Baptism of the Lord
The Christian holidays by ENZO BIANCHI
Jesus’ baptism reveals that the Holy Spirit descended on him and dwelt in him with his energies

Baptism of the Lord

John the Baptist began his preaching with a cry: “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is near!” To this cry of his responded many Jews who decided in their hearts to change their way of thinking and behaving and to produce fruits of repentance; these came to John to be immersed in the river Jordan. John is demanding: the gesture of immersion is not enough to find salvation before the coming judgment, it is even not enough to vaunt one’s identity as children of Abraham. No, it is necessary to live in such a way  as to demonstrate one’s will not to remain in injustice, to stop being sinners: then one’s sins will be forgiven.

Who believes and takes in this preaching by John? Not the priests and the ministers of the temple, not the scribes expert in the law, but men and women obviously in a state of sin, portrayed by the phrase “prostitutes and publicans” (cf. Mt 21:32). We can hence imagine visually a line of persons “pointed out by the finger” who go to John the Baptist; will, in this line of sinners Jesus too takes his place! A scandalous act, even for the Christians who formed the first communities, some of whom will try to minimize this event almost to the point of forgetting it. The Gospel, or rather, all four Gospels, however, witness to it clearly: Jesus associates himself with sinners, he appears among them and as one of them in asking John for the immersion. According to the evangelist Matthew, the Baptist would have wanted to stop this gesture by Jesus and objected to it strongly, but Jesus with equal determination asks him: “Let it pass, for now!” He invites him to carry out together — John and Jesus — God’s justice, to express God’s will and not theirs. Yes, God’s justice is not man’s justice, even if the latter is the fruit of the former: God’s justice, in fact, is that particular coherence with which God means to realize his mercy towards sinners, his universal design of salvation.

The episode of the baptism is the first occasion when Jesus as a mature man enters the public scene. He neither works miracles nor teaches, but associates himself with sinners, a disciple who humbles himself before a teacher: Jesus begins his ministry in solidarity with sinful humanity, in a movement of humility. he does not present himself as a powerful savior, he does not show himself through prodigious acts, but stands in company with sinners who are trying to repent: from his very first steps Jesus embarks on the way of lowering himself, of emptying himself, of humiliation.

Now, in the very moment of Jesus’ immersion in that water burdened with humanity’s sins, the Father’s voice is heard: “You are my beloved son: in you I find great joy!” God wanted to see Jesus just like this, there in the midst of sinners, and exactly in that act of humility he wanted to fill him with the Holy Spirit. That is how it happened. The Gospels tell us that Jesus began his mature life by narrating God, by speaking and working in his name: because of this he was anointed, consecrated with the unction of the Holy Spirit. It is just in Jesus’ baptism that we can perceive the unity pf salvation in God who works through the Son Jesus by conferring on him all the power of the Holy Spirit.

But this feast of Jesus’ immersion is for us also the commemoration of an immersion that stands at the beginning of our Christian life — our baptism — and at the same time commemoration of God’s voice addressed to each one of us: “You are my child!” Each one of us is a child of God, each one is the place of God’s great joy if we remain on the road of conversion, of return to him, each one of us is the place on which the Holy Spirit descends and remains if we know to invoke him and to prepare everything to receive him. It is thus that we can feel that we are children of God, able to cry to him “Abbà, beloved father”, able to breather the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ baptism reveals that the Holy Spirit descended on him and dwelt in him with his energies: energies that are seemingly weak, defenseless, but in fact more powerful than any other force of life or of death, divine energies, not creatures’. These are the same energies that dwell in every Christian from the day of his baptism: hidden energies that nevertheless never cease to show themselves efficacious in one’s life, energies that are stronger than sin and, as we shall one day see, stronger even than death.

Enzo Bianchi