FEAST OF THE LORD’S BAPTISM
(Sunday after Epiphany – First Sunday of the Year)
For the Eastern Church Christ’s life was (theologically speaking) a series of epiphanies (revelation) of which the baptism of the Lord was the first and most important one. Since in the West the story of the magi was so popular, the baptism of Christ could only take the place of the following Sunday, which is now the first Sunday of the year.
The first and second reading of the cycles A, B and C are the same. Only the gospel is different each year, but different only in the sense that the same report of Christ’s baptism is taken from the parallel report of the three Synoptic gospels, this year from Luke. Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptized by the Baptist (gospel) in order to take upon himself the sins of mankind and to be revealed as the Son of God and thus start his public career as Servant of Yahweh. This was foretold by Isaiah 42 (first reading) and outlined by Peter (Acts 10:35-43) in his speech in the house of Cornelius (second reading).
Since the new ordo Lectionum Missae (Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1981) one may also take ad libitum Is 40:1-5.9-11 as first reading and Titus 2:1-14; 3:4-7 as second reading. This first reading is also taken as first reading of the 2nd Sunday of Advent, year B, and the second reading is taken in the Midnight Mass at Christmas year A, B and C (Titus 2:11-14) and in the mass at dawn (year A, B, and C) (Titus 3:4-7).
All lessons have been explained in the indicated places. Here just a summary of the lessons ad libitum.
Deutero-Isaiah, an anonymous prophet during the last years of the Babylonian exile (587-538), delivered his message to fellow exiles in the captivity (Is 40-55). The first part opens with an introduction (Is 40:1-11), announcing the return from exile. He shall comfort his people with the good news of return (40).
He hears a voice of a herald going ahead of the king (v.3) in the desert. When the Israelites return from Babylon to Jerusalem a way has to be made through the desert. That means hills have to be leveled, valleys to be filled with soil. A road shall be built for Yahweh, the king, from Babylon to Jerusalem (v.4).
Yahweh returns on this way, taking Israel along as booty of triumph, in a second exodus (v.5).
Again the prophet hears a voice telling him to preach (v.6), although he is only like grass (vv.6-8). He shall tell Zion (Jerusalem) to go up on a high mountain (v.9) and proclaim that Yahweh is there, returning with power to Jerusalem (v.10). He is like a good shepherd carrying the sheep in his arms (v.11).
This is the good news: God has appeared; in particular his grace (Titus 2:11), his kindness and love (3:4), in the person of Christ in order to save us (2:11). Thus we can forsake all worldly desires (2:12) and can live with prudence (which has everything under perfect control), justice (giving both to God and men that which is their due) and reverence (making us live in the awareness that this world is temple of God (2:12). We live from the expectation of the coming of Jesus Christ (2:13).
And repeating it again with slightly different words the apostle states: Christ has redeemed us and has made us his people that want to do what is right (2:14).
Christ appeared (3:4). The result is: he has put us into a new relationship with God, which is a grace and a gift from God nobody can deserve, coming from God’s kindness and goodness (3:4-5). In concrete we are saved by baptism (3:5), which gives us a new birth through the renewal of the Holy Spirit (3:5). By this regeneration which is the only reincarnation possible (not the one people sometimes speak of) we become heirs of eternal life already now, although we still hope (3:7).
This year we read the account of the baptism of Jesus according to the third Synoptic gospel: Luke. He has the shortest report of the baptism. As we saw, Christ’s baptism shows (1) how Jesus, although he is without sin, places himself in line with all the sinners to take away symbolically (later on in reality) the sin of mankind. (2) at the same time Christ’s baptism marks the inauguration of the public ministry of Jesus with clear divine approval: A voice from heaven (the Father) is heard: “You are my beloved Son. On you my favor rests” (Luke 3:16).
Luke, the good stylist, has in this case a very poor sentence: Now it came to pass when all the people had been baptized, Jesus also having been baptized and being in prayer (present tense), that heaven was opened…” He stresses more the humiliation of the baptism, and diminishes a little bit the glory after baptism by reporting the event so briefly and omitting the note that Jesus went out of the water immediately (as Mark has it). He is the evangelist of the passion.
Jesus is praying when the Holy Spirit comes. Luke seems to connect the marvelous event with this prayer, thus making it a little more human. Luke, the evangelist of prayer, tells us that Christ begins His public life with prayer. Prayer is not something that comes occasionally, but something that must direct our life. With prayer we must start the day, every important action.
The Spirit descends in bodily form (so only Luke). This is an additional proof that the event probably was a public demonstration from heaven of the character of Jesus (and not merely an interior vision of Jesus or of Jesus and John). Was it an animal? Or was it rather a special light with the form of a dove? Most would prefer the latter. Others think of Hosea 11:1 and Ps 68:14: The dove represents the new people of Israel, the eschatological community, which is now going to be established by Christ. The Holy Spirit enables Christ to start his public career as Messiah as he enabled the prophets and judges.
THE LORD APPEARED
Of the two sense organs man has: eye and ear, the ear is stressed much more than the eye in the Bible, the hearing much more than the seeing. Again and again we will find the expression: “Listen, Israel!” Bt hardly ever does the expression occur “See, Israel!” We are here one earth more to hear when God speaks to us than to see. The seeing is reserved for eternity, when we will see God as he is.
