Baptism of the Lord – 2022
With the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism the Christmas Season comes to an end. We began the Christmas Season celebrating the birth of a Child. As we began the season celebrating new beginnings, so we conclude the season. Jesus’ baptism represents for him a new beginning, the beginning of his ministry to realise his mission. This invites us to consider what new beginnings are being extended to us. How is God calling us, within our own circumstances, to move forward in our life? What are the new possibilities into which we are being invited so that our own hearts might not lose their freshness no matter our age? Our hearts are always being birthed by the grace of Christ into new life. What is the new life this new year might represent for us?
However, I would like to reflect for a few moments with you about one of the most important new beginnings that has been the experience of each of us, that beginning which gives us the confidence to search always for the sense of what is coming to birth within us – and that is the beginning which is our own baptism. On the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism it is good for us to reflect on the nature of our own baptism, and the extraordinary invitation that it represents not simply in the past but more importantly now and in the future.
As the Dominican Paul Philibert once remarked, we should never let the waters of baptism dry from us.[1] This is a wonderful image: we should always keep ourselves irrigated by the waters into which we were baptised. For most of us our baptism was at a time that we cannot remember. And for this reason it is more than likely that most of us cannot recall the date of our baptism. It would be fascinating to go around and ask each of us, “What was the date of your baptism?” Pope Francis once put this question to the people gathered in St Peter’s Square:
“Many of us do not have any memory of the celebration of [our baptism] and it is obvious why if were baptised soon after birth. I have asked this question two or three times already, here in this square: who among you knows the date of your Baptism, raise your hands. It is important to know the date on which I was immersed in that current of Jesus’ salvation. And I will allow myself to give you some advice – but more than advice, a task for today. Today, at home, go look, ask about the date of your Baptism and that way you can bear in mind that beautiful day of Baptism. To know the date of our Baptism is to know a blessed day. The danger of not knowing it is losing awareness of what the Lord has done in us, the memory of the gift that we have received. Thus, we end up considering it only as an event that took place in the past – and not by our own will but by that of our parents – and thus has no impact on the present. Indeed, we must reawaken the memory of our Baptism. We are called to live our Baptism every day, as the current reality of our lives.”[2]
The date of my baptism was the 19th April 1959. It took place in a little wooden church in the suburbs of Launceston. Like most of us I have no recollection of it, occurring as it did just over two weeks after my birth. But for all of us, the date of our baptism is, as Pope Francis reminded us during the week, the most significant date in our life after our birth. And all of us should have the date etched indelibly in our minds, and even more, celebrate the day each year just as we might our birthday.
We should never let the waters of baptism dry off from us. What does this mean, and why should it be our aspiration? Why is our baptism the foundation of all new beginnings for us?
By our baptism we are immersed into the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the waters of baptism we die and rise. We enter into that extraordinary mystery at the heart of the Christian understanding of life – as Metz put it, “the art of dying as part of the charismatic art of living.” We cannot live without dying. Something must die in order that something might live.[3] This is the lesson at the heart of our Christian engagement of life. Ultimately, of course, we die to self; we rise to the other. We die to those factors and forces which would entrap us, enclose us, isolate us. We rise to those attitudes and patterns of life that open us up, have us reach out, draw us into communion with others. We move from selfishness to selflessness, from self-centeredness to a life lived through, with and in others. For the Christian this way alone is the pathway to fulfilment and happiness. It is the pathway that Jesus himself has paved out for us.
In our baptism was a new beginning. Through the waters of baptism we were brought into this community which keeps alive for us the call and the challenge to both die and rise, to keep dying and to keep rising – no matter our age, no matter our circumstances. If we keep attentive to the question every day, “what must die? what might rise?” then the waters of our baptism will never dry from us. Let us remember the date of our baptism; let us treasure this date. Then we may realise ever more deeply that at every single turn in our life we are at a new beginning.
[1] See Paul Philibert, Priesthood of the Faithful: Key to a living church (Liturgical Press, 2010).
[2] Pope Francis, General Audience, Catechesis on Baptism, 8 January 2014.
[3] See Johannes B. Metz, Followers of Christ: The Religious Life and the Church, trans. Thomas Linton (London/New York: Burns & Oates/Paulist Press, 1978) 18-22.
