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In the name of the Father, of the Son
and of the Holy Ghost.
When a human enters into the world, he
enters from nowhere, of total, radical absence enters through the gates
of time in order to grow into eternity. He enters an ephemeral world in
order to become citizen of God’s Kingdom. When Christ was born, the
Eternal entered into the narrow limits of time; He Who was immensity
itself was limited by space and became a man in the flesh although the
fullness of the Godhead abided, dwelt in this human frame. He entered
into a world of sin in order to overcome sin, and in a world of
suffering to endure it all together with us.
But on the day of His Incarnation God
delivered unto us in the frailty of the child of Bethlehem the fullness
of His love, and love is always defenseless and frail, abandoned and
surrendered. It was an act of God by which He gave Himself to us and in
which the humanity of the Incarnate Son of God was helplessly delivered
into the history of mankind.
When we are baptised, we are plugged
into waters that cleanse us from sin. When Christ came unto Jordan, He
came sinless, but this time in the maturity of manhood, at a point at
which His human will, identified with the will of God, made Him a
self-offering; He brought Himself there to begin, to start the way to
the Cross. Thousands were baptised in the Jordan, and each of them
proclaimed his sins and these waters of Jordan were heavy with the
murderous sins of men. Christ had no sin to proclaim and to confess, and
when He entered into these waters of Jordan, He entered, to use an image
of a contemporary divine, as one plunges, walks into a dye — He was dyed
with the darkness of our sins. He came out of it carrying all the sins
of the world. He came out of the waters of Jordan loaded with the
condemnations that lay upon the world. And this is the time when He
begins His ascent to the Cross.
We are now keeping the feast of the
Baptism of Christ, a dread event, an event that should keep us
spellbound, in awe: Him Who is pure shares the impurity of human sin so
that He may save us. We will bless the waters, the natural waters that
surround us. Let us pray the Lord to send upon these waters grace and
blessing for them to become pure and holy, endowed with the power to
cleanse and to renew, to make us and all the objects and all the places
where they will be sprinkled, partakers of this purity of the waters of
Jordan which had touched the holy and pure body of the Incarnation, of
The One Who had taken upon Himself all the evil of world. Let us pray
that the grace of the Spirit of God may come upon these waters and that
they may be truly blessing and salvation by the power of Christ, by the
power and dwelling of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
