Baptism of the Lord, Year C
First Reading: Is 40:1–5, 9–11
Second Reading: Ti 2:11–14; 3:4–7
Gospel Reading: Lk 3:15–16, 21–22
In 1955, Pope Pius XII separated the Feast of the Lord’s baptism from the Epiphany (then Jan. 6) and moved it to Jan. 13. In 1969, Pope St. Paul VI transferred it to the Sunday after Jan. 6. In 1996, Pope St. John Paul II made Christ’s baptism one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary.
Why is it so important? John proclaimed “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” but Jesus was sinless; why did he need baptism?
Jesus first took on the sin of the human race at his Incarnation, when he became man. With his baptism, at the beginning of his public life, he accepted and inaugurated “his mission as God’s suffering Servant,” allowing “himself to be numbered among sinners,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As John realized, he was already “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
Jesus told Nicodemus that to enter God’s Kingdom, he must be “begotten from above” of “water and Spirit.” Just before his Ascension, he told his apostles that anyone who believes in the good news and “accepts baptism will be saved,” while he who “refuses to believe in it will be condemned.”
Baptism is “the basis of the whole Christian life,” the Catechism says: the “gateway” to supernatural life and “the door which gives access” to the other sacraments, all of which “are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”
The ordinary minister of baptism is a bishop, priest, or deacon, but “in case of necessity such as danger of death, anyone may baptize”—and anyone should know how to.
Some years ago, a young man who had intended to become Catholic but had to relinquish his studies twice due to cancer returned to China to die. There, in an ICU where only his father, a Buddhist monk, was admitted, he asked to be baptized. His father phoned a woman who had taken my course The Catholic Faith in Plain English, and she, reading from my material, told him what to do: pour water three times over his son’s head, saying, at the same time, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
By the power of the Holy Spirit, that water and those words actually accomplished what they signified: namely death to sin and rebirth into the life of the Holy Trinity.
Indeed, water—which drowns us, cleanses us, refreshes us, and keeps us alive—symbolizes baptism very clearly. It “was both ‘your grave and your mother,’” St. Cyril told the newly baptized. Just as “the gestation of our first birth took place in water,” so our rebirth into supernatural life takes place in water, says the Catechism.
God had baptism in mind when he created water and used it throughout salvation history, Pope Francis said in his Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi. It was as if he wanted “to perfect” water by eventually making it “the water of baptism”—as if “he wanted to fill it with the movement of his Spirit hovering over the face of the waters” so that it would have within it “the power to sanctify”: to regenerate humanity through the Flood, open the way to freedom for the Israelites through the Red Sea, plunge into it “the flesh of the Word soaked in the Spirit” at Jesus’ baptism, blend it with the Blood of his Son on the cross, and pour it out from his pierced side.
Baptism, the Pope said, is not an act of “mental adhesion” to Christ’s thought, nor agreement with His “code of conduct.” Rather, it is “being plunged into His passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension”; being “inserted into the Body of Christ” and thus given “the possibility of dying and rising” in him.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2 – 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m. – noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is The Communion of the Saints in the Body of Christ.
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