.png)
John tried to prevent him, saying,
“I need to be baptized by you,
and yet you are coming to me?”
John was not wrong to be surprised. After all, his baptism was one of repentance for forgiveness of sins, and Jesus had never sinned. He was the lamb of God, and therefore without blemish or spot (see First Peter 1:19). Further, John knew that Jesus himself was the one who alone could baptize with the Holy Spirit, something that even John needed and desired.
Jesus said to him in reply,
“Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
to fulfill all righteousness.”
There was more to the plan the even John recognized. In the incarnation Jesus came near to men and women in order to communicate his teachings and demonstrate his love. A central aspect of this demonstration was his desire to share our lot, and to identify himself with us as fully as he could. What was necessary for us because of our sin and God's justice Jesus elected for himself out of mercy and compassion. Jesus thus visited and transformed all these places of alienation where God might have seemed the most distant into genuine encounters with God himself. This was true of baptism, which, without Jesus, could not become a truly saving reality. And it was also true of death, which baptism symbolically represented. Because Jesus died, although he did not deserve death, we were made able to live eternally through his mercy. It was in this way that God acting in the person of Jesus himself turned reality upside down in order to fulfill all righteousness. His own righteousness was unassailable, even able to bear the weight of identification with sinners such as ourselves. And because he did so he fulfilled God's plan to make us genuinely, truly righteous with the righteousness that was his own. Thus what was his by nature was fulfilled in us as his gift.
After Jesus was baptized,
he came up from the water and behold,
the heavens were opened for him,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
and coming upon him.
The baptism of Jesus represented the beginning of a new creation. Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters in the beginning, just as the dove brought back evidence of dry ground to Noah after the flood, so too the Spirit here was revealing a new reality, a new foundation on which lives of righteousness could be built. Therefore all of us who have been baptized are new creations in Christ.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (see Second Corinthians 5:17).
Those of us who were baptized as infants may tend to take it for granted but baptism is a genuine transformation. We are the ones whose eyes have been enlightened by Jesus the "light for the nations". We are the ones who would have otherwise been prisoners in the confinement and darkness of sin but are instead able to live in the light of truth and the freedom of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself was "formed" and "set" as a "covenant of the people" and it is in baptism that we were welcomed as members of this covenant family. Jesus himself is this Covenant, and it is his "blood of the New Covenant" (see Luke 22:20) that we receive every time we go to mass, drawing us ever more deeply into the reality of this new creation and this supernatural family.
Here is my servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one with whom I am pleased,
upon whom I have put my spirit;
After he was baptized Jesus heard the words of the Father giving testimony to his identity as the only begotten Son. But the Father also speaks over and claims everyone who receives the Sacrament of Baptism as his own beloved sons and daughters.
However, through the divine sonship conferred by baptism, it can be said that the Father's words, "You are my beloved son", apply to every person baptized and grafted on to Christ.- John Paul II, General Audience (1 April 1998).
No comments:
Post a Comment