THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST

Human nature is always human nature. I can imagine the shores of the River Jordan, lined up with throngs of people, minding ‘other people’s business’: “Look who is being baptized!’; or ‘So, that Greek merchant is a sinner too’; ‘Incredible, look, there is Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph the carpenter, I never thought …’. Yes these are samples of  the remarks of the gossipers. The reason is simple.

Originally the Jews were never baptised, because they were of the belief that being Jews and having their father Abraham, their salvation was guaranteed. The baptism was only for the neophytes, pagans, that is not Jews, who converted to Judaism. They might have been Greeks, Romans, Ethiopians, Egyptians etc. But the time came when,  after the preaching of John the Baptist, (the Readings we find during Advent), that the Jews started receiving Baptism too.

Jesus, being a Jew realised that this was the moment He had to start on His Mission, so He joined the others and went down to the Jordan to be baptised. But, entering the waters of the Jordan to be baptised had many implications. First of all that would be a declaration by the person being baptised, that he is a sinner, a man who wanted to repent and convert. There’s were the ‘gossip’ comes in.

Let’s refer to what St.Paul said,  that ”Jesus was like us, a human in everything, except in sin.” That means Jesus was sinless, yet He was burdened with sins, yes all the sins of humanity went down into the waters of the Jordan, shouldered by Jesus Himself; those were my sins, yours and of all humanity. So Jesus took upon Himself all the guilt of humanity, He took our place … we should have gone down in the Jordan to be baptised … The rite of baptism was by immersing the whole person into the water and after that the baptised comes out of the water, clean and free from sin.

This is a figure of the ‘Death and Resurrection’ of Jesus himself, He came out of the depths … on Easter Sunday. We realise why there was certain gossip going round, by busy-bodys on that day when  ‘The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world’ went down to the river to be baptised. But this should not surprise us, because even nowadays, in the year 2014, many are those who argue and say that such a thing cannot be explained; Jesus being baptised to cleanse Himself from guilt and sin. All this is lack of learning and instruction about the Holy Book. Yes, it can be explained.

John the Baptist did realise such an act to be heroic, and yet unworthy of  him to obey: “It is I who who should be baptised by You.”  He even deemed himself unfit, unworthy to touch the lace of His sandals. This IS the stuff great man are made of. We can trace the ‘golden thread’, the ‘mission statement’, ‘the line of action’, the ‘programme’, whch Christ wanted to follow and invite us to follow Him; this was, in word, ‘HUMILITY’ in anything He did.

The Creator was born ‘under the earth … in a cave’. Is not that humility? What woman would ever dream of giving birth to her child, in an unhealthy, unhygenic cave, surrounded by animals? We are all luckier than Jesus, in that regard. To add insult to injury, as we said in the previous posting, He grew up in a village, looked upon as an outlaw, an outcast; in Nazareth.

Now, to top it all, the cherry on the cake, HE had to go down in the Jordan as a sinner to be baptized. We should stop from our daily work, and reserve some time to think about the great significance of next Sunday’s Gospel Text, and not rely only on the Sunday Homily delivered by the priest.

“Thank you, Lord Jesus, for taking my place in the manger; for taking my place to learn what humility is (though You never needed it) by growing up in Nazareth; by going down in the Jordan instead of me to be cleansed from sin; for taking my place on the gibbet on Calvary. How lucky, how fortunate I am, how honoured and loved I am by YOU, my Lord and my God”.