HOMILY FOR FEAST OF THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD — YEAR A

HOMILY FOR FEAST OF THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD — YEAR A

HOMILY THEME: THE BAPTISM OF OUR LORD

BY: Msgr. Cletus Gotan

Isaiah 40:1-5,9-11/ Titus 2:11-17; 3:4-7/Luke 3:15-16,21-22

Today marks the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, the first of the mysteries of Light of the Rosary. There is an important link between today’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and last week’s Feast of the Epiphany. The gospel readings for both feasts are manifestation stories; they reveal the Identity of Jesus where the Father affirmed His only begotten Son by saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’’ This Feast, which brings to an end the joyous Christmas season in the Liturgical Calendar of the Church and introduces us into the formal beginning of the Ordinary Time of the church’s liturgical cycle reminds us of our identity “because Christ in his overflowing love willed to share His relationship to His Father with us” (Homiletic Directory, 137). That’s why all of us here, no matter what our DNA, can say together “Our Father.” There is no minimum blood quantum or other biological criteria.

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The Baptism of Jesus was the moment when He passed from the relative obscurity of village life in Nazareth onto the public stage of his mission of proclaiming God’s Kingdom. We are brought to the banks of the River Jordan somewhere north of Jerusalem where John the Baptist had begun his ministry. John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness and was baptizing all those who would respond to his message of repentance. The purpose of his ministry of preaching and Baptism was to direct people toward Jesus who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit.

The Scriptures tell us that Jesus came from Galilee to River Jordan to be baptized by John the Baptist. Jesus subjects himself to this simple act of repentance and is baptized by his own cousin. Baptism is meant as an acknowledgement of sin and Jesus who was totally sinless had no need of repentance or forgiveness. Yet this was the beginning of his mission as was planned by his Father. The Baptism of Christ as recorded in all the four Gospels indicates the Trinitarian Revelation and the commencement of the public ministry of Jesus. When Jesus came out of water after his Baptism the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove. There is also the voice of the Father that comes from the cloud, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

The Gospel Reading (Luke 3:15-16, 21-22) recounts to us this scene of the Baptism of our Lord with the very fascinating events that took place. Firstly, we heard of the administration of the baptism of John the Baptist which was to prepare the people for the coming of “He who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The ministry and mission of John the Baptist was part of the content of the prophecies in the First Reading (Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11) about the voice that cries “prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord. Make a straight highway for our God across the desert.” John the Baptist was clear in showing Christ to all and in preparing them to meet him worthily. Secondly we heard about the Baptism of Jesus after which the voice spoke from heaven. It was not only the identity of Christ that was revealed in this occasion. God also revealed Himself to us as the Blessed Trinity; the Father who spoke, the Holy Spirit who descended in the form of a dove and the Son who is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ, “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on You.”

The Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord gives us the opportunity to reflect on baptism in our own lives and in the life of the Lord Jesus, and the opportunity to understand more fully who we are as Christians. Jesus was about to launch a revolutionary movement which would turn Israel and the world up-side-down. He would finally establish God’s rule of justice, peace, truth and love in Israel and (through Israel) among all nations on earth. However, he would not choose any of the ways his contemporaries envisaged God’s rule being established. He would reject the politics of violent revolution (adopted by the Zealots); of easy compromise (the option of the Jerusalem elite) and of narrow nationalism (advocated by the Pharisees). He would choose instead the path of redemptive suffering, as portrayed by the prophet Isaiah.

His way would be to turn the other cheek, to walk the second mile and to take up the cross. He would defeat evil by letting evil do its worst to him, by suffering evil in love and forgiving his enemies. In obedience to the will of his Father, he would identify with sinners and outcasts, with the poor and downtrodden, and exercise a ministry of compassion and forgiveness, healing and hope. In Jesus’ Kingdom ministry, as the renowned biblical Scholar, Tom Wright puts is, ‘we see the biblical portrait of Yahweh come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life; the God who works through his created world, and supremely through his human creatures; the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people; the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress.’ (The Challenge of Jesus, p. 90).

Through His Baptism, Jesus draws our attention to the Old Testament account of how the Hebrew people, fleeing Egypt, came to the Red Sea and how God appeared to them as fire and led them through the Red Sea to safety, but had the water drown out all the Egyptians after the Hebrews had been delivered. The ancient Fathers of the Church saw in this account the foreshadowing of baptism. God led his people into the water. He went first, and they followed and were saved. So, too, Jesus went first into the waters of baptism to reveal to us that he is, in fact, God who leads us to safety, and that he as a man we need to enter the water of baptism after him. Yes, in his baptism, Jesus reveals that he is God and Man, the Son of God and Son of Mary and eternally one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit, just as he became one with us in our human nature. He is a divine person, and is both human and divine in natures. Jesus is the favored one of the Father. He has become like us in every way but sin.

As Christians, we know that we are now called to be Jesus’ presence in today’s world. Just as God the Father, speaking from heaven, said to his Son Jesus, who had just been baptized by John, “You are my beloved Son. With you I am well-pleased!” so too he says of us, his adopted sons and daughters through baptism. We are beloved sons and daughters of God! Do you believe this?

“That is a nice thought, but I’m not sure of it” you might be thinking, There is a part of us which really doesn’t want to fully accept this idea that we are sons and daughters of God because if we do accept it, then we have to live like Jesus lived. It is our tendency to fall into a false humility here by saying, “I am only a man or a woman, without any real understanding of religious matters. I leave all that up to people holier than me.” If we do this we put ourselves into a weird sort of dilemma because on the one hand we blind ourselves to our real dignity as sons and daughters of God, and on the other hand we blind ourselves to our real sins, all those sins of omission, those times when we didn’t speak the truth or didn’t shelter the homeless or feed the hungry or accept foreigners, and instead focused on trivial matters.

