Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman. Today is the feast day of the Baptism of the Lord. What is happening here that is of interest to us? We know relatively little about Jesus Christ until he reaches the age of thirty. The angels, the manger, the straw, the magi, the star, the shepherds, the ox and the ass, these are all images which later generations plastered on the bare walls of fact. We know that he was born in Bethlehem, which still exists and which is now a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine, located about six miles south of Jerusalem; and at a particular time, in human history, ‘the time of Caesar Augustus, to be precise, when Herod was king of Judea.’ These are verifiable facts. At some point in his life, probably during his adolescence, the Gospel suggests at the age of Twelve, this remarkable human person, this boy similar to ourselves, at about the same age as many of you sitting listening to me at this moment; this person, who had been brought up as a Jew, who had his relationship with God filtered through the normal channels of Temple worship, yearly feasts and traditional prayers, experienced a traumatic transformation, a psychic upheaval. He became aware that his relationship with God was different from anything that had ever been experienced by any other person who ever existed on this planet.
Something strange had happened when he was twelve years old. He was in Jerusalem with his parents and a whole load of other people who had travelled there, as they did every year for the Festival of Passover. When the whole group, including his parents, left the city to travel home, He somehow knew that he had to stay behind without telling any of them. Three days later after agonising worries about his safety, they found him in the Temple arguing with theologians and experts about the God question.
Today we are focusing on a later moment in his career. He is out in the desert beside the river Jordan. His cousin, John, is baptising people in acrowd. Suddenly he knows that he must be baptised also. When he goes into the water, something happens to him and something happens to the river.
He comes up out of the water and he knows that he is the Son of God. This is no longer a hazy intuition, it is a certain conviction. He hears a voice from heaven saying: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’
In a few moments from now, during this Mass, one of you will bring a flagon of wine to the altar. One drop of water will be poured into the chalice as these words are said: ‘By the mystery of this water and this wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.’
My dear friends: we are that drop of water, we are the Jordan river; we are invited to share the same light-bulb moment that Jesus Christ experienced as he came up out of the water.
One of these mornings
You’re going to wake up singing
going to spread your wings
And take to the sky
That’s the kind of feeling when the message sinks in: You are being asked to hear these same words we have just had read in the Gospel passage addressed to you personally this morning: ‘you are my beloved, you are the one and only; and I am with you for ever more.’
If you are still looking for a New Year resolution: make it to find the switch to that light bulb and turn it on. No one else can do it for you, that is the meaning of free will. It should change your life and it should make the year 2025 the most significant and the most creative you have yet to live.