Baptism of the Lord - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2022

Matthew, Mark and Luke speak differently when writing of John’s baptism of Jesus. Today we have Luke’s account. If you listened carefully, you will have noticed that John’s baptism did nothing to Jesus, or to people generally, for that matter. John himself insisted that he simply baptised people with water, giving them a chance to express publicly their personal, inner repentance. With Jesus, however, something did happen. In his case, it happened while he was quietly praying after his baptism. Jesus had a profound inner experience. We shall notice later in the year, as we work through Luke’s Gospel, that Luke made quite a point of Jesus’ praying and praying alone.

To describe the indescribable, Luke drew on an image Isaiah had used five or six hundred years earlier. It was the passage that we heard this morning in the First Reading. Luke adapted it to suit his purpose. In the passage that we heard, Isaiah had God saying, “Here is my servant …, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights. I have endowed him with my spirit…”. The translator of Isaiah’s prophecies and the translator of Luke’s Gospel used different words for a few of the original words, and Luke himself made a few deliberate modifications.

Where Isaiah had God saying, “Here is my servant”, Luke had God speaking directly to Jesus and saying, “You are my Son”. Where Isaiah had “my chosen one”, Luke had God calling Jesus “the Beloved”, and where Isaiah had “in whom my soul delights”, Luke had “my favour rests on you”. Luke also made more of Jesus’ experience of God’s Spirit, by expressing it graphically: “Heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily shape, like a dove.” Personally, if I were the translator, I would choose Isaiah’s translator, but make it all a bit more direct, “You are my son. I love you. You delight my heart.” And I would leave out the comment about the dove.

We shall find out later [in Lent, I think], Jesus needed to take time to come to terms with what he had just experienced in his prayer. He went off alone into the deserted bushland surrounding the Jordan — “led by the Spirit”, as Luke would put it. He needed time and space to somehow explore the new revelation of his unique, over-powering, relationship with God his Father— and its implications. Not surprisingly, while he was still there, he was “tempted by the devil”, in the shape of facing possibilities prefaced by what he was already hesitatingly wrestling with: “… if you are the Son of God”. “if you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf”, “…if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down [in full view of everyone] from the parapet of the temple”. In other words: exploit your newly-realised dignity, and betray your whole mission. Effectively, Jesus was tempted to by-pass the supreme centrality of love as the source of all human dignity, and the means of human salvation.

But the Father who loved him dearly was real, and was on his side — and he knew it. It was on the basis of that clear revelation that Jesus embarked on his mission, stepped out confidently into the world — and resolutely embraced his destiny.

If we can let God reveal to each of us just how much God loves us, we too can be transformed, and eagerly allow God’s love to renew our lives.