Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Behold the Lamb of God.” Jn. 1:1
“A lot of church-going people never really get baptized.”
This was a sentence that jumped out at me from a very provocative article written by a Catholic priest.
What he was proposing was that we Catholics, we Christians in general, are seldom truly baptized people. Yes, he admits, we’ve all gone through the ceremony. We’ve had the water poured over our heads. But, then, he insists, way too many of us have gone on living our lives pretty much like everyone else. No real difference can be observed.
Here’s how he put it: “True baptism is that moment when you get it, when you understand what your life’s purpose really is, when you get your meaning, when you wake up one morning and say to yourself: ‘I think I know what I was created for.’”
He goes on to say that true baptism is different from living life on “cruise control.” It’s different than just going through the motions of living: growing up, going to school, getting married, having children, getting a job. These are very important moments and valuable achievements in a person’s life.
But often they are just door openers to life’s next stage of “cruise control” living.
His point is that often people never allow themselves to fall into that surrender that creates a different set of eyes – eyes that can see a deeper meaning to “what it’s really all about.”
The kind of baptism this priest is talking about most often does not come in moments of achieving greatness. It usually happens when we are faced with experiences of failure, of abandonment, of betrayal, of deep hurt, of sin.
The good news is that this kind of pain can bring gain – if we allow ourselves to be taught by it; if we allow ourselves to enter into a deeper experience of God because of it.
When that happens, we are in effect joining Jesus in his plunge into the river Jordan, or, like St. Paul, falling from our horse of power and self-sufficiency on our own road to Damascus.
The point this priest is trying to make is that true baptism involves much more than a ceremony of pouring water. Instead, it happens when you discover your soul and begin living out of that experience. It happens when you surrender finally to the magnitude of God’s love and allow it to be the deepest meaning of your life.
That’s when you’re baptized.
And that’s exactly what happened to the man named Jesus of Nazareth. He was 30 years old at that time. He’d live a bit, perhaps failed a bit. And then “it” happened.
Each of the gospel writers tried to communicate this major transformation within Jesus by telling of the opening of the heavens and the overshadowing by a dove and the words of “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” issuing from the clouds.
In today’s reading, though, the gospel of John adds something very different. He tells of John the Baptist giving Jesus a title not found anywhere else in the gospels: The Lamb of God.
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks his earliest followers in today’s gospel.
Their answer is unusual. Instead of asking something from Jesus. They instead inquire about where he dwells, where he lives in his innermost heart. That’s where true baptism takes place: inside a heart willing to change, inside a heart willing to serve, inside a heart open to prayer.
Jesus, the Lamb of God, tells us about the kind of God with whom he has become fully united. He is a God not to be viewed in terms of spectacular power and majesty. He is a God who instead invites each of us into a dwelling place so safe and liberating that we will be able to say openly with Samuel in our first reading today: “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
God, John’s gospel insists, is to be seen as a lamb: gentle, meek, tender – a lamb who opposes the misuse of power, a lamb who joins us in our agonies and our terrors.
“What are you looking for?”
In answer to this question asked of each of us in today’s gospel, Jesus offers this invitation:
Immersing ourselves once again in the water that will allow us to be truly baptized and will re-make us into gentle followers of the Lamb of God.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
1809194.1
1/11/18
