Sign of Solidarity, Sign of Salvation

A few Januarys ago, when I was still the pastor at the university parish in Fayetteville, a man walked into our church that I didn’t recognize. I welcomed him and asked if I could help him. When he took off his stocking cap, I realized that I did know him – he was one of the students most active in our ministry. The reason I was caught off guard was because, whereas before he had had long, flowing hair, now his head was completely shaved. After recovering from the shock of realizing who it was, I asked him what had caused him to do such a thing. It turns out that it was a Christmas gift to his mom. She was soon going to be losing her hair as she underwent treatment for a rare disease, and so he decided to shave off his hair out of love for her, as a sign of solidarity with her in her illness.

Perhaps you know of or have heard of stories similar to that one. It is a basic instinct of human nature to want to help someone in need, and one of the best helps we can give is to show solidarity with them. This is all the more true, of course, when the one in need is someone we love deeply, and when the difficulty they are facing is something beyond our power. We desire to save them, but we can’t – and so we show them that we are there for them, in solidarity with them as they face their trial.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus shows up at the river Jordan to be baptized. This caught the people of the day off guard, including John the Baptist. Baptism was a sign of the desire for repentance – an acknowledgement of the fact that one had committed serious sins and needed to make a change in life. Not just a minor change either; baptism signified a symbolic death and rebirth – when the individual walked into the water, the old person died, and when they came out, a new person was born. John knows that Jesus doesn’t need this kind of baptism – Jesus is without sin. And so he tells him, “I should be baptized by you!”

Jesus’s response is interesting. He says, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” In other words, Jesus says, “This is what God wants – you’ll see why in a moment.” Jesus, though sinless himself, has come to show his solidarity with sinful mankind. Though he is God Made Man, his first public act is not to teach or to preach or to work a miracle – but to show us that he understands our brokenness, our sinfulness, our desire to be transformed. He stands in solidarity with us, because he loves us, more than any human love imaginable.

 Joachim Patinir, The Baptism of Christ (c. 1520)

Now, if that was all that Jesus’s baptism signified – God’s closeness to us in our spiritual dysfunction – then maybe it would be an interesting footnote in the story of his life. But as we heard, something else happens – the heavens are opened, the Holy Spirit descends, and a voice declares, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus has come into our world not just as a sign of God’s solidarity with us, but as Savior for our sins. When we stand in solidarity with someone, we do so as a sign of love and support; but often we can’t really help them, we can’t rescue them from what afflicts them. But God’s solidarity is not so powerless. In his baptism, Jesus shows us not just God’s closeness, his sympathy with our sinful humanity, but he also reveals the very means by which he will rescue us from that sinfulness.

Sometimes perhaps we think of baptism as just a ritual of welcoming, a ceremony of bringing someone new to the church. Maybe this is because baptisms usually are done as children, and so we have a hard time thinking about children as being guilty of much sinfulness. But this mindset is incomplete. It’s true that baptism is the sacrament that welcomes us into the Church, the gateway by which we begin to share in the Church’s life. But there is also a real and essential transformation that takes place in every baptism, a true liberation from sin – both the sins we have committed personally and also, as in the case of a newborn, the basic state of spiritual dysfunction that we call original sin, which we inherit as human beings from the first sin of Adam and Eve. John the Baptist offered a baptism that was only symbolic; it represented a change in life, but it couldn’t actually bring that change about. But in the sacrament of baptism, God does what no human power could: he gives us rebirth in grace and a share in the identity of the Son. In baptism, we participate in Jesus’s dying and rising again, so that like him we are able to call upon God as his beloved sons and daughters.

Of course, this should be more than just theoretical for us. I wonder whether you and I recognize the importance of our own baptisms. Do we know on what day we were baptized? Do we celebrate on that day? We should. One of my favorite stories about Pope St. John Paul II is when a journalist asked him what was the greatest day of his life. Perhaps the journalist expected this great figure to say it was the day on which he was ordained a priest, or made a bishop, or elected pope; but no, John Paul said, “The day of my baptism.” When he visited Poland in 1979, a few months after he had been elected as pope, he went to the town Wadowice where he grew up; he went into the church, went straight over to the baptismal font on one side, and knelt down and kissed it. St. John Paul II knew the power of baptism – he knew that that day was the font from which everything else in his life had flowed.

The Baptism (1755) by Pietro Longhi

Friends, we should have the same reverence and gratitude for our own baptisms, even if they were long ago, even if they were before we can remember. In the waters of the Jordan, God revealed Jesus to be his “beloved Son,” and in the waters of our baptisms, he has made us sharers in that same identity. The friendship that we have with God by means of our baptism doesn’t make all of our problems go away or solve all of our struggles. We still will face trial and difficulty and illness and sorrow, and life at times may truly seem more of a cross than a joy. But through it all, God stands in solidarity with us and, more than that, has opened the way for our salvation. He gives us the possibility of grace here and now, and when this life ends, he calls us to receive the gift of his friendship in the life to come.

About a year or so after that former student of mine showed solidarity with his mom by cutting off all of her hair, her illness worsened, and she passed away. It was, of course, devastating for him and for his family. And yet, in their grief, they took heart. Because their mother shared in the Death of Jesus in her baptism, they have a firm hope that one day she will share in his Resurrection, where there is no more sorrow or pain, where every tear is wiped away. In the end, that is our hope too, or should be – the greatest hope any of us can have, the only thing in the end that matters.

May the presence of Christ, which we receive in the Sacrament of the Altar, renew in each of us the grace of our baptism so that we may hope to share in his everlasting life.