Saturday, January 11, 2014
The baptism of our Lord
Tomorrow we celebrate the baptism of our Lord. The image is familiar, perhaps too familiar to me and yet each time I revisit this I come away wondering if I haven’t missed something. Isn’t there something concealed here, in plain sight, which I am failing to fully appreciate? That is, of course, the marvelous aspect of the mysteries of our faith. The Holy Spirit seems to oftentimes tease us into pursuing that which is otherwise veiled from our understanding by hints of movement just on the edge of our peripheral imagination.
The gospel renderings of this event evoke obvious questions. The Baptist immediately recognizes that he has no business baptizing his Lord. He was baptizing with water those who repented their sins that they might know that repentance and “coming clean” was a necessary step before forgiveness ensues and a changed life can be lived. This process was obviously unnecessary for Jesus, the sinless, the clean, and the ideal to which everyone should dare to attain. And yet our Lord tells John that it is the will of the Father that this should occur for the purpose of fulfilling all righteousness. In other words, this act is in fact necessary and essential and not merely a showpiece.
The portrait of what occurs next is engraved into the minds of all Christians. Jesus, in all of his humanity, is then taken into the waters of the Jordan by John, his proclaimer, and baptized with water. As our Lord rises from the waters, God, his Father, from the heavens announces to the world that this is his beloved Son, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, descends upon him. Jesus, who is fully human in nature, is now baptized with the Holy Spirit by the Father, announcing and revealing his fully divine nature. And the world is changed forever as humanity and divinity are inimitably joined here on earth. God becomes incarnate at Jesus’ birth; He is recognized in Jesus by mankind at the Epiphany; and He becomes active in the world in a new way by his Son’s baptism.
Is there something here to help us better understand the significance of our own baptism? Jesus endowed the Church upon his Ascension with the authority to go to the ends of the earth to make disciples, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Just as it was essential for our Lord to be baptized by John to fulfill all righteousness, we find here that our baptism is likewise essential and . . . for the same reason. We too, like the Lord, are baptized in water and the Holy Spirit so that our humanity can be joined with the divine. We too are then called to make God active in the world, as beloved sons or daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the pure splendor of all this is too blinding.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Deacon Charlie's homily on Saturday (1/11/14) was a work of art, a masterpiece! He began by explaining many things in our faith are mysteries, but like all mysteries, we can learn just a bit more today and a bit more tomorrow, each time bringing our understanding to a greater degree of perfection but like all mysteries, never complete understanding.
ReplyDeleteDeacon Charlie then brought our understanding of our Lord's baptism to a much higher level of understanding. As he did in the above discussion, he covered what is commonly known from Scripture regarding His baptism and then emphasized the words of the Father, i.e., This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased." Next of course he described the descent of the Holy Spirit visually as a dove. That is, the Holy Spirit descended upon the baptism of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
What he explained next was remarkable. Deacon Charlie explained that the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ was fitting as both Christ and the Holy Spirit are Divine Persons. By the very nature of the Holy Trinity, Divine Love blesses Divine Truth. However, because our Lord had both a divine nature and a human nature, in the same instant in which Christ's divine nature was blessed in baptism by Divine Love, by the Holy Spirit, incredibly fallen human nature too as conjoined in Christ to divine nature was consequently gifted with the same blessing, the same bestowing of the Holy Spirit! Just as human nature was immeasurably blessed by conjoining with Christ's divine nature at the Incarnation, so too was human nature immeasurably blessed by the Holy Spirit at the Baptism of Christ.
It follows from this teaching that had Christ not been baptized, baptism would have remained at the level at which John the Baptist baptized and human nature would have never been restored by the Holy Spirit to the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity. How much more devoutly can we now understand why Christ was baptized, that is, in the divine economy of salvation, the means to restore fallen human nature to its capacity as it was "in the beginning" was to unite divine nature to human nature so that human nature would share in the descent of the Holy Spirit in baptism of Christ. So as Deacon Charlie stated in his homily, we too share in the same baptism as did Christ! In this way, human nature through baptism shares with Christ in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This understanding not only increases our understanding as to why Christ was baptized, but also why baptism is the foundational sacrament as without the baptism Christ received and in which we participate, our fallen human nature would continue to lack the capacity to love and to share in love. Without that capacity, the other sacraments would fall upon a nature incapable of bringing the sacraments to fruition.
We love the last sentence in Deacon Charlie's discussion above, i.e, "Perhaps the pure splendor of all this is to blinding." The splendor of all of this is blinding in the same way the beauty of the Holy Trinity is said to be so blinding that even the Seraphim are said to be unable to look directly at God's splendor!!! The more we understand, the more we come to realize the limitless splendor there is yet to understand. Thank you Deacon Charlie for so humbling sharing this splendor with us!