PLANNING ahead is par for the course for a pastor but I must confess I haven’t put anything in my diary for 2030. At least not yet!

It would seem that some senior church leaders are far ahead of me though, because they met recently with Jordan’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities to focus on ways in which they could cooperate to promote religious tourism ahead of the anticipated 2,000th anniversary of the baptism of Jesus.

It’s a symbolic date of course, although we are told that Jesus was about thirty years old when he surprised his cousin John the Baptist by turning up and asking to be baptised. John would have been stunned because prior to this he had said that he wasn’t even worthy to carry His sandals, and that was a slave’s job. It’s easy to see why John did his best to deter Him then.

Many others have found it difficult to understand too. After all John was baptising people who were aware of their ‘sins’ and wanted to be assured of God’s forgiveness. That clearly wasn’t the case with Jesus. So how do we explain it, and what can we learn from it, other than the fact that it gives us a good reason to visit Jordan in 2030?

People have come up with all sorts of reason over the years. One early source suggested that Jesus was simply trying to please his mother and his brothers! But that doesn’t square with what we know of Jesus’ normal behaviour. I have come to the conclusion that if we’re looking for the correct explanation it makes sense to take His words at face value. He told John that He was doing it because God had shown Him it was the right thing to do.

In fact, the New Testament shows us that this was the basic principle that shaped Jesus’ life and He constantly sought to do His Heavenly Father’s will even if it didn’t make for an easy life. In fact, pleasing God meant Jesus became something of a square peg in a round hole because He didn’t fit in with the (religious) culture of His day and, as a result, ultimately ended up on a Roman cross.

Pleasing God can sometimes mean not pleasing others but it is the right way to live. It can mean feeding the hungry and caring for the sick of course, but it can mean so much more.

For me it has meant getting involved with a charity that seeks to expose the evils of modern slavery whereas for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor I would suggest it should prompt him to reveal all he knows about the Epstein affair. It will vary for each one of us of us but above all, as a Christian, I believe it means acknowledging Jesus as Lord and being willing to tell others that He can give us a new start in life, however badly we might have messed up.