Entering More Fully Through Baptism into What Jesus’ Baptism Accomplished, Baptism of the Lord (C), January 9, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Year C
January 9, 2022
Is 40:1-5.9-11, Ps 104, Tit 2:11-14;3:4-7, Lk 3:15-16.21-22

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today’s 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 effectuate. We’ve been singing in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing since 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 today’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.
• 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. When Jesus was baptized, three things happened, as we see in today’s Gospel. 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 Logos and the Logos was before God and the Logos was 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.

• What happens in our Baptism is that we are able — incredibly — 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 asked 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. We celebrate our birthdays. In many culture we celebrate our saints’ days. We celebrate the anniversaries of marriage, of priestly ordination, and religious profession. But we don’t have a culture of celebrating what is the most important day of our life! We need to change that and Pope Francis every year challenges us to.**
• Because the day of our baptism is so important, we should never cease to ponder the reality of what occurred on that day. Paul describes it in today’s second reading to St. Titus and all of us: “When the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life.” In baptism we are reborn, made just with God by his grace, filled with the Holy Spirit, and become heirs to eternal life. In the first reading we hear the Isaiah’s prophetic words we hear every Advent, “Comfort, give comfort to my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her [that] her guilt is expiated,” which are fulfilled when God we, through baptism, enter into the atonement Christ won for us by his Baptism in blood and are strengthened by him on the inside. What a great comfort indeed! Psalm 104, which we prayed today, reminds us that God has constructed his palace “upon the waters” and sends forth his spirit, to recreate us and “renew the face of the earth.” God makes us his dwelling place upon the waters of baptism and the Holy Spirit seeks to renew the world by renewing one baptized Christian at a time.
• The Baptismal Rite helps us to continue to ponder the reality of what happened on the day of our Baptism. 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. 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.
• Saint Teresa of Calcutta never ceased to thank God for the gift of her Baptism, and her words and actions showed the importance that gratitude for our baptism should have in life.. She was baptized in Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Skopje on August 27, 1910, the day after she was born and she called August 27 her “true birthday.” She said that the whole call to holiness is based on baptism, because like we see revealed in today’s Gospel, the love of God that is manifest in baptism is, she said, “the rock on which sanctity is built.” In 1997, during the Year of Jesus Christ in preparation for the great Jubilee of 2000, “Sanctity is nothing but … Jesus intimately living in you, the same life we received at Baptism grown up and made perfect.” The life we receive in Baptism is supposed to be completed, through cooperating with the promises of baptism. And it’s because of the importance of baptism that she focused so much on making sure people die being offered the awesome privilege of Baptism and considered it one of the great joys that in the houses that care for the dying, so many have received this divine gift. Today we ask her intercession that we may live out the gift of baptism — the gift of being loved by God, of being filled with the Holy Spirit, of having Jesus live within us — as fully as she did and seek, as missionaries of divine love, to bring as many people as we can to receive that same gift.
• 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 the mystery of Jesus living in us grows toward perfection. As we approach the altar today, let us burst with gratitude to God for this awesome gift, renew our baptismal promises, make sure our white garments are clean, 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 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 Saint Teresa of Calcutta and all the saints to enter heaven, which baptism opens, and please and praise him forever.

**After the Mass, the Sisters told me that they happily already have the tradition of celebrating their baptismal anniversaries, that the have a board with all of their baptismal anniversaries and they they mark them together with joy every year. I told them that I hope that their blessed tradition spreads throughout the entire Church! 

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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