Last weekend, we celebrated the Feast of Epiphany, that moment in time when God revealed his son, Jesus, to wise men from the east. Today’s gospel goes one step further. This time Jesus finds out who he is. “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.”
History tells us little of what Jesus did as a young adult. We can presume that he lived in Nazareth and worked as a carpenter, following in the footsteps of Joseph. After his baptism, he had a religious experience that forever changed the world. He was gripped by a deep unforgettable awareness of being fully loved by God. Such an experience, which one would call mystical, is never forgotten. From then on, no matter what happened, no matter how others reacted to what he said, Jesus carried on with his mission, fully aware that he was indeed God’s beloved son.
In those days, such a notion was radical. Until then, the relationship between God and humanity had been anything but intimate. Although they viewed themselves as God’s chosen people, even the Jews considered God as a distant deity; so sacred that his name could not even be said. Jesus narrowed the gap considerably. When asked how one should pray, he said, “When you pray, pray, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’
For most of us, that prayer is a daily experience. To his peers, the thought of addressing God so intimately was unthinkable. God was seen as one who was to be appeased or they would be punished. Yet as Jesus taught repeatedly, God does not want to punish. To the contrary, God has always wanted to save humanity from the consequences of sin. Now the moment has arrived to send forth his Son to accomplish this mission. Like any Sunday readings, however, the message here is not merely historical or biographical.
There is more to this story than simply the baptism of Jesus. This story is our story as well.
As Christians, we share the common experience of baptism, for it is only through baptism that one becomes a Christian. This sacrament is our initiation into the Christian community. Together, we profess our common belief in God as Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God isn’t to be seen as a distant deity out to punish us, but as a Father who has invited us to be one with his Son in a relationship anointed by the Holy Spirit.
Through baptism, we became sons and daughters of God. Our humanity was gifted with a share in Jesus’ divinity. One thought comes to mind, could God, looking at the way we treat one another, say of each of us, “Here is my beloved daughter, my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased”?
Only Matthew recounts John’s resistance to baptizing Jesus, but Jesus tells him that the point of his baptism is “to fulfill all righteousness.” Fr. John Donohue, a scripture scholar, surmises that a better way to translate that line would be, “bring to fullness all justice.” That makes sense to me for this envisions Jesus continuing the mission of the servant that we heard about in the first reading from Isaiah.
In the first of his four servant songs, Isaiah describes Jesus very well. At his baptism, Jesus recognized himself taking on the role of the suffering servant. “I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”
But God is not speaking only to Jesus. God is calling on us to listen to this servant song as well. Out of the sea of humanity, we have been chosen to manifest the same message of hope that Isaiah spoke of so long ago. In his commentary on Isaiah, Fr. Daniel Barrigan writes, “If I am chosen, if you are chosen, if, as a community, we are chosen, it is in order to be sent as a sign of God’s loving compassion to the world.”
I long thought this was an odd feast for closing out the Christmas season; after all, Jesus is now an adult, but now I see the logic. If the message we heard at Christmas, summed by the angels as peace on earth and good will toward all, is to be manifested in the coming year, it can only happen through us. And that won’t be done unless we freely choose to do what we can individually and collectively as a faith community to heed God’s call to justice.
As followers of Christ, we must open our eyes to the blind: instructing, explaining, evangelizing. That is one reason why we must learn our faith well, studying and reading any chance we have. We must liberate prisoners from the confinement of their inferiority complexes, their fears and their physical limitations by lending a helping hand, saying an encouraging word, uttering a prayer. As the Hindu greeting expresses it, namaste…the God in me greets the God in you.
While the season closes with this Mass, we are by no means finished with Christmas. It is now time for us to make use of its treasures. The good news spoken by angels continues to unfold as we endeavor to seek out the lost, to heal the sick and the hurting, to feed the hungry, to liberate the imprisoned, to rebuild families and nations, to bring peace to peoples everywhere, especially in our own families.
Baptism is the most precious gift we have received. Clothed in the Spirit; let us resolve to live new lives that will prompt God to say to us one day, “This is my beloved child with whom I am well pleased.”