"And
a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you, I am well pleased.’"
Today
marks the end of the Christmas season; with the baptism, the years of the
Lord’s hidden life have come to a close and Jesus takes up his public ministry.
The time of Israel’s expectation has been fulfilled. The long-awaited Messiah
has appeared. The whole time of the preparation of the Old Testament, of
Israel’s election, the covenant, and the mission entrusted to it, converges
here on this one figure, in this one very concrete time and place in human
history. With the eyes of Easter, we can see how all the fragmentary images
presented in the Old Testament find their unity and unveil their meaning precisely
here in Jesus.
For
thirty years Jesus has been immersed in the beliefs, customs, and traditions of
Israel and its covenant relationship with the God who chose them and formed
them as his people; and in and through them matured in the mission that he and
the Father had decided upon in eternity. Jesus’ baptism by John shows that
Jesus emerges from the midst of this history.
When
Jesus descends into the river, he shows himself in solidarity with that part of
Israel that heeded the voice of God proclaimed through John, with all who
confessed their guilt and were willing to dive into the water of judgment and
salvation, who acknowledged themselves as sinners and ready to face the divine
judgment on their sin and receive the salvation that can only come from God.
Along with them, Jesus, too, shows himself obedient to the voice of God through
John, ready to be called by this voice out of the hidden life and to take up
his public life at this moment.
His
humble submission to being submerged in the waters is fulfilled immediately by
the affirmation of the voice from above. In this obedient act the Israel that
has been made ready for God and the God who has entered into the covenant with
Israel come together as one; finally, in a manner unforeseen by Israel and that
it was in no way able to accomplish on its own. Upon him alone the Spirit
descends in bodily form as a dove. He is the one designated as the chosen one,
and on him, the Spirit will remain as his abiding inspiration.
The voice
from heaven confirms and interprets this event: “This is my beloved Son, with
whom I am well pleased.” Here is the one to save Israel. Here is the
fulfillment of the image of the mysterious Servant of the Lord prophesied in the
first reading from Isaiah, the obedient one who was to become a ransom for the
people: “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am well
pleased. Upon him I have put my spirit; he shall bring forth justice to the
nations.”
Through
his humble submission to baptism, Jesus becomes the one who baptizes with the
Holy Spirit and fire, through whose mouth come words of ‘spirit and life’ (Jn
6:63). At the same time, the image of the Holy Spirit and fire points us
forward to the completion of his mission: he will become one who baptizes in
fire by way of the cross on which he will be burnt as a holocaust, as the lamb
of God, in whom sin and death will be consumed. His whole mission points to
this event. As he says later: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that
it were already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is
my distress until it is accomplished.” In the baptism, Jesus appears as God’s
judgment on Israel and on the world. He is God’s definitive appearance in his
saving power.
As God’s
beloved Son, Jesus’ mission is qualitatively different from that of the
prophets who preceded him. Not only is his mission unique, but he himself is
unique. In the case of the prophets, no matter how generously they handed
themselves over to their mission, it was always at least relatively possible to
distinguish their mission from their person; but in Jesus no such distinction
between person and mission is possible. There is no before and after in terms
of awareness of his mission, no sense that it is something added on to an
identity that preexisted it, no time in which he acts outside of his mission.
Rather, everything points to his being identical with his mission. Throughout
the Gospels, he appears as nothing other than the one whom God has sent, and it
is impossible to imagine him otherwise. He is the one of whom Paul says that
God sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin and condemned
sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be
fulfilled in us.” (Rom 8:3-4). His mission and his being are identical.
In
today’s Gospel John the Baptist himself witnesses to this new order, when he
says, “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am
not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the
Holy Spirit and fire.” In the Gospel of John, we read “There was a man sent from
God whose name was John…He was not the light but came to bear witness to the
light.” Of this light, he says that God sent his Son “in order that the world
might be saved through him.” At work here is something more radical than the
mere appointment of a messenger or representative or even the choosing of a
prophet (even prophets chosen “from the womb”, like Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and Paul.) Later in John, Jesus will say of himself (“I proceeded and came
forth from God”). The sending of Jesus by God, therefore, is rooted in this
prior “proceeding” from God, which points us back into his eternal life with
God, where he was always and had always been, “with” God. Jesus is God’s Word
sent to his people. He is the Word that was in the beginning, that was with God
and that was God. His earthly mission is nothing other than the expression of
his eternal procession from the Father.
In Jesus,
the heavens have been opened, here, at the baptism, through his manifestation
as God’s beloved Son, and then throughout his public ministry by his unfailing
fidelity to his mission. Guided by the Father through the Spirit, in all that
he said and did, he never deviated from his Father’s will. In all his
interactions with others, in his preaching, his prayer, his miracles, his
formation of his disciples, right on to his “hour”, his passion, death and
resurrection, his mind, intelligence, and free will were wholly
oriented to making the One who sent him, known, believed, and honored. In him,
we have access to the world of God, and therefore to his universal design for
all mankind, which is to be “in Christ”.
By his death and resurrection, we are now “in Christ”. And thanks to his self-gift,
an acting area has been opened up within
himself in which the whole of mankind is granted the opportunity to share in
his mission, and in that, become conformed to the idea that God has of each.
Blessed and destined for holiness from the foundation of the world, we are for
the first time able to become what we are. Not simply according to the
fulfillment of our natural endowments, but according to the particular meaning
and purpose for which we have been created. In Christ, man is no longer
condemned to ceaselessly circle round and round in the vanity of his own
unfulfillable transcendence. Rather the world of God has been opened up to him.
We now have the opportunity to discover God and ourselves in a way hitherto
impossible.
What this means for us then, as followers of Christ, is that we are to
“act” in the acting area that has been opened, that is, in Christ, in such a
way as to bring our innate nonidentity between our being and our mission into
an ever-closer approximation to the perfect identity that Christ enjoys in
himself. In other words, we are to bring our own “self” more and more in line
with our God-given mission and to discover in this mission our own identity,
both personal and social.
For us, as monks, this assimilation comes about through our prayer, our
patient slow attentiveness to God’s living Word in lectio divina, our
participation in the Liturgy, especially the Eucharist, the service of our
work, in a word, in the whole of the monastic conversatio, and the
particularity of our charism. This is our acting area, in Christ. Losing
ourselves in these, in the blessedness of those who are poor in spirit, we
undertake a journey of discovery: of God, by our obedience, of our brothers and
all those we encounter, by our service to them, and of ourselves, because it is
only in such service and obedience that we truly encounter ourselves.
It is the Lord who has proposed this task to us, let us call upon him to infuse us with his same perfect readiness to carry it out.
The Baptism of Christ by Perugino. This morning' s homily by Father Timothy.