The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, January 11, 2004

            The background scene for today’s Gospel is that occasion when the prophet John the Baptist was baptizing the many people who were coming to him because they were repenting, turning from, their sins.  They were coming to John because they could no longer carry the heavy weight of their guilt; they were tired of the false promise of freedom that sin offers.  They were there at the Jordan River to receive God’s liberating forgiveness.  Then a singular figure, a man, steps forward through the crowd and kneels down in the water in front of the Baptist.  “Lord,” John protests, “it is I who need baptism from you; and yet you come to me?”  “Leave it like this for the time being,” Jesus replied, “it is fitting that we should, in this way, do all that uprightness demands.”

            Why would Christ, perfect man and sinless, why would He receive a baptism that is for sinners? is the question that always accompanies the celebration of today’s feast.  But we can go deeper than that and could also ask, Why would Christ, perfect man and sinless, why would He bear the sins of the world and suffer and be crucified under such an immense burden?  And we can go even further back, and ask why would Christ, the perfect, eternal Son of the eternal Father, the Son of God, become man, taking upon Himself the frailties of human flesh and the painful consequences of our sins? 

            I ask such questions because we are in danger these days of losing awareness of the real meaning of so much of our faith, including the meaning of baptism.  For we live in a day when Christ, instead of being the key, the doorway, to the great majesty and mystery of God, is merely an unusually nice fellow who has showed us how to be reasonably nice and comfortable with ourselves (sometimes including even comfortable with evil); and baptism is the way we start off in this life of being nice and open, and of belonging to a group of people who think of themselves as being unusually nice; baptism becomes, then, a kind of “rite of passage” much like other important moments in growing up – a birthday party, going to school, getting one’s driver’s license, etc.  Strange how different is the Church’s understanding and the biblical discussion of baptism.  There we find such terminology, almost frightening, as “Do you not know,” St. Paul accusingly asks the Christians of first-century Rome -- “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”  “Repent and be baptized,” St. Peter preached the first Christian sermon after the Resurrection of Christ from the dead -- “Repent and be baptized so that you might be forgiven your sins.”  Or as it is expressed in the baptismal rite itself:  “May all who are buried with Christ in the death of baptism rise also with him to newness of life.”  Here, then, is baptism as the Church understands it, a glorious sacrament prefigured in the Old Testament by the story of the primordial flood of Noah that washed the earth clean of sin, human evil, and gave the human race a new beginning; or prefigured by the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea, leaving the slavery of Egypt behind and entering into the new life of the Promised Land. 

            Why was Christ Himself baptized?  Certainly, so that He might express His desire to fully identify with men and women, with all people in their human joys and trials and sufferings.  He was baptized to show the depth of His solidarity with His creatures who need so desperately a fresh start in life, a freedom from the bondage of sin and the hope of a joyous and unending life to come.  But He was also baptized, as the Church Fathers loved to relate, in order to transform the waters of the world now in the hands of His Church into a vehicle for the dispensing upon a human soul, a human being, God’s love, forgiveness and God’s very life itself. 

            I received a glimpse of the reality of this years ago, while serving as a priest in Charlotte, when one morning I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone.  As I groped for the receiver, I noticed the clock -- 3am -- and I guessed rightly that some tragedy had struck.  On the other end of the line the chaplain at the local hospital told me that there was a little child dying and that the parents had requested a priest to come.  I went over quickly and walked into the room.  There lying before me was a three-year old girl, beautiful as an angel, almost gone from this world.  I prayed over the child, the nurses around us knelt down, and I took a glass of water and slowly poured it over her little head three times saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.” 

            A little dramatic scene in a hospital room in Charlotte, North Carolina at 3:20am, on a certain winter day almost 6 years ago.  But really much more, much more, was going on.  Something that really happened some 2,000 years ago became truly present in that room with a dying child surrounded by nurses, a priest bending over a little frail body almost expiring, pouring water, saying some words.  Something that happened 2,000, I am telling you, broke into the sadness of that scene and shattered it to pieces.  If we only had eyes to see, we would have been astounded by the rolling back of the curtains of time and space and would have beheld the most sorrowful and tragic figure of a Man dying on a cross and almost simultaneously a bright, unearthly light breaking out of an empty tomb.  All that was done and accomplished in this both grisly and glorious scene -- all of it -- poured forth from that glass over the head of that precious little girl in the hospital, and it flooded her soul with light.  That is baptism.

            If we only had eyes to see!  But in a sense we do.  It is called faith.  Not something that is a substitute for reason, for thinking, but something, a power, that opens up for us what the reason could never have discovered by itself, but which it can begin to understand and appreciate -- faith born out events in history, things that really happened -- a man about thirty years old, kneeling in the water of a river and being baptized by St. John, so that we, people of all times and places, might be baptized into His suffering and death so that we might rise with Him to new life, living that life of faith, hope and love now on this earth and gaining, like that little girl that early morning in the hospital -- gaining the everlasting life, God’s own life, that Christ won for us.