The Baptism of the Lord (Year C)
Commentary on Isaiah 40:1-5,9-11; Titus 2:11-14,3:2-7; Luke 3:15-16,21-22
The baptism of Jesus is the third of three great manifestations or revelations which characterise the Christmas season. Today is a kind of transition. We have come to the end of the Christmas season. Yesterday was ‘Twelfth Night’, the last of the twelve days of Christmas and now we will enter the first week of the Ordinary Season. (Today is also the First Sunday in Ordinary Time, although it is never celebrated. However, the prayers of its Mass will be said during the week.)
The three great revelations we have been celebrating are:
- Christmas: when God comes among us with the Good News for the poor, the outcast and the sinner. This is Luke’s version, where Jesus is born in poverty and the first to come to pay him homage are poor and marginalised shepherds.
- Epiphany: when God comes among us with a message of salvation for everyone, for all the people of the world, and not just for one select group. This is Matthew’s version and the description of the strange visitors from the East.
- Baptism of Jesus: God is seen as specially present in Jesus and working in him and through him.
Why baptise Jesus?
We might ask ourselves: Why did Jesus need to be baptised? Most of those coming to John the Baptist were repentant sinners. Our baptism, too, is partly to rescue us from the power of sin by being bathed in the redemptive love of Christ.
How does Jesus himself fit into this? We always say that he is like us in all things, except sin. Moreover, John clearly states that he himself is not the Messiah, but only the fore-runner, the herald of his coming. John says:
I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal.
Undoing sandals was something only slaves did. In other words, John felt that, in Jesus’ case, he was not even worthy to do that. And yet, Jesus is to be baptised by John.
Two answers
There are two answers we can give to the question of why Jesus was baptised:
- By being baptised in the River Jordan with all those self-proclaimed sinners, Jesus shows his total solidarity with us. John’s Gospel says:
…the Word became flesh and lived among us…
(John 1:14)He does not say that the Word was made a human person, but that the Word “became flesh”. In biblical language, ‘flesh’ (Greek, sarx) has all the connotations of our human weaknesses. In becoming a human person, Jesus identified with us not just in our humanity, but in our weak human-ness. Jesus had the same feelings and reactions that we have; only he never did sin or do anything wrong. This solidarity with us was indicated by the criticism of the Pharisees that Jesus spent so much time eating and drinking with sinners and outcasts.
Despite his dignity and rank as Son of God and Messiah, Jesus never did require any external signs of privilege. Most of the time, he looked just the same as everyone else. And, when he got up in the synagogue of his home town and began to amaze people with his insight, his neighbours could not understand it. They had lived for years with him and had no idea of this side of his person.
- There is something different happening here beyond that of an ordinary baptism. Significantly, Luke says that Jesus was at prayer when his baptism took place. At all the most important moments in his public life, Luke represents Jesus as praying. Here, it was at this moment that the Spirit of God, in the visible form of a dove, comes down on Jesus.
A voice, clearly that of the Father, says:
You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
It is clearly a form of “missioning” for Jesus. We could call it his ‘Pentecost’ experience. It is a clear endorsement from his Father for the work that Jesus is about to begin. (Another important endorsement will come at the Transfiguration.)
So, through his baptism, Jesus is being officially commissioned to begin his public work of teaching, healing and liberating enslaved souls up to the climactic moment of his passion, death and resurrection.
What is Jesus’ mission?
And what is that work that Jesus is to accomplish through his teaching, preaching and healing? That is described in the First Reading from Isaiah and in the Second Reading from the Letter to Titus.
Isaiah promises that valleys will be filled and mountains and hills made low as all obstacles will be removed and the glory of God will be revealed and made accessible to all. The Lord is coming in the person of Jesus:
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms
and carry them in his bosom
and gently lead the mother sheep.
He is the Bread of Life and the Good Shepherd.
In the Second Reading, the Lord comes to bring salvation and wholeness to all and to help us leave behind all “worldly passions”, all those appetites and longings which are ultimately destructive and harmful to our proper destiny. And our baptism is linked with that of Jesus:
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
The Word became flesh so that we could be liberated from the sinful inclinations of the flesh.
His baptism also for us
At his baptism, that Spirit came down on Jesus. It was not for him alone, but so that we might receive justice (“justified by his grace”). A just society is one where everyone has what they need to have, where their dignity is respected and affirmed and where people live in right relationships with each other.
Later in his Gospel, Matthew applies the words of the prophet Isaiah to Jesus:
He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smoldering wick… (Matt 12:19-20)
Here expressed in truly poetic images is a picture of the compassionate Jesus who welcomed sinners and sat down to eat with them; the Good Shepherd who left the ninety-nine “good” ones to go and find just one which had gone astray and to bring it back.