And yet in certain key passages it is said that God appeared, as we have it in today’s second reading (Titus 2:11.13; 3:4). Here the epiphanein is used, which has become the technical term for the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord. And the baptism of Christ was the first and most important epiphany, i.e., revelation. In this homily we want to meditate a little on how God has revealed himself in his word, his Second Divine Person, from the beginning of creation till he finally appeared in his Incarnation and his life on earth so that John in 1Jn 1:1 can write as purpose of his writings, especially of course of his gospel: “This is what we proclaim to you: what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and our hands have touched we speak of the word of life.”
1. God is distinct from man and high above him. He is transcendent. But he has revealed himself in a word, he has created the sensible and the visible by a word, by the divine word. And this is so because God the Father knew himself so perfectly that this self-knowledge is a divine person, the Divine Word. Thus, God goes on revealing himself in his divine word, the second person in the Blessed Trinity.
2. The invisible God becomes visible in his creation. The Father created everything through the Divine Word as we see it stated in some Wisdom Books: “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth, established the heavens by understanding…When he established the heavens I was there, when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep. When he made firm the skies above, when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth (Proverbs 3:19; 8:27-30). John in his prologue formulates it this way: “Through him (the Divine Logos) all things came into being, and apart from him nothing came to be. Whatever came to be in him was life” (Jn 1:3-4). And so we can even understand the report of Genesis as this Divine Word by which the Father created everything. “God said, “Let there be light and there was light…God said, “Let there be a firmament between the waters…God said,” Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear” (Gen 1:3.6.9). It is true, “By the word of Yahweh the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Ps 33:6).
3. The result is that everything visible is good; man is even very good (Gen 1:31). The material world is not a degradation and fall as it is for a Platonist and a Neo-Platonist. For such a Greek philosopher one must go out and turn away from the sensible in order to know the intelligible. The sensible world is only a shadow. Concrete reality bears no message. – In the Bible however, all things visible are meaningful and all creation is a discourse with a vocabulary everyone can understand, because they are created by the Divine Word. In a true way the invisible God is visible in his creation.
4. Thus we understand why every visible thing can and shall be a symbol to understand the transcendent God. The gratuity of rain, for instance, recalls the gratuity of the word of God and its almost infallible fertility: “And I will make them a blessing round about my hill and I will send down the rain…there shall be showers of blessing” (Ez 34:26). “As the rain comes down from heaven and makes the earth fertile so shall my word be…It shall not return to me void” (Is 55:10). Salt preserves everything, makes it tasty and clean. Thus the apostle gives the advice: “Let your speech, while always attractive, be seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer” (Col 4:6). The church has taken over this language of the signs into her liturgy for the sacraments. Since we are dirty with sins, we have to be washed clean by the water of baptism. Since we live God’s own divine life since baptism, that life has to grow. And as our natural life grows by eating bread, food, this divine life has to grow by taking Eucharistic bread and drinking consecrated wine. As sportsmen use oil for strengthening purposes, we anoint an ordinand during the sacrament of ordination and anoint sick during his sickness that he may be fortified.
5. St. Paul elaborates how the visible creation is the guide to the invisible creator so that nobody is excused who does not find God: “Since the creation of the world, the invisible realities, God’s external power and divinity, have become visible, recognized through the things he has made. Therefore these men (who do not know God) are inexcusable” (Rom 1:20).
6. That same apostle goes on telling us that this Divine Word, Jesus Christ was already working in the history of the chosen people before the Incarnation when he explained how the Jews in the desert were eating the manna and were drinking water from the rock. And Paul goes on saying: “And the rock was Christ” (1Cor 10:4)
John expresses the same idea in his prologue: “To his own he came, yet his own did not accept him” (Jn 1:11), which according to many scholars refers to the Divine Word before the Incarnation since the Incarnation is referred only in Jn 1:14.
Thus we see, there is nothing bad in matter, inasmuch as God has made it, inasmuch as it is the manifestation of the invisible God, inasmuch as it is a sign that leads us to a fuller understanding of the transcendent God. It becomes bad only if we take matter as something absolute. There is unity between matter and spirit.
II. The human body, the human person is an appearance of the invisible God. Lastly again because we are created by the Divine Word. For a Platonist the body is only the prison of the soul. Flight from the body is the only way for a soul to become like God. For a man of the Bible even union of man and woman are a knowledge: “Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Gen 4:1) is no euphemism but reality. For a Greek philosopher, man consists of body and soul. There is dichotomy.
1. But for the Bible the man is either basar, sarx, flesh, or he is ruah, pneuma, spirit. But flesh does not just mean “flesh”, even less a “fleshly” person, but the whole human person as he is such good since God makes him. Thus Adam can exult when God creates Eve, his partner for life: “This is now flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone” (Gen 2:23). She is the other half of Adam, the better half, so that Adam could no longer alone.
Then the course flesh has the connotation of frailty, limitation. So when the Psalmist says: “He (God) remembered that they (men) were flesh, a passing breath that returns not” (Ps 78:39).
But flesh stands for sinfulness only if and when man relies on his being flesh only and forgets that he is also spirit.
2. Man is also spirit, spirit from the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. And since this is so we can do “all things in him who strengthens us” (Phil 4:14). Especially St. Paul unfolds this supernatural dimension of man. The Spirit is that within man, which permits an encounter with the Spirit of God: “The Spirit becomes witness with our spirits that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16).
III. Christ’s Incarnation and his life on earth are the epiphany, the appearance of God among us. Having seen and heard him we have seen and heard the Father. This is the good news of Christmas, the good news of the Feast of the Epiphany and the Sunday of the baptism of Christ. It was a relatively short appearance. And so John wrote down what he saw that we could profit from his vision. Reading the gospel we can hear Christ and in a sense see him, if we have faith. The appearance of Christ goes on.