Baptism of the Lord

St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Mk 1:7-11

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
11 Jan 2009

During the past week the situation has moved quickly in the cycle during the liturgical year which commemorates the events in Our Lord's life. 

Last Sunday we celebrated the feast of the Epiphany remembering the visit of the wise men from the East to the baby Jesus, anticipating the universal message of salvation which Christ would announce.

Today we have moved on nearly thirty years to the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, a ceremony which occurred as Jesus was about to commence his public life.

Baptism, a blessing accompanied by the pouring of water over the head or by the immersion in water of the person to be baptised, was not a mainstream Jewish celebration, although one group of Jews called the Essenes had ritual washings with water in their monasteries as they struggled to purify their hearts.  John the Baptist probably spent some time with them as a child and young man, because the Jewish monks took in young recruits to live with them and it was John's practice of baptism, which he conferred on his followers, which Jesus received and the Church adopted in its sacrament of baptism.  However for John the Baptist and for the Church baptism can only be conferred once, distinguishing it from the regular ceremonies of the Essenes.

We find brief accounts of Our Lord's baptism in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, where all agree that John was the celebrant, that Jesus was immersed in the Jordan river, and that the event was accompanied by a theophany, where the Spirit of God in the form of a dove appeared, announcing that Jesus was God's beloved Son and that God's favour rested upon him.

In faith we are all called to believe that God has a plan for each one of us, which we should endeavour to recognize and embrace by accepting what we call our "vocation".  God has to be adaptable, because having the gift of free will we sometimes sin and sometimes don't listen for God's call; or more rarely, reject what we suspect God might be wanting for us.  Priests, brothers and nuns are not the only people with vocations as every person fits into God's plan.

With billions of people in the world today and billions who have gone before us and billions more to come, a Godly plan for each of us seems too much even for God!  The prodigious capacity of giant computers to store and rearrange billions of pieces of information, a human invention, throws new light on God's capacity to be interested in each one of us.  I was also struck by the capacity of the English author J. R. Tolkien in his huge novel "The Lord of the Rings" to bring together all the struggles, misfortunes and mistakes of his characters to the desired conclusion.  For some reason, not entirely clear to me, this helped me better appreciate the reality of God's providence for each one of us.

God obviously had special plans for his only Son Jesus, but where does this baptism fit?  Why it was necessary or appropriate for Jesus to be baptised?

Most of the commentators associated the baptism with Jesus' claim that he was the Messiah, the leader who the Jews were expecting to come and provide political and religious leadership for them.

We are told that there was no single image of the Messiah throughout the Jewish community in Jesus' day, but being the Messiah was not seen as a claim to divinity.

The concept of the Messiah was linked to the Temple and Jewish royalty so that it was expected this public figure would struggle against and defeat evil, bring back Israel politically or symbolically from exile and reinstate God in Zion; vindicate the universal claims of the one true God.

Our Lord was not a simple country lad with the four evangelists as spin doctors and Paul in particular as the theoretician and strategist who directed the propaganda campaign.  Jesus was a profound theologian, original and subtle, who impressed the New Testament writers and provided them through his teaching and activities with the foundations for their theologizing.

Our Lord believed that God's kingdom and Israel's destiny were fulfilled through him; he was to fight Israel's battles and a new religious community or identity would be forged around him.  This was his conviction long before his suffering and death, although he could not announce it too soon or too clearly because it would cause trouble with both civic and religious authorities and provoke misleading political hopes among many of the people.

Through symbolic actions such as his driving the money changers from the Temple and his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus claimed the Messiah-ship.

But equally importantly, he pointed to his baptism by John to legitimize his claims.  John was the last of the prophets who announced the one, who was the Saviour.   Jesus' baptism by John confirmed this.

We cannot enter into the psychology of Jesus at this point.  We cannot pinpoint the mysterious workings of his divine and human natures to say that he received God's call and recognized it at that stage or that the ceremony was a public confirmation of the special call He had long acknowledged.  This is a mystery.

But the Jewish prophecies were fulfilled in a paradoxical way by Jesus the Messiah.  He did not restore the Temple or free Israel from the Romans, but he broke the power of evil and established a new Kingdom of God on earth.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.