Hari Raya Pembaptisan Tuhan Tahun B

Renungan ini diambi dari Abbot's Homily

PEMBAPTISAN TUHAN

My sisters and brothers in Christ,

Come to the water! If we are thirsty, we are invited to listen today to the word of the Lord and to be refreshed by the living water that is given to us.

Clearly the focus today is on the Baptism of Jesus Christ, our Lord. It is Jesus, who is holy, who sanctifies the waters of baptism. Yet today He is baptized and we can only be in awe. Jesus takes on every smallest part of our human nature, except for sin. Jesus becomes like us in all ways except sin. Jesus is truly human and yet fully God.

We can understand a bit the reluctance of John the Baptist. More importantly, we can understand from all of the Gospel accounts that something very mysterious happened at the baptism. There is this voice from heaven which tells us clearly: This is my beloved Son! The Father is pleased with His Son.

We know that this baptism also marks the beginning of the public ministry of our Lord Jesus. From this time on, he leaves his home and begins to preach the word of the Father to all who will listen. Are we thirsty for this word?

The First Letter of Saint John tells us that the victory that conquers the world is our faith: our faith in Jesus as God's Son, our faith in Jesus as our Redeemer, our faith in Jesus as the One who loves us completely and without limits.

It is as though the whole of the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, speaks directly to this day of the Lord's baptism, when the people begin to recognize Jesus as the One sent by God.

This great solemnity also speaks to our own baptism. We are baptized into this same Jesus Christ. We become one with Him in a way that is sacrament and mystery and divine. We are one with the Lord and yet we do not always choose to live from that unity with Him. Today's solemnity can remind us that we have a divinely given power to live in the Lord if we are baptized. For sure, when we begin to try to exercise this power, we do not always succeed. The whole of the interior life is based on trying to live from the power given to us in our baptism.

There are two aspects of living in Christ: dying to ourselves and living in Him. These aspects cannot be separated except in our thinking. As we die to all that is darkness and sin and brokenness within us, we come to new life in Him.

We are invited today to live our baptism. We are invited today to marvel at the Lord's baptism. Jesus is baptized unto death. Jesus dies so that we might live. Jesus rises and changes the whole earth. Let us rejoice in Him.