No my friends, you are baptized into Christ Jesus, into his life, his death, and his resurrection. By your baptism, you become temples of the Holy Spirit. You become a brother or sister of Jesus, His life is now to be your life.It is through baptism that we are conformed to Christ, we are spiritually adopted as sons and daughters of God, we are cleansed from every stain of sin, we are given the Holy Spirit and made temples of that Spirit, we pledge our lives to Jesus so that we might become the eyes and ears, the hands and the feet, and the voice of Jesus in today’s world. It is through baptism that we have opened to us the door for receiving the other sacraments, and we are made members of the Catholic Church.

Our celebration of the baptism of Jesus therefore, reminds us of the meaning of baptism, this fact that we too were baptised and the demands of our baptism. What does it mean to be baptised? As Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3. To be baptised is to be born again and unless we die, we cannot be born again.

Long before the era of the Gospel preachers of prosperity, long before the era of “I receive the Holy Spirit,” the most common question on the lips of Christian brothers and sisters was: “Are you born again?” Yes, that was the era when people could actually say, “I have seen the light” because their lives were truly transformed; sin no longer held sway in their daily routines. Unfortunately, things have changed today; too much water has passed under the bridge. No one sees the light anymore, it is now about “how I was poor before, now I am stingingly rich.” It is now about how this miracle or that miracle which I had been praying for over the years eventually happened. Testimony time today is now about how I sowed this seed or made this offering and how God “multiplied” it.

The truth about our Christianity today is that it needs repentance. Yes, all of us who still call ourselves Christians today need to return to the basics; we need to thoroughly re-examine our mind- sets and those things we cherish most in life. We all need to be born again; our preachers must change their theologies and start telling us the hard truths we must hear rather than what we like to hear – that man’s greatest enemy is sin not poverty.

Enough of this “soul-winning” which, in essence, is just “filling up the church with people” today. Our churches are full already, now, we need to move to the next level; we need to start producing living saints. Enough of empires and mansions, enough of business centres in the name of the church, enough of schools, hospitals, banks, and so on and so on. Now is the time to tell ourselves the truth that it is not our money-making-enterprises that will sustain our churches but Faith. Christianity as we practice it today needs to die and become born again.

Yes, Baptism comes from the Greek word which means “to immerse, to wash, to dip.” If we want to be God’s children let us immerse ourselves in Jesus’ baptism and be ready to become God’s servants, that is, rendering service with a clean heart. Being God’s servants means being witnesses of God here on earth. Fr. Mihalic in his book entitled A Thought for Today has a very beautiful description on how to become witnesses of God. He said that there are times in our life when we are called upon to publicly witness to our Catholic faith, when we have to stand up and be counted.

We stand up and recite our creed every Sunday but we hardly ever really think of what we are saying. So many of our Christian politicians and public servants, as well as a great number of our Catholic students, give little or no evidence of this faith by what they do or say. This does not mean that we have to go around preaching religion at work or school, nor that we should be arguing religion all the time. Everyone has a right to his/her beliefs. We must respect that. But every now and then there comes an occasion when a true Christian cannot remain silent. He/she must speak up.

Some years ago, there was one government minister who went overseas to a meeting and took his secretary along. When they arrived in the new country, the boss told his secretary, “Now the first thing I want you to take care of is that every night I have a few girls to sleep with.” The secretary, a former Catholic seminarian, answered, “I am sorry, sir, but I will have nothing to do with that kind of work.” “All right,” answered his boss, “then you are fired.” And the secretary lost his job. That is what we call witnessing: stand up for what we believe in. Do you think you would have the courage to do that?

It is not always easy to stand up for what we believe. We are going to be laughed at and made fun of. Some people will not want us around. Do you know why? Because what we say and what we do, shame them and make them uncomfortable. So we have to go. In our times, what we need are witnesses because we have neglected this already. By becoming witnesses, people may recognize us as God’s servants as well as that Christ lives in us. When could we be truly servants and children? Let us now open ourselves, once again, as we did when we were infants, to the graces given to us by this wonderful sacrament, and let us never be ashamed to follow him who has called us to the wonderful life in God.

As we celebrate the baptism of the Lord, we need to do an in-depth personal assessment as to how far we can live and sustain the baptismal life. We are thus invited to stand firm on the path of righteousness as the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, who received baptism and sanctified it for our sake. Today it is appropriate occasion for us to remember the graces we have received in Baptism and to renew our baptismal promises. On the day of our Baptism, we were anointed with the oil of Chrism to show that we were consecrated in the image of Jesus, the Father’s Anointed One. The candle lighted from the Paschal Candle was a symbol of the light of Faith which our parents and godparents passed on to us. On this day, then, then let us thank the Lord for the privilege of being called to share in the mission of Jesus, and let us ask him to help us to be faithful to our baptismal commitment.

I conclude with a prayer reflection from the pen of Flor McCarthy, SDB:

Lord Jesus, touch our eyes,
so that we may see the signs of your presence
in our lives and in the world.
Touch our ears so that we may profess our faith.
Touch our hands that we may give and receive.
Touch our feet that we may walk in your paths.
Touch our minds that we may understand you ways.
Touch our wills that they may be in tune with your will.
Touch our hearts that we may bring your love
to the praise and glory of God. Amen.Have a renewing celebration of the Lord’s baptism, and may the benefits of the sacrament enrich your life always.

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