The story of the Lord’s Baptism as we hear it today in Saint Luke’s Gospel is told almost in passing, as we heard: “… and Jesus also had been baptized, and was praying…” Missing is the conversation between Jesus and John the Baptist in which John, surprised by the Lord’s appearance, hesitates and insists, “I should be coming to you for Baptism…”
The event of the Lord’s Baptism presents us with an ultimate and difficult paradox concerning the Lord’s vision of His act of Redemption. John’s Baptism was an essentially penitential act. It was a public and external act that expressed an inner change of disposition, and had as its effect the remission of sins, which Jesus would not need.
The Gospels begin with either stories or genealogies that point to Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, yet the Messiah’s first public appearance is as a participant in a communal ritual intended for the remittance and absolution of sins.
So, Saint John the Baptist makes a good point: Jesus, incapable of sin, did not need to take part in this ritual. Why, then, did Jesus request it… and follow through with it? It wasn’t simply an affirmation of John’s ministry, nor was it simply “making an appearance,” the way a parish priest might do in attending the school play or high school basketball game.
What could it mean that Jesus numbered Himself among sinners? There can be no doubt that the purpose of Our Lord’s life was to deal with sin. He became, as we hear in the Eucharistic Prayer, “… a man like us in all things but sin.” So, the meaning of His identifying with us sinners is to break down the barriers which sin creates, and which separate us from God.
In our contemporary understanding, Baptism washed away the effect of Original Sin. What is this effect? We can see it this way: The first two words an infant learns to say are Mama and Papa. What is the third word a child speaks? (“No!”) This primordial “No” in the midst of unmeasurable parental love and otherwise infantile innocence is Original Sin in its first manifestation.
Baptism provides the Grace to overcome this “No” in the beginning and ongoing development of conscience. What Jesus has done in accepting a Baptism He did not need, was to destroy the inevitability of sin, and to reform our free will with Grace that provides both prevention and a cure.
In order to understand how Jesus does this, let’s first make a brief definition of sin beyond the “primordial No” of Original Sin — that is — the willful choices we call Actual Sin. But, for so many of us, we have lost, or have at least diminished our sense of sin.
It may have begun 50 years ago with the psycho-emotional self-help processes, for example: Transactional Analysis: (you’ll remember: “I’m okay; you’re okay”) … and then grown through:
+ dissent (it’s not a sin) an objective re-definition
+ denial (I’m not actually sinning when I’m doing this) a subjective re-definition
+ latent (I decide what is true and false where sin is concerned) an overtly personal worldview.
All of this translates into larger society, creating confusion about the moral life, creating an anything-goes approach to virtue, and creating new societal values that turn the world upside-down where it comes to sin, virtue or holiness. One can see this amid the present transgender nonsense, in which it might be said: If a man can say he’s a woman, then a sinner can say he’s a saint.
For our benefit, this moral and spiritual insensitivity is addressed in two of the prayers we recite at Mass:
+ the Confiteor (“I confess to Almighty God…”)
+ the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world…”)
Let’s look at these closely.
The Confiteor
“I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned… in my thoughts and in my words… in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do… through my most grievous fault.”
We make this statement, “through my fault,” three times in order to transcend denial or dissent, or blaming of others for our sinful choices or omissions. As we recite these words, we beat our breasts three times, re-enacting an ancient physical gesture which demonstrates repentance.
This prayer allows us to make a public acclamation that we are sinners in need of forgiveness, as we did formerly in long lines outside the confessional, and not unlike the public penitential act in which Jesus joined the other people in line before John the Baptist at the Jordan River.
TheAgnus Dei
“Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world…”
Note here that we say sins, not sin… because sin and evil are not removed from the world through individual absolution. Instead… Jesus dies for and expiates each individual sin that all of us commit.
Both the act and the effect of sin consist in alienation from God, from others, and from our better self. Sin creates a self-perpetuating isolation; salvation consists in restoration from this isolation, healing broken relationships with God and with others.
Even though our hearts tug us toward the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the initiative in this restoration comes from God through the direct action of Christ because Jesus has come to transform our lives into the pattern of His own. This is the reason for, and the meaning of, His Holy Passion.
But we have to understand that Jesus doesn’t just waltz through His life before His Passion. We learn in the First Letter of Saint Peter, and elsewhere in the New Testament, that Jesus was burdened by our sin, because of His solidarity with sinful humanity.
He saves us by sharing our lot, as we hear Him described in the Eucharistic Prayer: “a man like us in all things but sin. His gift of salvation is transmitted not primarily through His teaching or preaching, as valuable as these are, but by being the Incarnation of the God of compassion in our midst.
Unlike our self-absorbed individualism, Our Lord’s self-awareness is always experienced in relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit… and because of His humanity, with all of humanity, sinful through we are. So, when He prays, He prays as one of us, which means that His prayer is also our prayer.
When Jesus comes to be baptized, the Son of God burdened by our sins before the human John the Baptist, it was with full awareness of the terrible separation that sin created between humanity and God. Sharing in our humanity, then, it is as “the New Adam” that Christ enters the Jordan. In Him, the whole human race stands before God, “confessing our sins.” There is no denial of guilt here, no dissent from Church Teaching, no avoidance of shame; this is a moment of honest admission of the true state of fallen humanity.
In Saint Luke’s account of this story, which we heard today, we learn that Jesus is praying. In response to His prayer, several things happen with immediacy:
+The sky is split so that there is no longer any obstacle to communication between heaven and earth.
+The Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as the New Adam…thus establishing an entirely new relationship between God and Man.
+Finally, Jesus is addressed by the voice from heaven, affirming that He is the Father’s Beloved Son.
And so, at this moment, Jesus becomes aware of something that nobody else knows: Despite human sin, there is no more separation between heaven and earth. Nothing, not even sin, will ultimately separate us from the love of God.
This being said, however, as long as the consciousness of sin is denied, by ignorance or agnosticism, or just plain haughtiness, the graciousness of God’s love will remain undiscovered.
To believe that we are without sin is to falsify our relationship with God. It is the awareness of our need for forgiveness that provides us with access to God’s mercy and forgiveness.
At the sacred moment of the Lord’s Baptism it became clear to Jesus and now to us, as we read this Gospel, that the relationship He experiences with the Father has become, to a degree, accessible to everyone.
In a typical gesture of humility, Christ embraces communion with sinners to assure us that God knows everything about us, and yet His love is never diminished, and that we might thereby experience the truth of what John the Evangelist would later write: “Even though our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts.” (I John 3:20)