How are you? I hope that you are well in this New Year. This Sunday marks the liturgical conclusion to the Christmas Season for us as Roman Catholics. There are other members of the Christian family who will continue celebrating the birth of Christ for a little while longer but we will soon move back into Ordinary Time. For now we are anticipating one of the most significant events in the life of Jesus.
The baptism of the Lord is a simple and yet profoundly rich experience to contemplate. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that St. John the Paul II proposed the Baptism of the Lord as the First Luminous Mystery of the Rosary… We read within the Gospel according to St. Luke, “After all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (3:21-22).
There at the Jordan River the Lord Jesus entered into the waters not needing to be purified of any sins but rather to purify the waters so that our own baptism would cleanse us of our sins. Being the Second Person of the Holy Trinity we believe that Jesus was always united to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and so the moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon him was not necessary for his sake per se, but was an outward sign that God was with him in a special way.
The descent of the Holy Spirit at his baptism was an anticipation of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the baptism of all believers. When the Father spoke from the heavens and declared to Jesus that “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” they were intended to show the dynamically close and loving relationship between them. By extension they are words which are meant for all those who are baptized into Christ, that we are truly beloved sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.
Though we will experience hardships, difficulties, heartaches, and pain in this life we have the assurance that we are indeed beloved. We might not feel that in the midst of intense suffering but it is the reality. Jesus himself suffered greatly in his Passion and Death, even crying out from the cross with the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” And yet Jesus was, is, and always will be
The Beloved
of our Heavenly Father.
St. Paul provocatively wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “
Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?"
We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (6:3-4). We unite our own sufferings to those of Christ and are given the grace and the strength to experience his triumph over sin and death. As we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord this weekend, let’s reflect upon this powerful moment in salvation history and realize that its graces extend to us in our daily journey of faith.