“No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and as afflicted as He. No one was as needy. No one so utterly human, because so fellow-human. No one confessed his sins so sincerely, so truly as his own, without side-glances at others. He stands alone in this, He who was elected and ordained from all eternity to partake of the sin of all in His own person, to bear its shame and curse in the place of all, to be the man responsible for all, and as such, wholly theirs, to live and act and suffer. This is what Jesus began to do when He had Himself baptized by John with all the others. This was the opening of His history as the salvation history of all the others.”

-Karl Barth, CD IV.2.2

“Jesus of Nazareth—among the many who in Jordan received the baptism of John for the future forgiveness of sins—was the One in whom God was well pleased as His beloved Son, the One upon whom John saw the Spirit descend from heaven, Himself the One who, proclaimed by John, was to come as the bringer of forgiveness. In this way, in the free penitence of Jesus of Nazareth which began in Jordan when He entered on His way as Judge and was completed on the cross of Golgotha when He was judged—there took place the positive act concealed in His passion as the negative form of the divine action of reconciliation. In this penitence of His He “fulfilled all righteousness” (Mt. 3:15). It made His day—the day of the divine judgment—the great day of atonement, the day of the dawn of a new heaven and a new earth, the birthday of a new man.”

-Karl Barth, CD IV.1, 259