The Baptism of Jesus

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven saying: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’” (Matt. 3:16-17).

Today is the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. It marks the beginning of His public life.

St. John Paul II made it the first “mystery of light.” He said, “The whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of light. He is the ‘light of the world’ (John 8:12). Yet this truth emerges in a special way during the years of his public life, when he proclaims the Gospel of the Kingdom...

“The Baptism in the Jordan is first of all a mystery of light. Here, as Christ descends into the waters, the innocent one who became ‘sin’ for our sake (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21), the heavens open wide and the voice of the Father declares him the beloved Son (cf. Matt. 3:17), while the Spirit descends on him to invest him with the mission which he is to carry out” (John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, Point 21, October 16, 2002).

Our Lord sanctifies the waters of the Jordan. He institutes the sacrament of Baptism by receiving it. The other sacraments— sometimes He consumes the Blessed Sacrament, sometimes He promises to send the Holy Spirit. But in this case, He receives the sacrament.

This feast is also an epiphany, a manifestation of the divinity of Christ by the voice of the Father. “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

As the Chosen People received freedom through the opening of the waters of the Jordan, we receive freedom from the waters of Baptism—the gateway to the other sacraments.

The Code of Canon Law uses that phrase “gateway” (Code, Canon 849). It's a rather impressive word. The sacrament opens horizons for us. Grace comes into our soul and washes away the stains of original sin.

We could use this feast day to be grateful to God for our Baptism. Some people really have to strive for Baptism. There are two interesting books that have come out recently from Ignatius Press: The Price to Pay and also From Fire, by Water. They talk about two Muslim converts and what they had to go through in order to receive Baptism, how they hungered for the Bread of Life and the waters of Baptism.

Yet possibly God gave it to us without the slightest effort. We can be grateful for that great grace that God has given to us. “Those to whom much has been given, much will be expected” (Luke 12:48).

We could also remember to pray for the priest who baptized you. For your godparents. Possibly you don't know that priest who baptized you.

It's an occasion to think of all the priests in our life who have contributed something to our soul, to our spiritual well-being, to who we are today: the priest who baptized you; the priest who gave you your first Holy Communion; the priest who heard your Confessions all through your life; maybe the priest who married you; the priest who will anoint you; and ultimately, the priest who will bury you.

God has sent certain priests to be there in various key moments of your life. It's good that we get into the habit of praying for priests. One particular moment to pray for priests could be after we receive the sacrament of Confession, perhaps to repeat the penance that we’re given, for the holiness of that priest who heard your Confession.

When Christ submits Himself to be baptized, He shows great humility. John the Baptist had foretold His humility. We're told: “The people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah”—some people thought John himself might be the Messiah, but John proclaimed a great humility— “John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming. I am not worthy to untie the tongue of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire’” (Luke 3:15-16).

“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:21-22).

John is very aware of his role as the Precursor, the one who foretells the coming of the Messiah. He also foretells the greatness of the Baptism that Christ will bring: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

At this moment Christ formally begins His apostolic mission. At Baptism, the Holy Spirit begins to act on souls and that will continue forever. From our Baptism we receive faith and we receive grace. The wounds of original sin may still be with us, which explains so much of the human condition, but the stain of original sin is washed away.

Our human nature gets purified in Baptism. We become temples of the Holy Spirit, children of God, and heirs to the kingdom of heaven. With our Baptism we are born to a supernatural life.

The sacraments, in some way, parallel our physical life. There's a sacrament that is there at the beginning of life. A sacrament to nourish us as we grow. A sacrament of maturity: Confirmation. A sacrament that will be there as we set out on the pathways of our life: Marriage or Holy Orders. And a sacrament that hopefully will open the gateway to heaven.

Fulton Sheen likes to say that “as a ray of sunlight…splits up into the seven rays of the spectrum when shot through a prism, so the love of God splits into the seven sacraments, that in each one we get a glimpse of the mystery of the Divine.”

With our Baptism, we're told in the Catechism, we become “a new [creature]” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1265). It's a rather beautiful word.

Grace cleanses us, but also lifts us up onto a whole new supernatural plane (cf. Baltimore Catechism, Lesson 9). Grace cleanses us, but it also elevates, so that we are elevated onto that supernatural plane. We're called to lead a supernatural life, a life above our ordinary natural life. We're given a calling to heaven.

