Reflection - Baptism of the Lord

These days there are some young Catholic parents who wonder whether baptism is the proper thing for them to seek for their children. One argument they sometimes offer is that it would be better to defer baptism until their child reaches adulthood and then he or she has the opportunity to choose it. As appealing as this argument might seem on the surface, the problem is that the reasoning behind it is so inconsistently applied.

Young Catholic parents do not give their children any choice about eating vegetables, learning to read or write and living out a moral code. They enforce these things because they know that nutrition, literacy and ethics are essential for adulthood. If we recognise that, from birth, a child has spiritual as well as educational, moral and physical needs, it strikes me as inconsistent to relegate this constitutively otherworldly element of a child’s character to a ‘must be decided on later’ category.

Baptism is not brainwashing. Adults can come and go from the practice of their faith as they feel drawn. Sadly for us, they can even choose against belief. To grow up, however, with no religious foundation or no basis on which to make spiritual choices seems to limit freedom rather than promote it. In our culture baptism of infants by their parents is an entirely proper thing to do.

In today’s Gospel we hear that Jesus was baptised by John in the Jordan because it was ‘the proper thing to do’.

This can seem all quaintly odd to us today because we seem to accept that our only convention is to flout convention. The done thing today is to undo what we’ve done before.

We hold very strongly, however, to the idea that God always does the ‘proper thing’. It’s called ‘appropriateness’ in theology. We believe, for example, that God decided it was proper to become incarnate when he did, how he did and where he did. Over the centuries there’s been endless debate about what would’ve happened if the Word had come to us as a woman, in another era, on another continent. While these are interesting enough matters on which to speculate, they are not what God thought proper – or what, in fact, happened.

In line with the right action of God, Jesus does the proper thing in being baptised by John’s baptism of repentance, even though he had nothing of which to repent. Jesus is not baptised, however, simply because it was expected of him, just a fulfilment of his duty. Jesus’ experience of baptism starts with John’s baptism as an admission of guilt and then reveals that baptism is primarily about the Father’s love. To this day our baptismal ritual holds these two realities in a healthy tension. When we are baptised in Christ, we acknowledge both Original Sin and Original Grace. God’s love comes alive in us even though we are aware of how far from that love we stray.

The Baptism of Jesus and every baptism done in his name ever since, is the moment when we hold together the greatness of God’s love, that calls each of us by name to be his son or daughter, with the reality of our human frailty. What more appropriate way of welcoming anyone into the world than having a community of frail, human believers initiate its members by reminding them that Original Sin does not have the last word. For those of us baptised in Christ, the Father’s love always and everywhere has the final, appropriate, say on every matter.

May this Eucharist make us worthy of the love lavished on us in baptism and give us the courage to keep doing the appropriate things for the coming generations.

© Richard Leonard SJ