Baptism of our Lord

Baptism of Our Lord – St. Ignatius 10am – Year C – Lk 3: 15-22 It may surprise you to learn that the early Christian community were very embarrassed by the Baptism of the Lord. This was because it upset the neat categories that they were trying to establish: namely that John came to prepare the way for Jesus and that therefore Jesus was greater than John and shouldn’t have needed baptism by John. Furthermore, at a time when the Christian community were trying to convince people of the divinity of Jesus, it didn’t help their cause to have Jesus joining the line of sinful human beings for a baptism of repentance. It is not something that they would have celebrated like we are doing today. Indeed, a careful study of the gospels reveals Jesus’ Baptism as an event that gradually gets erased from the evangelical record. Mark, being the first gospel to be written, tells it as it is: Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. A few years later, Matthew in writing his gospel, has John the Baptist objecting and saying that it is he who needed baptism from Jesus and not the other way round. Luke for his own part completely omits the fact that it was John the Baptist who baptized Jesus, and simply says that Jesus was baptized. In Luke’s version, John the Baptist is already in prison by the time Jesus is baptized! By the time we get to the gospel of John, written 20 to 30 years after Matthew and Luke, there is no mention at all of Jesus’ baptism, it has been completely skipped over. If we today can comfortably celebrate Jesus’ baptism, we must ask ourselves what has changed for us from that first Christian community and what might it mean for us today.

The first thing that has changed is that we do not need any convincing of Jesus’ divinity – this is the very bedrock of our belief in Jesus. If anything, we need to go in the opposite direction to the early Christian community and recover the meaning of Jesus’ full humanity. There is a way in which we can exalt Jesus so high above us as God supreme that there is little room left for him to be fully human. We can easily fall into a trap of a competitive system where the more divine we make Jesus, the less human he becomes. What we actually need to strive for is a notion of divinity and humanity where the more fully human Jesus is, the more fully he reveals to us who God actually is. In other words, it is through his humanity, and not in spite of it, that he reveals to us who God is. What this requires is fundamentally altering our ideas about God and holiness that have led us to pit the human against the divine. Jesus’ baptism helps us to do this. Our idea of holiness is often marked by the notion of avoiding sin. The more further away from us we are able to keep the sinful world, the more holy we are. This is where the idea of monastic life arose from, with the first Desert Fathers fleeing from the world into the desert, where they could work on their project of holiness set apart from the mass of sinful humanity. In Jesus’ baptism, we see Jesus doing just the opposite and entering the desert in order to join and become one with the mass of sinful humanity.

It is important for us to grasp just what Jesus is not doing here. Jesus is not staying up on a mountain of personal holiness and then calling out to everyone, saying, hey everyone, life is much better up here so I’m going to throw down some ropes to y’all down there so I can pull you up and you can become sinless like me. No instead Jesus is coming down into the valley of human sinfulness and walking amongst us – not to tell us it’s fine for us to remain where we are, but rather to transform human society from the inside out, and to lead us out of our captivity to our sinfulness. In this way, Jesus redefines the project of holiness. Holiness is not about a personal project of purifying oneself from sin. This is not easy for us to accept, because, for those of us who are cradle Catholics, we have been taught over the years to regard sin as an individual affair. I am to repent of my own sin, examine my own conscience and go to confession to be cleansed and try to live with a pure heart and avoid sin in the future. This is presented to us as the path to holiness, the path to heaven. Don’t get me wrong, I think that this is a crucial part of the spiritual life, but we cannot stop there.

We cannot keep ourselves in splendid isolation of the sinful world giving as our justification our desire to preserve our own personal purity. We must, like Jesus be prepared to go down into the muck of the world and there stand in solidarity with a sinful humanity and in this darkness, allow the light of our own redemption by Christ to shine forth as the promise of the redemption of the whole of humanity. We, like Jesus, should take responsibility for the social sin of the world, the sins that humanity perpetrates against the rest of creation on this planet God has given us, the sins of racism, the sins of economic injustice, the sins of sexual exploitation of the weak and the downtrodden. It is not enough for us to simply say, well it’s not my fault that we’re in the mess that we’re in, so I’m going to just keep my distance and make sure I am not sullied by these hateful practices. This is why Pope Francis has said that he prefers “a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security." Too often the Church’s security has come from a false notion of holiness. With his baptism, Jesus redefines what holiness is: holiness is being prepared to take on the darkest and dirtiest places of human suffering in order to shine God’s light there.

Jesus could take the risk of being branded a sinner because he was so secure in his knowledge of being the beloved Son of his Father. Indeed, it is not when he is standing above people, working miracles and showing how different he is from normal human beings that he hears the words “You are my Beloved Son.” Rather it is when he decides to stand in solidarity with his sinful brothers and sisters that Jesus hears the words that is Father is pleased with him. In the depths of his humanity, Jesus reveals to us who the Father is. God is the one who walks besides us, who does not abandon us in our sinfulness, but calls us to repentance, not from a place of impossibly high holiness, but rather by standing right next to us. If God were to stand on top of the mountain, the path towards holiness would seem insurmountable. This is why God walks with us in the valley, and the path towards holiness is as simple as taking a step towards Jesus our brother who walks just one step ahead of us. Ultimately holiness is all about being where God is. Jesus’ baptism reveals to us that God is where sinful humanity most needs God to be, namely walking right next to them. Having a God who is prepared to get dirty in order to walk the dirty streets that God’s people find themselves in is nothing at all to be embarrassed about. Indeed it is something to celebrate, because it reveals the depth of God’s love for us. It also reveals the depth of love that should dwell in us as Christians as we try to imitate this God-man who has shown us how to become the beloved sons and daughters of our Father in heaven.

Questions for reflection:

1. Have I constructed my own personal project of holiness in ways that exclude me from contact with those I regard as being too sinful?
2. In what ways might I begin to take responsibility for the social sins I see around me?
3. Where are the dark valleys in my own community that God might be calling me to walk into and shine the light of God’s mercy and forgiveness?