Baptism and Mission, Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord, January 11, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Baptism of the Lord, Year A
January 11, 2026
Is 42:1-4.6-7, Ps 29, Acts 10:34-38, Mt 3:13-17

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• All four of the Gospel writers focus on Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. It shows how central the baptism of Jesus is in presenting and understanding his life and saving work. But his baptism is confusing. All those who were going out to the Jordan River to be baptized by John were there for a baptism of repentance. They were self-consciously sinners who, having heard John’s message of conversion, of making straight the paths for the coming of the Messiah, were entering into the waters with John, symbolically showing their need to be interiorly cleansed of their sins. Jesus, however, was sinless. There was not only no need for him to enter the waters but his lining up among sinners to be baptized by John rightly shocked John, who tried to prevent it. “I need to be baptized by you and yet you are coming to me!,” he exclaimed. John had already declared that he was baptizing with water but someone was coming after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, someone whose sandals John considered himself unworthy to unfasten. Jesus, he would announce, was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, not a sullied sheep needing to have his sins removed. But Jesus told John, as we heard in today’s Gospel, to permit it, in order to “fulfill all righteousness.” Yes, Jesus’ baptism was not to remove any sins in Jesus, but God’s plan to restore justice after the sins of Adam and Eve and you and me, to set things right between the human race and God. The Lamb of God needed as Good Shepherd to lead his flock through the waters of Baptism to restore us to a proper relationship with God. While John’s baptism symbolized our need to be forgiven of our sins but couldn’t take those sins away, Jesus’ entering into the waters of the Jordan sanctified not only those waters, but all the waters God had created, so that, later, in the baptisms Jesus and his Church would do, they would be able to effect what the cleansing immersion of baptism symbolized — and actually take away those sins. Jesus through his baptism leads all of us to the Jordan where his baptism there points to his baptism of blood on Calvary that fulfilled what his baptism in water foretold. His baptism, in other words, gives a glimpse, a summary, of his whole saving life and work.
• But while most look to the baptism of John as a symbol and of the Church as a sacrament or efficacious sign of the wiping away of our sins, that is only a part of what baptism involves. The more important part is how God seeks to fill us after he has cleansed us. That’s seen in what happens after Jesus emerges from the water. God the Father thunders from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, revealing that Jesus is indeed the one whom Isaiah prophesied who would be able to say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” Together it is the fulfillment of today’s first reading from Isaiah, in which God the Father says, “Here is my servant,” the word principally means “obedient Son,” “whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my spirit; he shall bring forth justice to the nations.” He is the Son, he is pleasing, he is anointed by the Holy Spirit.
• By Jesus’ baptism, there is a manifestation of Jesus’ identity, an epiphany, a theophany pointing to him and to what he seeks to do in every one of the baptized. Throughout Church history, three epiphanies of Jesus are connected, and we can still see this in various prayers for the Solemnity of the Epiphany we celebrated last week. The first is the epiphany that took place when the wise men came to Jesus in Bethlehem; the second is the Baptism of Jesus; and the third is the wedding feast of Cana, which happened at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry after the baptism, when Jesus revealed his glory and the divine power he had to change not only water into wine, or even later wine into blood, but sinners into saints. Insofar as it was only St. Matthew who recorded the epiphany in Bethlehem, and only St. John who recalled the epiphany in Cana, the fact that all four evangelists remember the epiphany at the Jordan shows how important this epiphany is. It’s important not just for understanding the life of Jesus and recognizing his divinity as a person within the Blessed Trinity; it’s important because that’s what happens in the baptism Jesus came to inaugurate that would fulfill the righteousness he came to bring. The most important thing about the Sacrament of Baptism is not the incredible gift of the forgiveness of sins, original and personal; it’s the gift of divine filiation by which God the Father adopts us as his beloved sons and daughters and proclaims, “This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” It’s that we not only are cleansed to receive the divine indwelling but that the Holy Spirit in fact comes down upon us to make us his temple.
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the meaning of Jesus’ baptism by teaching, “The baptism of Jesus is on his part the acceptance and 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.’ Already he is anticipating the ‘baptism’ of his bloody death. Already he is coming to ‘fulfill all righteousness,’ that is, 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. The Spirit whom Jesus possessed in fullness from his conception comes to ‘rest on him.’ Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all mankind. At his baptism ‘the heavens were opened’ — 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. Through Baptism the Christian is sacramentally assimilated to Jesus, who in his own baptism anticipates his death and resurrection.” It goes on to make the application of Jesus’ baptism to us: “The Christian must enter into this mystery of humble self-abasement and repentance, 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.” Baptism is the foundation of our whole Christian life, what the Catechism calls, vitae spiritualis ianua, the gate of the spiritual life. It’s what makes possible our receptivity to all the Sacraments, because they’re all intensifications of the new life baptism gives.
