Today’s readings: Is. 40, 1-5. 9-11; Tit. 2, 11-14; 3, 4-7; Lk 3, 15-16. 21-22.
The dramatic challenges facing the world call on the Church and on believers to wake up and ask how God is at work loving the world in these times. In the wake of the elapsed festive season we need to avoid the trap of idealist pictures of the Church and instead seek to understand its concrete reality in communion with the world God loves.
The account of Jesus in today’s gospel joining the queue to be baptised by John is not in the first place, as very often we recall, a gesture of humility. It is rather indicative of the way God involves Himself in the world and with the world to be with people wherever they may be.
With the baptism of Jesus there is discontinuity from the baptism of John. In fact, the gospel says: “Heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily shape”. John’s baptism was linked to a judgment that was imminent, while the baptism of Jesus was one meant to fill the heart of people with joy.
As we explore the significance of baptism on the feast of the baptism of the Lord, there are forgotten truths we have to recall and painful truths we have to acknowledge. Jesus is the one who instils in us the powerful apostolic genius that carries the movement of his Church and gives it life, making it innovative and creative. But, standing by our practices, baptism has practically got nothing to do with this apostolic genius.
Jesus’ last words to his disciples in the gospel were his commission to preach and baptise. The Greek word baptizo means ‘to immerse’, commonly used to describe a garment being dyed, rather than just pouring or sprinkling water. It means being completely submerged. We no longer seem to immerse people, not just because we interrupted the original ritual of immersing people fully in water, but also in the sense that we are taking baptism too superficially.
What has made things worse is that we impoverished the reality and meaning of baptism by reducing it to a ritual that cancels what we were taught – that we inherit ‘original sin’ by virtue of our being born humans. So with time, we actually reversed the richness of immersion, making baptism something akin to the Old Testament practice of circumcision done to infants shortly after birth.
Baptism should first and foremost refresh in us today the way the Church, as an organic body rather than an organisation, grows and spreads. Baptism is at the heart of discipleship, which is what Christian life is about. The ‘feeling of expectancy’, which in the gospel is said to have characterised the people at the time of John the Baptist, is the same feeling that characterises our times. But in a quite different sense.
Today, many have high expectations from what we proclaim in faith. If we do not upgrade our practices, if we fail to rise to today’s situations and challenges, then we are in for more and more illusions. In the presence of Jesus, John the Baptist declared his baptism outdated, and pointed to the one who “will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire”.
Standing by the recent study of the status of Christianity in our islands published with the title Enigmatic Faith, the data collected and studied on the degree to which people practise their religion can be very telling from a records perspective. But what is the real impact of that on the life of the Church and on of the country?
The Church can make incremental shifts in its struggle to win back the disenchanted. But the issue today is more about becoming healthier, about really being empowered as a Church, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, to be a joyful messenger on a high mountain, to let the glory of the Lord transpire from what we stand for.
In Church 3.0. Upgrades for the Future of the Church, Neil Cole writes about the shift we need today from “seeing Church as something that serves its people to a Church that becomes people who serve”. The Church is no longer a place to go to, but a people to belong to. It is no longer an event to be at, but a family to be part of. The Church is not a programme to reach out to the world, but a people that brings the kingdom of God with them in a lost world, with a contagious spirit.