For over 50 years now, this feast of the Lord’s Baptism has been raised in stature, given a higher rank in our annual calendar. And why? Because it holds so much.
Now, just as Eastertide ends with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the first believers (Pentecost), so Christmastide ends with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Jesus himself. Out of the Spirit’s coming on Jesus flows his public life, out of his coming on the disciples flows the life of the Church. The Holy Spirit is “the Giver of life”; he opens doors and sends out.
Today too, the Lord shines out. He shines out in his humility, as a servant: when he receives the baptism of John, which he didn’t need, he was identifying himself with sinners, sharing their lot. And he shines out in his glory too: the Holy Spirit hovers over him and a voice from the Father declares him a beloved Son. In this double vision, as it were, we can already see ahead to his Passion and Death, when he was “humbler yet, even to death on the Cross”, following fallen humanity all the way. And we see ahead to his Resurrection, when the Holy Spirit will fill his crucified body with indestructible life, and the Father say again: “You are my Son; this day I have begotten you”. So, already, what happens at the Jordan looks forward to Jerusalem, his beginning to his end, his baptism to the Last Supper, water to blood. How whole Christ is! How obedient to his Father! How worth following!
And with his baptism, he inaugurates ours. Let’s dwell on this. Jesus humbled himself before John, humbled himself by going down under the water, down and then up. There’s symbolism here. The ancients had a real feeling for the ambivalence of water. It can give life and take it. It can flood – think of tsunamis, remember what happened in Valencia not long ago. It can drown. It can kill. Think of the sea, “immense and contemptuous” (Kipling). The old myths peopled rivers and seas with dragons, monsters, demons, destructive forces hidden in water, just as they’re hidden in us. And so, from such a perspective, the Lord went down into the water to fight our ancient enemy, to crush the head of the serpent, and came up with the Holy Spirit above him and the Father’s love around him, to show us his victory. Today he’s a new Moses parting the waters for us to go free, a new Noah riding the Flood, a new Adam overcoming the Evil One.
This may sound a bit rich and overdone – “too much for breakfast” as Alice in Wonderland says. But this is what baptism is – his first, then ours. He “sanctified the waters”, say the Fathers. He made them an ally of the Holy Spirit, able to drown sin and dispel demons, able to give, not just natural but supernatural life, eternal life. Today’s feast gives us our baptism afresh. Today, it would be great to re-read, to re-pray as an adult, the prayers that were said over us and the rites that were performed when we were baptised: when we were exorcised from the power of the devil and cleansed of original sin, anointed, clothed in a white garment, given a light to hold and to be; when we renounced Satan and professed the Trinity; when we went under the water, being buried with Christ, to rise with him as sons and daughters of the Father, sisters, brothers one of another and “heirs…to the hope of eternal life”.
Brothers and Sisters, we’re in the Jubilee Year, the Year of Hope. So, we scrabble around in our topsy-turvy lives looking for reasons for hope. And here is one. Here it is, down there in the font. The first thing we did when the Jubilee opened was to remember our baptism, gathered round the font. It’s the first reason for hope – already in us if we are baptised, or waiting for us if we’ll be baptised at Easter.
Our baptism is a sure and ever-fresh reason for hope. “See what kind of love the Father has given us, wrote St John, that we should be called children of God, and so we are” (1 John 3:1). Baptism redefines us. If we were baptised as babies, it’s a shining sign that God has loved us first (cf. 1 John 4:19). If we were baptised later, after searching, or perhaps after a colourful career in sin, then now, says St Paul, we’ve been washed, sanctified, justified “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 6:11), a new creation. Whatever the process, divine mercy has led us to the waters, “to the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Tit 3:5). We have a spring of water within us welling up to eternal life (cf. Jn 4:14). We’re pilgrims now with a goal (the heavenly Jerusalem), a compass to guide us (faith), rations to sustain us (God’s word, God’s bread), companions by our side (our fellow-believers). We are part of a great company heading out of darkness into light. And most of all, having gone down into and up from the water with Christ, we’re stronger than all life’s dragons and monsters. We can overcome the demons, real and figurative, that try to grab us by the heel. We’re winners.
An Italian priest would encourage his parishioners, saying “Ave Maria e avanti!”
Brothers and Sisters, today let’s put our lives back into that stream of hope which springs from our baptism.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 12 January 2025
