Baptism of the Lord (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 8, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Baptism of the Lord, C, Vigil
January 8, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation God the Father has with God the Son in this Sunday’s Gospel, as we ponder the scene of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River by John and its consequences in your life and mine.
• The liturgical celebration of the Baptism of the Lord Jesus culminates the celebration of the Christmas season. It symbolically finishes Jesus’ three decades of hidden life as God the Father announces at the Jordan what was concealed from the beginning from almost everyone except from Mary and Joseph, a few shepherds, the wise men, Simeon and Anna and a handful of others: that Jesus is God’s own beloved Son in whom he is well pleased.
• The celebration of Jesus’ baptism culminates the Christmas season in another way as well, because it points to our baptism, which is the means by which we enter into the saving work Jesus was born into our world to accomplish. We’ve been singing in Hark! The Herald Angels Singsince Christmas day, “Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.” Christ through his incarnation has made it possible for us through baptism to enter into the mystery and meaning of Christmas and the immortality, resurrection and second birth that that baptism promises in this world and forever. Jesus entered the waters of the Jordan precisely in order to bless those waters so that they could bring about this second birth, so that what John’s baptism pointed to could actually be accomplished: John’s baptism indicated our and others’ need for spiritual cleansing, for the forgiveness of sin, for the triumph over the death to which sins lead us, but John’s baptism couldn’t actually take those sins away or deliver those goods. This is the truth to which John the Baptist pointed to in Sunday’s Gospel when he contrasted his baptism with the one Jesus and the Church Jesus founded would carry out: “I am baptizing you with water,” John said, “but one mightier than I is coming. … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” When Jesus entered the water to be baptized, he sanctified the water so that the sign of washing could actually bring about the interior purification it signified and make it possible for us to be raised and born anew.
• But the baptism Jesus would inaugurate would do far more than that. It would enable the sons of earth to enter into the very life of God. As we see in this Sunday’s Gospel, when Jesus was baptized, three things happened. First, heaven was opened. Second, The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus. Third, a voice came from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son; with whom I am well pleased.” The event of Jesus’ baptism gave us a glimpse into heaven, into the very life of God. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit manifest in this world their relationship with God the Son that has existed in heaven since the beginning. God the Father pronounces Jesus his much loved and all pleasing Son. Great Trinitarian theologians and saints, like St. Augustine, have explained the Trinity as love. God the Father is the eternal lover, God the Son as the eternal beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the eternal love between the Father and the Son so strong as to take on personality. When God the Father speaks at the Jordan pronouncing Jesus as his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased, He is just making explicit what has always been and will always be within the Blessed Trinity. Similarly when the Holy Spirit comes down from the Father in heaven upon the Son whose assumed humanity was wet in the Jordan, it is just a manifestation of the love between Father and Son whom the Holy Spirit has been since before the foundation of the world. Therefore at the Baptism of Jesus, we are able to eavesdrop on the eternal consequential conversation that takes place between the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. St. John refers to God in his prologue as the Logos, “In the beginning was the Logosand the Logoswas before God and the Logoswas God.” We normally translate Logos as “Word,” but as the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote in a 1980s work called Feast of Faith, logos can also be translated as “conversation,” as an interpersonal tri-alogue between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We hear, and see, an echo of that eternal three-person dialogue at Jesus’ baptism.