This is the means to the true divinization of man. God did not give the sacraments to the animals. He did not lift them up onto that supernatural plane. We're on a completely different level.

We're called to the life of grace, to the life of the Church. The greatest privilege we can have is to live in the state of grace all the days of our life, to take care of our spiritual life and of our sacramental life, to make sure we're filled with the Holy Spirit and all of His gifts and His graces.

The sacrament initiates us into the Church. It's one of the reasons why the Church has wanted that Baptism, in principle, should take place in parish churches, to symbolize that.

It gives us the grace to live as Christians. It makes us children of God—a great way to live and to live out the course of our life, knowing that we are children of God, children in His sight. “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (cf. Matt. 18:3).

In the Gospel we read that after His Baptism, God called Jesus “my Son, my beloved” as though to emphasize that point. Our divine filiation becomes the foundation of our whole spiritual life.

Our Lord's public life, we're told in the Catechism, “begins with his baptism by John in the Jordan” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 535).

“John preaches ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’” (Luke 3:3). “Make way the way of the Lord” (Mark 1:3).

“A crowd of sinners come to be baptized by him: tax collectors, soldiers, Pharisees, Sadducees. Then Our Lord appears. The Baptist hesitates: ‘You come to be baptized by me, and I should be baptized by you.’ But Jesus insists and receives baptism” (cf. Catechism, Point 535).

“The baptism of Jesus is on his part the acceptance and the inauguration of his mission as God's suffering Servant. He allows himself to be numbered among sinners; he is already ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29). Already he is anticipating the ‘baptism’ of his bloody death” (Catechism, Point 536).

It's all a unity. Later in His life Christ is going to institute other sacraments. With His death He's going to earn the graces that can flow through the sacraments for all time. While the sacraments are prepared, they receive their efficacy with the Crucifixion.

“Already he's coming to ‘fulfill all righteousness’; he is submitting himself entirely to his Father's will: out of love he consents to this baptism of death for the remission of our sins. The Father's voice responds to the Son's acceptance, proclaiming his entire delight in his Son (cf. Luke 3:22).

“The Spirit whom Jesus possessed in fullness from his conception comes to ‘rest on him’ (John 1:32-33). Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all mankind. At his baptism ‘the heavens were opened’ (Matt. 3:17)—the heavens that Adam's sin had closed—and the waters were sanctified by the descent of Jesus and the Spirit, a prelude to the new creation” (Catechism, Point 536).

Each one of us becomes this new creation every time we receive grace into our soul. That's why we can have a great love for this sacrament and for the sacrament of Confession for, as it were, we are Spirit-baptized anew. We begin again. We become that new creation on a new level with a new holiness, because of the new grace that's come into our soul.

“Through Baptism the Christian is sacramentally assimilated to Jesus, who in his own baptism anticipates his death and resurrection.” We're called to “enter into this mystery of humble self-abasement and repentance, to go down into the water with Jesus in order to rise with him, be reborn of water and the Spirit so as to become the Father's beloved son in the Son and ‘walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6:4)” (Catechism, Point 537).

These are all the great things that our Baptism has done for us. We can be grateful to our parents for wanting this gracious gift for us; not waiting until we're of age to decide for ourselves, because they knew that was the greatest thing they could give us: gateway to eternity.

The Catechism says: “Let us be buried with Christ by Baptism to rise with him; let us go down with him to be raised with him; and let us rise with him to be glorified with him. Everything that happened to Christ lets us know that, after the bathing of water, the Holy Spirit swoops down upon us from high heaven and that, adopted by the Father's voice, we become children of God” (Catechism, Point 537).

Our greatest status. Thank you, Lord, for this great gift you've given to us: the dignity of being children of God. We're told by St. John: “See what love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God, and such we are” (1 John 3:1).

Today is also a day of thanksgiving for all these graces that God gives to us, and an invitation to us that we would live out our Baptism in all the situations of our life.

Our Baptism is a calling to holiness and apostolate. We're all called to apostolate. It's not just something for switched-on Christians. It's a basic goal of our baptismal calling.

As a lay person in the middle of the world, we're called to bring that light and fire of Christ to all sectors of society. The angel said, “We bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people” (Luke 2:10). With our Baptism, we are sent out to all the people.

