We are a people of noise. We experience silence as a void, an emptiness we rush to fill with sound, with content, with activity. It is the awkward pause in a conversation, the unnerving stillness of a waiting room, the unproductive gap between one task and the next. But in the grammar of God, in the landscape of the spirit, silence is not an absence. It is a profound and fertile presence. It is the very soil from which God’s most world-changing purposes grow. This brings us to a deep and abiding question concerning the life of our Lord: What was happening within Jesus during the long, unrecorded years between His boyhood in the temple and His baptism in the Jordan?
The Gospels are largely silent on this period. There were no public miracles, no sermons on the mount, no crowds following His every move. From the outside, it was a life of ordinary stillness. The central thesis of our meditation today is this: Jesus’s world-changing call was not born in a moment of public spectacle, but was cultivated in the deep, unseen silence of His communion with the Father. To understand the power that shattered the world’s darkness, we must first learn to appreciate the silence in which it was forged.
The Fertile Ground: Redefining the Nature of Silence
To truly grasp the journey of Jesus, we must first reframe our own relationship with silence. We must allow the Spirit to move our understanding of it from a negative concept of emptiness to a positive one of divine potential. This is not merely a change in perspective; it is a fundamental re-orientation toward the ways of God.
The text for our meditation offers this profound re-orientation: "Silence is not a moment of stagnation, but the very place where a Calling is born." Here is the crucial contrast. Our world worships at the altar of measurable progress; it views stillness as a failure of productivity. But in God’s economy, quiet is the ground of becoming. It is incubation, not stagnation. It is precisely this kind of unseen, silent growth that the prophet Isaiah foretold. In Isaiah 53, verse 2, speaking of the Messiah, he says: “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.”
Think of that image: a root out of dry, barren ground. It is a picture of life emerging from a place that looks utterly desolate and unproductive. This was Jesus in His hidden years. While the world saw nothing but the dry ground of a carpenter’s life in Nazareth, God the Father saw a root system growing deep, drawing life from a hidden source. During this sacred period, deep within His heart, "God's time was quietly approaching." What, then, did this divine preparation look like in the inner life of Jesus?
The Unseen Awakening: Jesus’s Inner Communion
This brings us to the most intimate and foundational aspect of Jesus’s calling—the unseen, internal “Awakening” that preceded all His external works. This was the true work of His silent years, a reality forged entirely beyond the public gaze, which gave substance and authority to the ministry the world would later witness.
This “Awakening” was a process that occurred "where people could not see" and was cultivated through a "deep communion with the Holy Spirit." While the world saw a tradesman, heaven saw the Son communing with the Father, preparing to receive the full weight and glory of His mission. This presents us with a holy paradox, a stark contrast between the outward appearance and the inward reality of His life.
• Outward Appearance: His life was marked by an ordinary obscurity. There was no self-revelation, no public teaching, and no performance of miracles. It was a life hidden from the world’s stage.
• Inward Reality: His inner world was being forged into the most potent force in human history. It was a seismic spiritual power gathering beneath a placid surface, a call with the latent force to "shake the world" being forged in absolute stillness.
This long season of silent, internal communion was the necessary foundation for the dramatic, public affirmation that was to come. The authority He would later display did not appear from nothing; it was drawn from the deep well of this hidden preparation.
The Divine Affirmation: When Silence Breaks
The baptism of Jesus at the Jordan is one of the most climactic scenes in scripture. But we must understand it not as the beginning of His calling, but as the public revelation of a calling that had already been fully formed in the silence. It is the moment the unseen reality rips through the veil of the visible world with breathtaking power.
The event unfolds in three divine acts:
1. The Heavens Torn Open: Mark’s Gospel uses a startlingly violent word here. The Greek is schizō, which means to rip, to tear apart. It is not a gentle parting of the clouds. It is a forceful tearing. As a scholar of the Word, I must tell you that Mark uses this exact same verb only one other time: at the moment of Jesus’s death, when the veil of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom. His public ministry is bookended by these two cosmic tearings. At the Jordan, the heavens are torn to reveal the Son to the world. At the cross, the temple veil is torn to grant the world access to the Father.
2. The Spirit Descending Like a Dove: The Holy Spirit, with whom Jesus had been in deep and quiet communion for decades, now descends in a visible form. This is the outward sign of an established inward reality, a physical manifestation of the spiritual relationship that defined His hidden life.
3. The Father’s Voice: From the torn heavens comes the ultimate affirmation, the declaration that gives voice to everything formed in the silence: "You are my beloved Son." This is not a new identity being bestowed, but the eternal identity, nurtured in quiet, being proclaimed for all to hear.
This momentous, audible declaration from the Father was made possible only by the long, inaudible preparation within the Son. The power of the proclamation at the Jordan was directly proportional to the depth of the communion in Nazareth.
Conclusion: Finding Our Own Call in the Silence
Brothers and sisters, the journey of Jesus from the quiet workshop of Nazareth to the rushing waters of the Jordan provides a divine model for our own lives. It is a call to honor the silence.
And so, I must ask you to confront the idols of our age. In a world that screams for constant productivity, that demands you curate a public image of success, and that equates busyness with worth, the act of embracing silence is an act of spiritual resistance. Our world operates on an economy of clamor; God operates on an economy of silence. To choose stillness is to defy the spirit of the age and make space for the Spirit of God.
Do not despise the seasons of waiting and seeming inactivity in your own life. Perhaps you are in a hidden period right now, where it feels like the dry ground of Nazareth. You see no public fruit, hear no divine affirmation. Do not mistake this stillness for stagnation. This is your invitation to cultivate your own deep communion with God, to allow a root system of faith to grow where no one can see.
The most transformative truth we can take from this is that from the quietest places, from the moments where it feels like nothing is happening, God can begin a call that will change your world. That period of waiting may be the very place where God is shaping a purpose in you that will one day shake everything.
Let us, therefore, learn to embrace the silence. Let us enter it not with fear of its emptiness, but with faith in its fertile potential. For it is there, in the quiet communion with our Father, that we will discover who we truly are and hear the call He has for our lives. Amen.
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