Our 'Yes'

Today's readings: Isaiah 55, 1-11; 1 John 5, 1-9; Mark 1, 7-11.

The river Jordan assumes major significance in today's Gospel of the baptism of Jesus. It was not simply a coincidence that John the Baptist and Jesus happened to be there. The river coexisted with the entire history of ancient Israel, starting with Abraham, who reached the land beyond the Jordan from distant Ur.

During the people's journey across the desert, it was the first and most important obstacle at the time of Joshua. Now it is the meeting point of the old and the new, marking the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Like Mt Sinai and Mt Tabor, it is a place of revelation where the voice of the Father makes itself heard.

With the arrival of Jesus, John moves out of the picture. Jesus came here to receive the baptism of repentance from John and he was in the midst of sinners. When he was crucified on Calvary he would be again in their midst. His baptism and crucifixion go hand in hand, marking the beginning and end of his mission. In his first immersion in the waters of the river Jordan, the voice of the Father indicates him as His beloved. On Calvary, immersed this time in the blood of redemption, the Father remains silent.

The great message of Jesus's baptism is God's proclamation of his Fatherhood: "You are my Son." In pursuit of the dream of emancipation, the modern age sought to construct a society without fathers, where there are no vertical relationships of dependence, only horizontal ones of equality and reciprocity.

But that dream is in crisis, and we are orphaned by the ideologies, risking to become more fragile and vulnerable, more in need of God. The deepest longing in each and every one of us is the nostalgia for home, to belong, to return to the Father. Belonging to the Father is not a belonging of dependence but a belonging of trust that fills our emptiness and enables us to be at peace with ourselves.

Baptism is supposed to insert us into communion with Christ, the One who conquered death and holds in his hand the keys of life. Baptism is the gift of life. But a gift must be accepted, it must be lived. How can something like baptism be full of the potency of God for new life? This question is very relevant, particularly when we consider the ritual practice of baptism for the past 15 centuries. Today, in contrast with the words of John in the second reading that faith overcomes the world, the West is experiencing a gradual and deep debilitation of Christianity.

For a long time now, the Christian faith coincided with social belonging. Faith was transmitted by osmosis, through a kind of sociological immersion. But this sociological Christianity is now being put to question. The cultural framework of the past no longer exists. We live in another framework whose values and understanding of life no longer identify with the Christian perspective.

Baptism needs to be seen against this background. In the celebration of baptism, there is an important dialogue consisting of three 'noes' and three 'yeses'. We say 'no' and renounce temptation, sin and the devil. Perhaps these words are taken lightly. We must think more deeply what are we saying 'no' to, because this is the only way to understand what we want to say 'yes' to.

In the ancient Church, the early Christians renounced the pompa diabuli, that is, the promise of life coming from the pagan world. It was therefore 'no' to a culture. Even today, our 'no' is a 'no' to a prevalent culture which manifests itself in the flight from reality to what is illusory, to a false happiness.

For this reason, the Christian 'yes', from ancient times to our day, is a yes to life and it is expressed in the three promises of loyalty to the living God, to Christ, and to the communion of the Church. We all need to go back to our baptism with water which marked our cultural immersion in Christianity and have the deep desire to be baptised with the Holy Spirit, who is the giver of life and through whom we can listen to the voice from heaven confirming to us who Jesus is.