John), Jesus would have simply merged into the crowd who’d come to see this strange man and hear him speak.

John the Baptist, on the other hand, had a certain amount of kudos. We don’t know how long he’d been ministering, out in the desert; but he was certainly recognised, and grudgingly respected, as a prophet in the tradition of Elijah; he had also managed to gather a group of disciples. John was obviously a powerful preacher and a charismatic figure; his denunciations of the Jewish ruling classes and of the detested Herod made him very popular (except among those being criticised!) And so, when John not only pointed Jesus out to the crowd but visibly deferred to him, people noticed. His glowing endorsement instantly gave Jesus credibility and made him into a man to be watched. The Baptist made it very clear that he was only the “warm-up” act for the headline act, and that he must now step aside and cede the stage to Jesus.

But, of course, something else happened first. The details vary from Gospel to Gospel, but there definitely seems to have been a supernatural intervention once Jesus had been baptised, with heaven opening, the Holy Spirit descending upon him in a form like a dove, and a voice from heaven saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; I am well pleased with you”. (Interestingly, just like the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” spoken on the Cross, this is a quotation from one of the Psalms). Here we have not only John the Baptist’s endorsement of Jesus but nothing less than his authentication by God, a divine ‘rubber-stamp’ which stated, “Yes: he really is the one!” Although they didn’t all make out God’s words, this event must have made a huge impression on everyone who witnessed it; you can imagine them rushing home and saying, “You’ll never guess what we saw today, not in a month of Sabbaths!”

So Jesus was authenticated: both by John and by God. But that wasn’t just for the people’s benefit: it was for Jesus himself. Up to this point he’d been pursuing a quiet life in Nazareth; we can’t know to what extent he was aware of who he was, nor can we guess how intently his mother was watching to see when he was going to “come out” and reveal himself. Indeed, up to this point Luke has taken pains to show us that Jesus has undergone a normal human development. He “increased in wisdom and in stature”; he learned by quizzing the teachers; we can even visualise him in Joseph’s workshop learning the carpenter’s craft.

But now something has happened. Perhaps John’s ministry has served as a trigger for Jesus: “That’s the forerunner I’ve been waiting for!”. It’s also likely that Jesus, knowing he’d now reached the age when he could become a Rabbi, felt an inner urge, a divine “prod”, to get started. But was he 100% sure that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, or did he have doubts? Did he need external evidence to convince himself that he was on the right path? That’s something we’ll never know: but what a wonderful confirmation to have the Spirit descending on him like a dove (which only Luke mentions) and God’s voice being heard from on high. Now he could go forward in total confidence that he was God’s servant. His path was set – the path that could only lead to the Cross.

And there’s something else going on here, something which isn’t obvious to modern British people. For I don’t know if you’ve seen what comes straight after this story in Luke’s Gospel? – it’s a list of Jesus’ ancestors going right back to Adam. To us, that’s a boring irrelevance we skip over as it contains too many unpronouncable names and we want to get on with the story. But in ancient Jewish society ancestry and lineage were supremely important, it told everyone exactly where one “fitted in”. This isn’t significant for us except, perhaps, for the aristocracy: it was amusing to see, when Diana died, how the Spencer family revelled in the fact that they could trace a continuous line of descent back to at least the 1400s with the royal family mere “johnnies-come-lately” in comparison.

Luke’s list of Jesus’ forebears contains one vital phrase. For it says that Jesus was “supposedly” Joseph’s son: that was what people thought although in those pre-DNA days there was no foolproof way of actually proving someone’s paternity! But at Jesus’ baptism we have a sudden revelation – just like when, in some work of fiction, the humble gardener is exposed to be the son of the manor who had been living in obscurity. For God speaks from the cloud and says, “Listen up, people! You’ve all got it wrong! This Jesus isn’t Joseph’s son at all – he’s actually my son, and I love him to bits”. At the precise moment when Jesus seems to be committing social suicide by turning his back on his family and aligning himself with John, God says, “You’re doing the right thing – and, in any case, I am your real family”. And we see something that we don’t often see in Scripture: all three Persons of the Trinity in action together.

Let’s try to draw some threads together and think what this story might say to us today – for, at the moment, we’re still stuck on the banks of the River Jordan, twenty centuries ago! And the first thing that strikes me is that we live in a world full of different voices saying, “Listen to me! Believe me! Follow me” and we have to distinguish between the voices which are truthful and authentic and those which aren’t – it’s not always easy. We’ve seen this, of course, during the Covid pandemic when on the one hand we’ve had Government and medical professionals telling us about the illness, its consequences and what we ought to do; and on the other hand there’ve been folk who are more willing to believe the reports and conspiracy theories that have been circulating on the Internet.

So, just this week, we’ve heard how Anna Redfern, the cinema owner in Swansea, showed the film “A Good Death” which claims that NHS staff have been killing elderly people in order to boost the statistics of people dying of Covid. Redfern says that the film is “eye-opening” and contains “real information” but the Center for Countering Digital Hate has described it as “completely false”, “pernicious” and “dangerous”. The point is this: should we trust film-makers who claim that the royal family are in fact a bunch of lizards, or medical professionals such as Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van-Tam with a list of credentials as long as one’s arm? To me it’s those qualifications which give weight to their words. You might even say something similar about church ministers: you’d hope that the Bible interpretation and preaching of someone with a recognised theology degree would be more trustworthy than that of a person who has picked up theirs from here, there and everywhere.

But there’s something deeper and more personal here, too. We see Jesus being authenticated, approved and called “beloved” by God. These are things which we all crave, yet which many people never experience. They are unsure of who they really are, they constantly feel that they don’t measure up to others’ expectations, they feel ignored or even rejected instead of loved. They are left feeling desolate, deserted, even suicidal.

Now there are many reasons why they might feel this way. Perhaps their parents have constantly criticised them for not achieving the standards they wanted to see, and never praised them. Perhaps they are migrants who are unclear about their true national identity. Perhaps they are folk who have only discovered as adults that they’ve been adopted, and are horrified to realise that the people they’ve always called “mum” and “dad” aren’t their birth parents. Or – recognising that so many people are defined by their job, whether it be doctor or artist or sportsman or craftperson – perhaps they’ve been made redundant or got injured and are now asking themselves, “Am I anybody at all, apart from what I do?” Confusion floods in and self-esteem crashes through the floor.

But – and I hope I’m not making light of the pain which many people feel – the Christian faith has an answer to all this. For we each have an identity which has nothing to do with our background, our parents, our job: we are simply unique individuals, loved by God (and, I would add, all given gifts and abilities by God, though we may not realise it). We live in a world where we may feel insignificant, anonymous and unwanted: yet to God we definitely are important, named and loved. As Paul says in Romans 9, “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people’: [they are] children of the living God”.

We’ve gone a long way from that day by the Jordan River: the day when Jesus, perhaps for the first time, truly realised who he was and what he had to do; the day when people understood that they must take notice of his words and deeds; the day when everyone heard that he was nothing less than God’s own Son. True, we’re not likely to hear a voice booming out from heaven (in fact it would be a bit scary); we have to take our relationship with God by faith. Nevertheless, it’s knowing about that relationship which enables each one of us to hold our head up high and say, “I’m not a nobody; I’m a somebody – for I am loved by my God”.