Rite of Passage
The Baptism of the Lord. Fr Samuel Burke preaches on the human and superhuman need for baptism.
Saint Luke’s Gospel describes a remarkable scene in which all three persons of the Holy Trinity act explicitly in concert: the voice of God the Father from heaven; Jesus, God the Son, in the water; and the Holy Spirit descending as a dove. John’s baptism in the River Jordan is nothing short of another epiphany but one that may prompt various questions.
One such question was asked of me the other day by someone whom I was instructing for baptism. He asked why, since Jesus was God, he needed to be baptised. It’s a reasonable and fairly common question, and with which early Christians wrestled, in fact. After all, why would the Immaculate Lamb, the holy one, need to submit to an act of ritual purification?
Of course, Jesus didn’t need to be baptised since he’s not a sinner in need of purification, like you and me. Rather, as St. Ambrose put it, ‘Our Lord was baptised because He wished, not to be cleansed, but to cleanse the waters’. Ambrose is not here referring to some sort of clean river campaign. Jesus wants to cleanse the waters so as to cleanse us, to sanctify the water which can then purify us. This comes as welcome icing on the theological cake because Jesus had already taken on the sin of the human race at his incarnation, when he became a man ‘for our salvation,’ as we say in the Creed. And we have just celebrated all of that at Christmas over the past couple of weeks. So Christ was baptised not because he needed to be, but because we need to be. This need can be understood on at least two levels, I think.
First, there is a subtle human need for ritual and symbolic meaning. These days people can be quite sniffy about symbols and rituals. Take, for example, the pejorative term ‘ritualistic’. Yet a reductive Zeitgeist that would do away with ritual opens to a desolate wasteland. Is it any wonder we often hear of a hankering for meaning, a yearning for belonging? Might satisfaction be found in the very thing which such iconoclasm has deprived us?
The word ‘symbol’ comes from the Greek symbálein meaning ‘to bring together’. Rituals such as baptism are symbolic practices in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community. And there is a great deal of symbolism at work at the Baptism of the Lord, the start of his public ministry. Recall, for example, how the Israelites had passed through the River Jordan to come home to the Promised Land. This takes on a new significance for you and me by Christ’s baptism in that same river. This same water will bring us deliverance by his sanctification.
Secondly, our need for baptism also exists on a spiritual level. Baptism is not just a symbol but a sacrament. At baptism, through water and words, we are incorporated into the life of the Holy Trinity and become adopted sons and daughters. Sacraments are not mere signs, but rather are signs which, in the classic formula, effect what they signify and signify what they effect. Thus the water of baptism not only expresses an inner cleansing but brings it about. Baptism is then a rite of passage in the truest sense. By it we pass from darkness into light; from sin to freedom; from isolation to relationship with Christ.
In the Second Reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter recalls how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit enabling him to do good and heal all who were oppressed. ‘God was with him’, Peter recalls. And God is with us: He is Emmanuel, as acclaimed at Christmas. He is with us through our baptism, which we celebrate The Lord instituting today. He is with us but — dare I ask, searchingly — are we with Him?
Will you follow him? Where might it take you? Return to your baptism, the grace it confers, and the relationship it inaugurated. In this is to be found both meaning and belonging but, more importantly, salvation. For Christ has shown us the way beyond. Let the Holy Spirit guide our steps. And may the Father be well pleased at our earthly life’s end.
Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 | Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7 | Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
Image: detail from a mural painted at the church of John the Baptist at the River Jordan, photographed by David Bjorgen, CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons
