The story, as you can see, is very schematic and short; I will fill it in with a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where a fuller description of what happened is given:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. And John restrained Him, and said, I must be baptized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me? But Jesus answered and said to him, "Leave it now; for thus it behooves us to fulfill all righteousness. Then John admits Him. And having been baptized, Jesus immediately came up out of the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and John saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and descending upon Him. And behold, a voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:13-17).

I want to say something about the baptism of Jesus Christ. People came to John to be baptized, confessing their sins. They came to John, shocked by his preaching, by the fact that there is truth on earth, that there is heavenly truth, that there is judgment on earth, the judgment of conscience; but in eternity is the judgment of God; and that he who does not reconcile with his conscience on this earth will become unanswerable before the judgment of God. St. John the Baptist spoke of repentance in this sense: turn to God, turn away from everything that captivates you, that makes you slaves to your passions, your fears, your greed, turn away from everything that is unworthy of you and about which your conscience tells you: no, this is too little, you are too big a being, too deep, too significant to simply give yourself over to these passions, these fears... But can something similar be said about Christ? We know that Christ was the Son of God not only in some figurative sense of the word, but in the most direct sense of the word. He was God, Who put on mankind, became incarnate. All the fullness of the Godhead, as the Apostle says, dwelt in Him bodily (cf. Col. 2:9); and is it conceivable that a human being, permeated by the Divine, as iron is permeated by fire, can at the same time be sinful, that is, cold, gloomy? Of course not; and therefore we affirm, we believe, we know by experience, that our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless as man, and as God was perfect in all things. Why did He need to be baptized? What's the point of that? The Gospel does not explain this, and we have the right to ask ourselves questions, we have the right to be perplexed, we have the right to think deeply about what this means.

Here is an explanation that an elderly priest once gave me. I was young then, and I put this question to him; and he said to me: you know, it seems to me that when people came to John, confessed their sins, their unrighteousness, all their impurity, both spiritual and physical, they seemed to symbolically wash it in the waters of the Jordan River. And its waters, which were pure, like all waters, gradually became defiled waters (as, you know, in Russian fairy tales it is said that there are dead waters, waters that have lost their vitality, which can only transmit death). These waters, saturated with human impurity, unrighteousness, human sin, human godlessness, gradually became dead waters, capable only of killing. And Christ plunged into these waters, because He wanted not only to become a perfect man, but He wanted, as a perfect man, to bear all the horror, all the weight of human sin. He was immersed in these dead waters, and these waters gave Him death, the mortality that belonged to those people who had sinned and carried mortality within them, death as the remnants of sin (see Romans 6:23), that is, the wages of sin. This is the moment when Christ partakes, not of our sin, but of all the consequences of this sin, including death itself, which, in some respects, has nothing to do with Him, because, as St. Maximus the Confessor says, it cannot be that a human being who is permeated by the Divinity is mortal. And indeed, the church hymn that we hear during Holy Week says: O Light, how do You go out? O Eternal Life, how do You die?.. Yes, He is eternal life, He is light, and He is extinguished by our darkness, and He dies our death. That is why He says to John the Baptist: "Leave me, do not hinder me from immersing myself in these waters, we must fulfill all righteousness, that is, everything that is just, everything that must be done for the salvation of the world, must be fulfilled by us now...

But why then does He come to the waters of baptism at the age of thirty, and not earlier and not later? Here again, we can think about what this could mean.

When God became man in the womb of His Mother, a one-sided act of God's wisdom and love was performed. The corporeality, the soulfulness, the humanity of the newborn Christ were, as it were, taken by God without them being able to resist. The Mother of God gave her consent to this: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be unto Me according to Thy word" (cf. Luke 1:38)... A Child was born, who was in the full sense of the word, man, that is, autocratic, with the right to choose between good and evil, with the right to choose between God and His adversary. And throughout His life—childhood, adolescence, adulthood—He matured in His total surrender to God. In His humanity, as a man, He took upon Himself all that God laid upon Him through the faith of the Mother of God, through Her giving of Himself and Him. He came at this moment to take upon Himself all that God, the Son of God, had taken upon Himself when He decided at the Pre-Eternal Council to create man and, when this man falls, to bear all the consequences of His primary act of creation and the terrible gift of freedom that was given to man. In the Slavonic text of the Old Testament, in the prophecy of Isaiah (see Isaiah 7:16), it is said about Christ that a Child will be born, Who, before He is able to distinguish good from evil, will choose good, because He is perfect in His humanity.