Continuing to quote from Isaiah, Matthew applies these words explicitly to Jesus:
…until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the gentiles will hope. (Matt 12:20-21)
Jesus, in spite of hostility, rejection and efforts to destroy him, will persevere to the end. In fact, it will be in his apparent destruction, his degrading death as a public criminal, that he will galvanise millions to follow him for centuries to come. Jesus’ work is above all to liberate us and set us free. For all of this, Jesus was baptised and commissioned by his Father.
Reflecting on our own baptism
Today is an opportunity for all of us to reflect on our own baptism. It is not something which happened a long time ago and which ‘made’ us Catholics. It is not just a ceremony lasting a few minutes which produces magical effects. Rather, it is the beginning of a lifelong journey. It is the beginning of a process of growing into the Body of Christ as one of its members.
Our baptism is essentially a community experience; it is not just a private or a family event, although in the way it was “celebrated” it may have looked like that. It involves active participation in the life of the Church and not just passive membership. Perhaps we could slightly alter the words of the American president, John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address and ‘Ask not what the Church can do for you, but what you can do for the Church’.
Each one of us is called to be a living witness to the Gospel—to be the salt of the earth, a city on a hill, a lamp radiating light for all. Our baptism is a never-ending call to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Every word of Isaiah can also be applied to each one of us who has been baptised. So let us today renew our faith in and our commitment to following Jesus. Let us re-affirm our readiness to carry on his work. For it is a sobering fact that without our co-operation, much of God’s work will never get done.
Read more
10 January – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 4:14-22
After his baptism, Jesus is full of the Spirit of God. He has been commissioned and is now ready to do his Father’s work. The Gospel says he has been in Galilee already for some time, and people everywhere are hearing about him as he preaches in synagogues. Today we see him in his home town of Nazareth. And, as he usually did, he went to the synagogue there on a Sabbath.
As was the right of any Jew, he read from the Scripture. The passage is from the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2). It is a messianic prophecy which he applies to himself:
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
And what is it that he read?
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me…
That is, the Lord God has made him King and Lord. He has been made Messiah (Hebrew)—meaning “the Anointed One”. In Greek it is Christos. This is a formal announcement of his identity. (Compare this to Mark’s Gospel where Jesus hides his true identity until much later.)
And what is the mission of Jesus as Messiah?
…to bring good news to the poor.
…to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
More than any of the other Gospels, Luke emphasises Jesus’ attitude to the economically and socially poor. We see that at Jesus’ first appearance in the world, when it is the poor and outcasts—the shepherds—who come to pay homage to the newborn child. The poor are also linked to the oppressed and afflicted, the forgotten and the neglected. Yet it is they who are most open to the Good News—so much so that the poor are described as “blessed”.
Jesus gives a message of liberation and freedom for the world. It is important for us to realise that Jesus came to make us truly free. So many Christians abandon their church in order to be ‘free’. They find being Christian a stifling experience. Yet, we must insist both by the way we present the message of the gospel and by the way we live it that, as Christians, we enjoy a particularly high level of freedom. True freedom does not consist in doing just what we feel like doing—that can be very destructive both to ourselves and others. True freedom is the ability to make the good choice—good for oneself and good for others. Agape-love points us in that direction.
The words of Isaiah that Jesus uses are to be taken both in their literal and in a fuller sense. It is a message for those who are materially poor, for those who are in prison, those who are blind and those who are oppressed. But all these terms can be understood in a much wider sense. There are all kinds of poverty. In addition to the material kind, there is intellectual, emotional and social poverty. There are all kinds of things which imprison people, including various forms of addictions and compulsions. Blindness is not only a physical disability, but there are other forms of blindness due to ignorance, prejudice and a lack of true vision in life. There are many ways a person can experience oppression. People can feel oppressed by forces which dominate their lives, like an obsession with materialistic values and consumerism, or driving ambition at the expense of others. It is for each one to look into their own lives and see where they need liberation most.
These words of Jesus can be seen as his ‘mission statement’. It is what his whole life will be based on. It is not primarily a religious manifesto. It is a manifesto for the kind of life that every human being is called to follow.
Jesus only began this work. Its continuation and fulfilment depends on our cooperation with him. We are not to hear these words only as receivers, but also as a challenge to us. To what extent am I part of this empowering, liberating, eye-opening mission of Jesus for my society and the world?
The people in the synagogue are deeply impressed by the words of Jesus, but they are also amazed and say:
Is this not Joseph’s son?
Very soon they would turn against him because they presumed they knew who he was, but they did not. They had grown up with him and were too close to him—a matter of familiarity breeding contempt. The same can happen to us when, as happens again and again, we cannot detect the presence of Christ in a person who is very close to us. Not only can we not see Christ in that person, like the people of Nazareth, we often do not want to.
Read more