• At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed in communion with the whole Church, “Almighty, ever-living God, who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well pleasing to you.” We pray on this day for the grace always to please the Lord. Our vocation in life is by the power of the Holy Spirit to follow Jesus in pleasing God the Father. We do that, first and foremost, by living up to our identity as beloved children of the Father, as temples of the Holy Spirit, and sons and daughters in Christ the Son. It means to live free from sin and alive for Christ Jesus. It’s continuously to renounce Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and live in communion with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, with all the other members of the Holy Catholic Church, professing our faith in the forgiveness of sins through baptism, in the communion of saints united in one baptism, in the resurrection of the body and life every lasting that baptism makes possible. It’s living with God’s help according to our baptismal call to holiness.
• There’s a second way we live well-pleasing to God the Father. We learn this from Jesus. Tight after his baptism, Jesus went into the desert for a 40-day retreat, and then emerged immediately thereafter preaching and teaching. That’s why we mark the end of the Christmas season now with the Feast of his Baptism, because his entering the Jordan both concluded his years of hidden life and inaugurated his public ministry. His baptism was the beginning of the epiphany of his saving work. In a similar way, our baptism is not meant to be a private event between us and God. It’s similarly meant to inaugurate our public ministry, our mission. For us to be faithful to our baptismal calling, for us to be well-pleasing to God, we must take seriously our identity as missionary disciples in communion with God and with all the members of the Church, including those who are now among the communion of saints in the Church triumphant. That’s why Jesus, at the very end of his earthly life, immediately before the Ascension, entrusted to us the continuation of his saving work. In his earthly valedictory, he said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and proclaim the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and knowing that I am with you always, until the end of the age.” With his own authority, he wants us to bring people first to baptism, to immersion in God’s Trinitarian life, by which God wipes away our sins and brings us into communion with him and others. But then Jesus wants us to become formed formators, evangelized evangelizers. He wants us trained not to just to “know” everything he’s taught but to “observe” everything he has commanded, conscious that he is very much with us still and always. To be faithful to our vocation and well-pleasing to God is to help others come to receive the grace of baptism and learn how to live holiness of life — and the freedom from sin and freedom for love that it makes possible. In the Rite of Baptism, we see this point about mission underlined. The bishop, priest or deacon does the Epaphtha prayer over our ears and mouth, asking God to bless our ears so that we may receive his word and our mouths so that we may proclaim “his” faith (faith in him) “to the praise and glory of God the Father.” We likewise see it in the rite of the baptismal candle. Having been filled with the light of Christ symbolized by the Paschal Candle, we are summoned to live our identity as the light of the world, symbolized by our baptismal candle, and keep that light burning brightly, illuminating others with the light of faith and warming others with flame of Christian charity.
• Today as we remember our baptism and renew our baptismal promises, we also renew our commitment to be God’s instruments to lead others to the saving waters of baptism and to the newness of life to which baptism calls us. We renew our summons to continue Jesus’ public ministry. We renew our calling to be missionary disciples and ask God’s help to be faithful. In today’s second reading, we have the beautiful words of the apostle St. Peter in the house of the pagan centurion Cornelius, where Peter had gone to baptize Cornelius and his whole gentile family. Peter said, “In truth, … God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” God, Peter proclaims, doesn’t play favorites. He wants everyone to come to communion with him. He wills all to be saved and the fundamental means he established is baptism and the life to which baptism leads. God is interested in 100 out of 100 or, in today’s numbers, 8.1 billion out of 8.1 billion. And Jesus gives us and all our brothers and sisters in the Church the great mission to go to the whole world and seek to bring everyone with us to the waters flowing from the Jordan all the way to the eternal Jerusalem. That’s our public ministry. That’s the way we will live as Jesus lived. That’s the way we will be so pleasing to God.
• There’s a beautiful procession in the Rite of baptism from the baptismal font to before the altar, where, together with the newly baptized and for infants in their name, we pray the Our Father, a sign that we know we are indeed beloved sons and daughters of God the Father in whom he is well pleased. That procession happens to show that baptism leads to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith, as Jesus fulfills his promise to remain with us always by coming to be our very food and dwelling within us. This is the way he seeks to strengthen and help us become pleasing to the Father. As we prepare now to renew our baptismal faith in the Creed and to receive that nourishment from the altar to which our baptism points, we ask the Lord to help us always to remember the Christian dignity we received in Baptism, remain faithful to our baptismal vocation, live always as beloved children of God the Father, spread with missionary zeal the gift of our faith, and come, one day, to experience that eternal life that Baptism makes possible.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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