And so this Man Jesus Christ, growing to the fullness of His humanity, fully takes upon Himself what God has placed upon Him, what the faith of the Most-Pure Virgin Theotokos has placed upon Him. Plunging into these dead waters of the Jordan, He, like pure flax immersed in a dyehouse, enters snow-white and comes out, as it is said again in the prophecy of Isaiah, in a bloody garment, in the garment of death, which He must bear on Himself.

This is what the Baptism of the Lord tells us: we must understand what podvig is in it, what love for us. And the question before us is posed – not for the first time, but again and again, insistently: how are we going to answer this?..

After the Savior is baptized, the Spirit leads Christ into the wilderness:

Immediately after that, the Spirit leads Him into the wilderness. And He was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and was with the beasts. And angels ministered to Him (Mark 1:12-13).

This is again an extremely concise description of the event, which, including as many as forty days, was, of course, much richer in content. But we must remember that the Evangelist Mark wrote at a time when the preaching of the Gospel was very widespread, and therefore he speaks briefly about what many had already spoken about before him. In addition to this text, I will read to you from the Gospel of Luke the first fourteen verses of the fourth chapter:

Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. There He was tempted by the devil for forty days, and ate nothing during those days; and after they had passed, he hungered for the end. And the devil said to Him, "If you are the Son of God, then command this stone to become bread." Jesus answered and said to them, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God' (Deuteronomy 8:3).And having led Him up to a high mountain, the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to him, "Unto thee will I give power over all these kingdoms, and their glory; for she is devoted to me, and I give her to whomsoever I will. Therefore, if you worship me, then everything will be yours. Jesus answered and said to him, "Get thee behind me, Satan; It is written, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve" (Deuteronomy 6:13). And He led Him to Jerusalem, and set Him on the wing of the temple, and said to Him, "If Thou art the Son of God, throw thyself down from hence; for it is written: "He commands His angels concerning Thee to preserve Thee; and they shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone" (Psalm 90:11-12). Jesus answered and said to him, "It is said, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God' (Deuteronomy 6:16).And having finished all the temptation, the devil departed from Him for the time being. And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee; and the fame of him spread throughout all the country round about.

I think that we need to think carefully about what this temptation is, because what happened to Christ in the wilderness happens to each of us at times. Of course, not in such an environment, not with such a convexity, not so sharply, but nevertheless it happens. Each of us at some moments suddenly feels that a depth has opened up in him, which he did not suspect, that such forces have opened up in him of which he had no idea, that the sea is knee-deep for him, that everything is possible to him, that he is ready to fight all the evil of the world, that he is ready to build only good. And at this moment, we, like Christ, are facing the temptation of power. The devil said to Him: "If You are the Son of God..." – that is: "Prove that You are the Son of God! You feel such tremendous power in Yourself, the Holy Spirit has descended upon You, Your entire humanity trembles with the fullness of its being — prove it. You're hungry. Thou hast fasted for forty days, hast thou not now power over all created things? Look, there are stones lying around You, take at least one of them, order it to become bread and be satisfied..." Is this not what happens to us when we feel within ourselves a certain uplift of strength, and yet we are in some kind of need; Is it not possible to use this force, which is purely spiritual, to satisfy a real, urgent need? Should I really die of hunger when I have the opportunity to do something with this power?.. Jesus answers, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." And the word of God is not a commandment, it is the life-giving word that God pronounces when every person is called from non-existence into existence, it is the word that holds us, thanks to which we exist, thanks to which we are alive and can grow to the full measure of our being. Christ rejected the humiliation of this Divine power in Himself for the sake of the miserable satisfaction of His need: such power cannot be used less than to serve God, less than to serve people.

And the defeated devil turns to Him with another temptation. "Thou didst not wish to use this power for Thyself alone, — come with me, behold a high mountain; from this mountain I will show Thee all the kingdoms of the world, Thou shalt survey them with one glance and see them all; and I will give Thee power over all these kingdoms, all their glory. She is devoted to me, to whom I will, I give them; Just worship me, and everything will be Yours..." Is this not a temptation that comes to us too? No one offers us a kingdom, no one offers us special glory, but how often does it creep into our thoughts: "If you are what you now feel yourself to be, do you not have the right to power over other people, do you not have the right to dispose of them? Why don't you use this tremendous power for good?.." This is the temptation of the Antichrist, and Christ renounced this temptation: "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, Him only shalt thou serve." This is the temptation of power: the power to enslave others, that is, to become what the Antichrist will become: a servant of Satan, turning into slaves by his power all those who do not stand before him like Christ and say: "Thou shalt worship thy God, Him only shalt thou serve!"