Baptism of the Lord - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

Why did Jesus insist on receiving a baptism of repentance from John?  It wasn’t just like going to confession.  John’s baptism was meant to mark a significant change; to mark a fresh way of seeing life and reality.  Did Jesus experience moments of such significant change?  I presume he did.  All human growth involves new insights, new ways of seeing things, recognising that up to now we have seen only half the picture, that we have had missed what now seems so obvious.  The gospel is quite clear that Jesus grew in wisdom as he grew older.  We all can.

Jesus did not personally sin.  But his baptism of repentance seems to have been for him a stand for solidarity with those who do sin.  In his Jewish world, sin often meant different things than it does in ours.  It wasn’t necessarily a moral matter.  More often it was the infringement of rules about ritual.  Jewish culture was theocratic.  To be labelled a sinner was to be relegated to the margins, to be judged inferior, to suffer social exclusion.  To be poor put enormous pressure to cut ritually constituted corners, and meant, too, not having the finance to buy the necessary animals to offer in sacrifice and so to be made ritually clean once more.

Jesus chose to work in Galilee.  It was a fertile area, but in Jesus time, the bulk of the population were dispossessed former peasants – now underemployed or unemployed – so, poor, and consequently wide open to hunger and malnutrition, and the sicknesses that result from that.  Those were the ones primarily to whom Jesus held up the vision of God’s Kingdom, and whom he invited to join his movement.  Among the righteous he got the reputation of mixing with the riff-raff, with tax-collectors, prostitutes and sinners.  That is what he deliberately chose.  That is what he said YES to at his baptism.

Surprisingly, the moment he did it, he experienced that incredible insight of the closeness of God, and of God’s affirmation of the stance he took:  The heavens opened – God is close.  God’s Spirit descended on him.  He heard, with his ears, or deep in his heart, or both, “You are my Son.  I love you.”  I suppose he needed that affirmation, as his life unfolded and his stance for the marginalised took practical shape, and as he encountered only a lukewarm response from the Galileans and fierce opposition from the religious and secular authorities.  We all need that affirmation as we live out our mission as disciples of Jesus and apostles of God’s Kingdom.

In late November, Pope Francis had a “Question and Answer” session with the Superiors of Religious Congregations meeting in Rome.  During the conversation, he said: Truly to understand reality we need to … direct ourselves to the peripheral areas. Being at the periphery helps to see and to understand better, to analyze reality more correctly.… This is really very important to me: the need to become acquainted with reality by experience, to spend time walking on the periphery in order really to become acquainted with the reality and life-experiences of people.

A few days before that, he had launched a wonderful document on the Church’s mission to the world.  Allow me to read a few comments from his official Apostolic Exhortation: I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us… In their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the centre of the Church’s pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them.

As I grow older, perhaps like a few of you here, I am not sure I have the energy any longer to dance to his tune, but I can certainly sing as I pray and ask what change it asks for in my life.