Interestingly, both Mark and Luke present the event from a personal perspective in which the voice from heaven was heard by Jesus alone. Matthew widens the perspective to include the onlookers as they too heard the same voice. This theophany is clearly a kind of “pneumaphany” wherein the Spirit manifested in the life of Jesus also marked the beginning of the public ministry of Christ.
The public ministry of Jesus must be seen in the context of what happened after the baptism. In the Epiphany last Sunday, Christ is shown to the world as the Light of the nations. In the Magi, we, the masses, have been invited to come into His light. Today, He does more than being the Light that attracts and draws the multitude to Himself. In the Incarnation, He had already entered in the human arena and His baptism presents an irrevocable ratification of His decision to embrace and elevate man’s destiny. The conversation between Baptist and Jesus illustrates this. He who is sinless asks for a baptism for the sinful. His action has life-changing implications for each one of us because the word public would require that there be people or a multitude to minister to.
This tremendous grace is highlighted when we mark the birthday of John the Baptist in June. There in the liturgy, the preface states that “to make holy the flowing water, John baptised the very author of baptism”. At the Easter Vigil Mass, the blessing over the water for the baptism of the catechumens churns up countless cues of the regenerating mystery of water for us. The same blessing tells us that water at the beginning of creation took on the power to sanctify. In the time of Noah, the flood foreshadowed the regeneration in which the very water that caused an end to vice signalled the very beginning of virtue. The Crossing of the Red Sea prefigured our Sacrament of Baptism. And on the Cross, the water that flowed from the pierced side of Christ gave the post-Resurrection Church the perpetual injunction and continued impetus to go and baptise all the nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
For as long as time remains, this is how far reaching the Baptism of Jesus is for the great number like us.
Yet, in our time, to speak of the Baptism in the Jordan as the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, it carries with it its own thought trajectory in the sense that it does lead us into thinking in terms of social action. In a world deeply scarred by injustice and inaction, more than ever, man is in need of liberation and how else better to do that than social activism. Our collective domain seems desperately in need of reshaping. Of course, we hear it frequently and have been egged on by Isaiah’s Suffering Servant as well as Luke’s Gospel that the Christ has come to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the prisoners, to set the oppressed free. We shall hear of it later in the Preface for the Baptism of the Lord. These imageries do lend themselves directly to this urgency in championing advocacy or social activism because our contrasting world is so emancipated by plenty and science and yet so shackled by unjust structures and the lack of access to technology.
In fact, everything concerning man’s current situation cries out for social readjustment which tends to make us forget that the central component of Jesus’ public life is salvation. In any crisis of pressing need, it is hard not to be stymied in one’s horizon or vision of the eternal.
Let us be clear that doing good and salvation are not mutually exclusive. And salvation is not we saving others but God saving us. Thus, for us, the salvation brought by Jesus is a mission of making available God’s salvation to others. In the midst of engaging the world, we must never forget this for Jesus did not come to us as the Guru of self-help or the therapist whose job is to make us feel good about ourselves or to help us overcome our victimhood. The Church is not a “spa”. It is more than the “space” that people can worship in comfort and convenience as it is also a place where the injured sinner seeks solace and salvation. He came to save us from our sin provided we still believe in the reality of sin, that we are sinners and are in need of salvation.
Sin is the cause of our sinful structures that perpetuate the unjust conditions of our times. If we fail to recognise that we need to be saved, then all our efforts at changing the world will come to naught. Eternal salvation should be the goal of every good deed we hope to perform
In conclusion, if anything, the pandemic has clearly illustrated the fine balance that we may have forgotten. There is a chasm between being safe and being saved. Again, they are not clashing concerns as they are related to each other and you catch a glimpse of this difference in horror/thriller genre. The coward who saves himself at the expense of others will ultimately be devoured by a monster or destroyed by a demon.
Thus, it belongs to the realm of grace to navigate the tension between being safe and being saved. The first condition is prerequisite for a peaceful and pleasant presence in this world. For example, nobody wants to walk out of the house and be assaulted. However, note that the second condition is directed toward the eternal. And it is the second which was the primary reason for the baptism of Jesus. It is true that we cannot work for the eternal without stepping into this world. Working in this world belongs to our professional capacity. Each of us has a role to play in shaping the world so that it resembles a bit more of heaven. But no one should forget that working for the eternal is at the heart of our vocation. It is true that we are baptised to leave a good mark in this world, but we are christened for the next world. Make no mistake about it.