There was a story once of a French missionary in Pakistan who was seen by another priest. He saw this person was very bent over, elderly, couldn't stand up straight, and asked what happened to him.

He was told that he was kept in a communist prison in China and he was put in a cage, where he couldn't sit down properly and he couldn't stand up properly and he couldn't lie down properly, in a situation of continuous discomfort.

Every day the communist authorities came to him and said, ‘Tomorrow we're going to execute you. Tomorrow we’re going to execute you.’ But they never did.

After nine months, they came and they said, ‘Tomorrow we're going to exile you.’ That night, twenty communist guards came to see him and said, ‘We want to be baptized.’

But he said to them, ‘Why do you want Baptism? You don't know very much about the Christian faith, and if you're discovered to have been baptized you might be executed.’

They said, ‘We've been watching you these last few months. We've seen your reaction in the face of all the brutal treatment that we've given to you. We've seen your peace, your serenity. We've come to the conclusion that any God who can give you a peace and serenity like that in the face of the treatment that we've been giving you—that's a God worth believing in. And so, we want to be baptized.’

We don't know how God is using us as instruments: our example, our commitment, our perseverance, our piety, our faith, our daring, our apostolic zeal—how God may be using all of these things to win the conversion of other hearts.

In the homily of Pope John Paul II on the day after St. Josemaría was proclaimed a saint, he said, “St. Josemaría was chosen by the Lord to proclaim the universal call to holiness and to indicate that everyday life, ordinary activities, are the way of sanctification. It might be said that he was the saint of the ordinary” (John Paul II, Address in Praise of St. Josemaría Escrivá, October 7, 2002).

God chose a special person to highlight this reality, the consequences of our baptismal calling: holiness and apostolate; and to show that He wanted that message to be brought to every last person on the planet—the universal call to holiness, one of the central teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

There was a survey made by an institute in Singapore many years ago. They decided to survey people as they were coming out from their Sunday Mass at all the parishes, and to ask people if they'd ever heard the message that they had been called to holiness. This was about thirty, forty years after the Second Vatican Council.

The result of the survey was that 70 percent of the people said no, they had never heard that before.

It takes a long time for decrees of Councils to trickle down to the ordinary person in the pew. People need to hear this message again and again, and to see it lived out by people around them.

John Paul II continued, “He was convinced that for anyone who lives from the perspective of faith, everything offers an opportunity for encounter with God, everything becomes a stimulus for prayer. From this point of view, daily life reveals an unsuspected grandeur” (ibid.). St. Josemaría opened the grandeur of everyday life to the vision of every last person.

He said, “Holiness appears truly within the reach of all. … he loved the world passionately with a ‘redemptive love’ (Catechism, Point 604). It is precisely for this reason,” St. Pope John Paul II says, “that his teachings have helped so many ordinary members of the faithful to discover the redemptive power of faith, its capacity to transform the earth” (ibid.).

One of the aspects of the life of St. Josemaría that perhaps is less well known or publicized is all the things that St. Josemaría has done for women. Possibly few saints in the history of the Church have done as much for women as he has.

He encouraged women of every background and status to go forward in society, to take their place at the pinnacle of society, in all sorts of positions, whether in the home or in professional life, to achieve greatness; but all the time sanctifying themselves in doing so, giving glory to God, bring to society the great gifts that they can bring to every environment.

“This is a message,” said the Pope, “that has abundant and fruitful implications for the evangelizing mission of the Church. It fosters the Christianization of the world ‘from within,’ showing that there can be no conflict between divine law and the demands of genuine human progress” (ibid.).

This is a message for every last person in China, for every person born yesterday. By their Baptism, they're called to be holy and to do apostolate, to shape the world according to the teachings of Christ.

“This saintly priest,” said Pope John Paul, “taught that Christ must be the apex of all human activity (cf. John 12:32). His message impels the Christian to act in places where the future of society is being shaped” (ibid.).

We're called to be there at the crossroads of society, where the important decisions of the world are made that influence everybody in the world of public opinion, in the world of politics, in the world of science. That's our place.

It's there that we're meant to live out our baptismal commitments, to influence the world. Somebody said, about the Second Vatican Council, that one of the things it did was that it changed the meaning of the word ‘missionary.’

