The Christmas season is officially over and today is the first Monday of “ordinary time.” But this time is anything but ordinary. The joy, peace, and hope of Christmas are supposed to remain with us, lingering in our hearts, trickling into our daily lives as we get back to the business of living post holidays. During this period the liturgical color is green, a sign of hope, and this is the time the Church gives us to cultivate that hope.
“The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism,
because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus,
the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us.
In Christ he has become our travelling companion.”[1]
We are not alone! Our God has drawn near; our God walks with us. This beautiful truth is made even more clear in the liturgy we celebrated yesterday: the Baptism of the Lord. In one of his homilies from this feast, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI examines the significance of this event, explaining that Jesus “wanted to make himself one of us in everything and … truly joined the line of sinners; he, who knew no sin, let himself be treated as a sinner, to take upon his shoulders the burden of the sin of all humanity, including our own sin.”[2]
“Jesus … blends into the gray mass of sinners waiting on the banks
of the Jordan. [He] loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon His shoulders;
he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan … stepping into the place of sinners. The Baptism is an acceptance of death for the sins of humanity,
and the voice that calls out, ‘This is my beloved Son’ over the baptismal waters
is an anticipatory reference to the Resurrection.”[3]
We have a God who has become one of us, and who has, in His mercy, taken on the burden that is rightfully ours, endures the suffering we should have had to endure. If there is anything that ought to inspire us to hope, this is it! But God doesn’t stop there.
If it isn’t incredible enough that a). Our God became man; and b). He has taken all our sin away so we don’t have to bear it; how about this: God offers to accept each of us as His family, to adopt us as His children, as the brothers and sisters of Jesus. Because the first two things weren’t amazing enough.
“To accept the invitation to be baptized now means to go to
the place of Jesus’ Baptism. It is to go where he identifies himself with us
and to receive there our identification with him.”[4]
Because Jesus so identifies Himself with us — to the point of becoming man and taking our sinfulness from us — we are given, in Baptism, new identities as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and as the beloved children of God. To sum up in one mind-blowing sentence, Jesus opens to us the door to relationship with the God the Father. It is by participating in the Baptism of Jesus that each of us is invited to call our God “Abba,” and He, in turn, calls each of us His “beloved.”
So, after all that, I don’t really have anything more to say! As we begin ordinary time, this season of walking with Jesus in our daily lives, let’s each try to remember our individual identity as a beloved child of the Father. Asking Mary, our Mother, for her intercession this week, may we simply bask in the knowledge of being loved by God, and allow that truth to soak deep into our hearts, minds, and souls.
“What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity,
and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is very simple: God….
He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him.”[5]
[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord,January 9, 2011. To read the full homily, click here.
[3] Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, pgs. 16, 18
[4] Ibid., pg.18
[5] Ibid., pg. 44