• But what is incredible is that in Baptism, we are able to enter into that conversation between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All three things that happened in the baptism of Jesus occur in our Baptism. First, heaven is opened; we’re not just purified of sin but made heirs of heaven and eternal life. In entering the Jordan, Jesus converted it into what he would later call, in his dialogue with the woman at the well in Samaria, “Living Water,” that would well up within us to eternal life, because as our bodies are sprinkled or immersed on the outside, on the inside we are filled with Jesus that Living Water. Second, the Holy Spirit comes down upon us to dwell within us and make us his temple. The cleansing that happens in Baptism “of the Holy Spirit and of fire” is precisely to make us an abode of God, so that he might dwell in us and us in him, not just here in this world but forever. The Holy Spirit incorporates us into the Mystical Body of Christ and we are mysteriously inducted into the interpersonal conversation who is the Holy Trinity. And third, God the Father turns toward us, incorporated through baptism into Jesus his Son in his humanity, and says, “This is my beloved Son, this is my much loved daughter, in whom I am well-pleased.” In Baptism, full as we are with Jesus the Living Water and the Holy Spirit the purifying fire, we are filled with the love of God the Father by our communion with God the Son and receiving of the Holy Spirit who is the love between the Father and the Son. Saint John would exclaim to the Christians of the early Church, “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.” In Baptism, we become God the Father’s much loved sons and daughters who takes pleasure in us just as anyone in the presence of a beloved is filled with joy. And the work of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in us as a result of Baptism is meant to help us always be pleasing to him. This is what we will ask God the Father in the Opening Prayer of Sunday’s Mass. We ask God the Father “Who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, [to] grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well-pleasing to you.” We will be always well-pleasing to God the Father by living out the reality of our baptism, the reality of our incorporation into Christ his Son, the reality of being filled with the Holy Spirit and with fire and zeal, the reality of being set free from sin so that we might live a new, holy life and pass through the open portal of heaven.
• That’s why the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord is always meant to be a time for us to reflect on the awesome reality of our own Baptism. On the Day of our Baptism, we could say we won the greatest lottery of all time. Not for any merit of our own, but by God’s grace and, for those of us baptized as infants, the faith of our parents, we were brought to the baptismal font, changed inwardly, and made joint heirs with Christ of the Kingdom of Heaven. We became members of the divine royal family. We were given God’s own immortal life inside of us and made capable of living in a holy communion with him. That’s why the day of our Baptism is by far the most important day of our life. St. Louis IX, King of France in the 13th century, always signed his official documents not “Louis, Roi de France,” but “Louis de Poissy.” When those in his court asked him the reason for this practice, he said very simply, “Poissy is the place where I was baptized. That is more important to me than the Cathedral of Rheims, where I was crowned king. It is a greater thing to be a child of God than to be ruler of a kingdom: the earthly kingdom I shall lose at death; but the other will be my passport to everlasting glory.” He recognized the importance of the day of baptism. That’s why, as Pope Francis never ceases to beg, we should know and celebrate the day of our baptism, thank God for the gift he has given, pray for the person who baptized us and for our parents and Godparents. That’s why we should never cease to ponder the reality of what occurred on that day, when we rejected Satan, all his empty promises and evil works, and professed our faith and trust in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in the holy Catholic Church in communion with all of the saints. On that day, the sacred minister prayed over our ears and lips so that we might hear his word and proclaim his faith in a way well-pleasing to God. We were covered with a white garment, an external sign of what happens to our soul in baptism, and instructed to take that white garment unstained to the eternal life of heaven, as our vesture for the heavenly wedding feast. Our baptismal candle was lit from the Easter Candle, a sign that we are now burning with the light of Christ risen from the dead, and were told, with our parents and godparents to help us, to keep that light burning with the flame of faith like the wise virgins until Christ the Bridegroom returns. And then we processed to the altar and prayed together the Our Father as beloved, well-pleasing sons and daughters of God, together with Jesus and moved inwardly by the Holy Spirit who helps us to cry out “Abba, Father.” We celebrate this reality on the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism as an anticipation of the celebration we should have every year on the anniversary of the day the heavens were opened, the Holy Spirit came down, and God the Father pronounced us his beloved child.
• That most important day of our life finished around the altar, a sign that the Sacrament of Baptism always is meant to lead to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, where God Father, Son and Holy Spirit seeks to bring us ever more into the divine consequential conversation. As we prepare for Mass this Sunday, let us with gratitude renew the promises of our baptism, clean our white garments, turn up the flame of the baptismal candle we’ve become, open our ears to hear his word and our lips to proclaim our faith as we thank God for the awesome gift of being with Jesus his beloved sons and daughters and beg for the grace to be maximally pleasing to him in this life so that we may have the privilege with all the saints to enter heaven, which baptism opens, and please and praise him forever.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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