Before the Council, a missionary was somebody who went off to a distant place, usually far away from Europe, and there they conducted their mission.

But with the universal call to holiness, the Church started to say that we are all missionaries. Every baptized person has become a missionary. Whether they're young kids like the children in Fatima, or whether they're elderly, or in every profession and place in life, every neighborhood, every women's group—everyone is called to be a missionary precisely in the places where God has placed them. And through their pastimes, or their clubs, or their organizations that they belong to, they have a Christian influence in society.

The Catechism said that “the circumcision of Jesus on the eighth day after his birth (cf. Luke 2:21) is the sign of his incorporation into Abraham's descendants, into the people of the covenant. It is the sign of his submission to the Law and his deputation to Israel's worship, in which he will participate throughout his life. This sign prefigures that ‘circumcision of Christ’ which is Baptism” (Catechism, Point 527).

We find that John the Baptist talked a lot about how “He will baptize you with...fire” (Matt. 3:11).

“I've come to spread fire on this earth” (Luke 12:49). Our Lord speaks a lot about fire. We're meant to be on fire with the love of God.

Fire in biblical times was associated with God and with His action in the world and in the lives of His people. Sometimes God manifested His presence by fire, such as the burning bush, which was not consumed when God spoke to Moses (Ex. 3:2-4).

In the Book of Ezekiel, the image of fire is used to symbolize God's glory (Ezek. 8:2-4). In the Book of Kings, to symbolize His protective presence (2 Kings 1:10-14). In Deuteronomy, His holiness (Deut. 9:3). In Zechariah, His righteous judgment (Zech. 2:5). In Isaiah, His wrath against sin (Isa. 43:2).

Fire is also used of the Holy Spirit. “God's fire both purifies and cleanses. It inspires a reverent fear of God and of his Word in us. Jesus came to give us the fire of his Spirit, that we may radiate the joy and truth of the Gospel to a world in desperate need of God's light and truth” (Don Schwager, Daily Reading and Meditation, January 10)

Pope Francis has recently talked about the spiritual emptiness of the world (Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Point 108, February 2, 2020; Angelus, June 19, 2016), a world very much in need of the fire of the Holy Spirit, of His light and of His truth.

“His word has the power to change and transform our lives, that we may be lights pointing others to Christ. Like the Baptist, we too are called to give testimony to the light and truth of Christ. …

“John preached a baptism of repentance. Why did Jesus, the Sinless One, submit himself to John's baptism?” (D. Schwager, Daily Reading and Meditation, January 10).

We go from the humility of Bethlehem to the humility of His public life.

“This humble submission is going to be a foreshadowing of the ‘baptism’ of his bloody death on the Cross. His baptism is the acceptance and beginning of his mission… He allowed himself to be numbered among the sinners, submitted himself entirely to his Father's will. Out of love He consented to this baptism of death for the remission of our sins. …”

“Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all who come to believe in him. At his baptism the heavens were opened and the waters were sanctified by the descent of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. … How can we enter into this mystery of Our Lord's humble self-abasement and baptism?” (ibid.).

St. Gregory of Nazianzus, a 7th century Church Father, says, “Let us be buried with Christ by Baptism to rise with him. Let us go down with him to be raised with him. Let us rise with him to be glorified with him.”

We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us to examine Our Lord's humility and to forge this same attitude in our heart, so that heaven may open for us as well. Our Lord is ever ready to renew His spirit and to anoint us with His mission.

“In these mysteries of light,” says John Paul, “apart from the miracle at Cana, the presence of Mary remains in the background. The Gospels make only the briefest reference to her occasional presence at one moment or other during the preaching of Jesus (cf. Mark 3:31-35; John 2:12), and they give no indication that she was present at the Last Supper or the institution of the Eucharist. …

“The revelation made directly by the Father at the Baptism in the Jordan and echoed by John the Baptist is placed upon Mary's lips at Cana, and it becomes the greatest maternal counsel which Mary addresses to the Church of every age: ‘Do whatever he tells you’ (John 2:5).

“This counsel is a fitting introduction to the words and signs of Christ's public ministry and it forms the Marian foundation of all the ‘mysteries of light’” (ibid.).

We can ask Our Lady, Mediatrix of all Graces, that she might help us to live out our baptismal vocation in all the moments where God is calling us throughout our whole life.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

MVF