Hi everyone! Here’s my homily for the FEAST OF THE BAPTISM OF THE
LORD - Sunday January 12, 2014. The readings can be found at http://usccb.org/bible/readings/011214.cfm As always, thanks for reading, sharing the blog with others
and all of your feeback and comments! God Bless You! Father Jim
HOMILY:
Merry Christmas!
With
dead Christmas trees on the sides of streets; Poinsettia plants losing
their leaves (or in my case, after dropping too many leaves - already
discarded!) and stores having liquidated their “holiday merchandise”
with clearance sale prices and already displaying Valentines Displays,
that greeting seems a bit misplaced. Many of us who’ve been seeing
“signs of Christmas” since early October have in a sense “moved on.”
For
the Church though the Christmas Season started on December 25th and
sees today’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord as the last Sunday of the
Christmas Season. For close to three weeks, we have been
reflecting on the birth of Jesus. As a church we meditated on the birth
of Jesus to the Virgin Mary under the protective gaze of Joseph...
joyfully announced by angels and shepherds. We recalled those somewhat
mysterious to us men – called Kings, wise-men, magi or astrologers – who
had followed a star that led them to this newborn king, Jesus. And now
to bring the season to a conclusion, the Church fixes her gaze not on
the infant, but the grown up Jesus, going into the Jordan river to be
baptized by John the Baptist.
It’s a somewhat
confusing way to end the season... For us, Baptism means we’ve entered
into the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus... that by that moment,
we are intimate members of His Family. We are Jesus’ Brothers and
Sisters. We have once again become Children of God after the ravages of
Sin had separated us from Him.
John the Baptist,
was offering something different... He was calling people to a baptism
of repentance. He was preaching that a savior was coming and in order
to prepare for that savior, people needed to recognize within themselves
how all of us are in need of this Savior... we could never fix the
damages of sin on our own... we would need God, and still do, to do that
for us...
What better way to propel us to not “end
Christmas” but to move away from the manger scene and get to the heart
of why we celebrated that feast in the first place?
For
in this scene as Jesus enters into the Jordan river, the good news of
Christmas is articulated not by angels, shepherds or wisemen... but the
very voice of God. We read in the Gospel that the Father from Heaven
can’t contain his excitement at the lavish gift he has given us. The
Father speaks: “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased”
(Matt 3:17). In that moment, the God of all creation “never tires of
repeating [to humanity]: ‘Yes, I am here. I know you. I love you. There
is a path that leads from me to you. And there is a path that rises from
you to me’” (Pope Benedict XVI)
Psychologists tell us
that these early days of January can be difficult for many people.
With the marketing-hype-overdrive that leads up to December 25th and
somewhat suddenly ends, that sense of excitement and anticipation
leading up to a single day could never live up to expectations. Which
is probably another reason we seem so ready to pack “Christmas” away and
already look forward to something else that might excite us or peak our
interests.
Yet for each of us Baptized, we know what
we have received is something that can not be contained to a single
day. This incredible gift from God: the treasure that it truly is, the
depths of love contained in it, the generosity required to give it so
freely to us... it takes even more than our collective lifetimes to
begin to appreciate. Words fail us as we unpack what today’s “Christmas
feast” that the words of the Father are spoken not just to Jesus, but
to each one of us baptized into Christ, calling us His “beloved.”
That’s why, we simply say: “Merry Christmas” one more time.