A Joyful Calling

It is great to be back with you after having been away for a couple weeks. This weekend, along with the usual Mass schedule, I have the special privilege of celebrating not one, not two, not three, but four baptisms. Three were yesterday morning, and one is today after Mass. If we took a poll among priests about which sacraments we most enjoyed celebrating, baptisms would probably be near the top of the list. A baptism is always a joyous occasion – always, even when it’s a little frenzied: if the family is running a little behind, or the child is fussy, or perhaps big brother or sister is squirmy and disobedient. The externals are not always perfect, but baptism is beautiful, not because of what’s going on the outside, but because of what’s happening on the inside.

I wonder sometimes if we talk about baptism enough, especially what happens on the inside when a person is baptized. We believe that, at baptism, the human being is spiritually remade: through the washing of the water, he or she participates, in a very real way, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And from those waters of rebirth, whatever sin is present – original or personal – is washed away; grace fills our hearts; we become a part of the Body of Christ; and God the Father comes to love us in a wholly new and supernatural way, for he sees in us the image of his Divine Son, Jesus Christ. For that reason, we can say that all who are baptized are truly sons and daughters of God, able to share – if we persevere in his grace – in something that before would have been completely beyond our reach: the eternal joys of heaven.

We believe those things as just basic parts of our Christian faith, but if we’re honest with ourselves, I bet we’d admit that rarely do they enter into our consciousness. Sure, we all know baptism is important, but if pressed, we probably have difficulty in explaining why. Perhaps because it is usually celebrated outside of our communal worship times, baptism as a sacrament can sometimes be out of sight, out of mind. We may go years without participating in a baptism, and even if we are invited to a baptism of a family member or a friend, we might be tempted to treat it as a one-off – a joyful event, to be sure, but one which, after having been celebrated, is rarely if ever thought of again. What we need is to get back to seeing baptism as the defining experience of our life – not just for babies, or young children, but for all of us. We are baptized in a particular moment in time, but the foundational reality of baptism, the new identity that we take on in baptism, stretches beyond that moment to shape every moment that comes afterward.

Today’s Gospel gives us a great example of just what I mean. No one who saw what happened to Bartimaeus could have easily forgotten that experience or been tempted to treat it as a one-off. The fact that St. Mark names him is itself a clue that people in the early Church clearly remembered this man who had been healed by Jesus: they probably knew him and interacted with him in their communities. And certainly Bartimaeus himself could never have been the same; his whole world changed when he received his vision. Not only was he able to see with his physical eyes, but he began to perceive things anew with spiritual sight. That’s why the Gospel tells us explicitly that Bartimaeus too began to follow Jesus. He became the Lord’s disciple – his identity, the whole course of his life shaped by and rooted in that healing encounter.

Healing the Blind Man (1832) by Václav Mánes

You might say, “Father, that sounds great, but surely it’s different for those of us who haven’t been personally healed by Jesus like Bartimaeus was.” But to that I would say, actually we all have experienced just this kind of healing. How? Precisely in and through our baptism. Our Gospel writer St. Mark uses baptismal imagery throughout today’s Gospel precisely because he wants us to understand it as not just the story of one of Jesus’s miracles but as the basic pattern of conversion that informs the life of every Christian. Before our baptism, we were like Bartimaeus – spiritually blind, idle, not on the road to anywhere. Seeing our need, the Lord called out to us. And when we were asked what we wanted the Lord to do for us, we responded – either ourselves or our parents on our behalf – to be baptized. And then, through the healing waters of the sacrament, the Lord transformed our lives as profoundly as he did that of Bartimaeus – and, yes, even more so. And with that grace, we now have the ability, and the calling, to be the Lord’s faithful disciples.

Friends, the beauty of baptism is that while it happens once, the pattern of it continues to play out in our lives over and over again. Whenever our lives become a little frenzied – when we find that we are spiritually running behind, or find ourselves to be a little fussy or disobedient in our relationship with God – we need only be renewed in the grace of conversion, which we first received in baptism. It was through the healing waters of that sacrament that we first encountered the Lord, and because of that encounter, we can encounter him anew, each day – we can continue to call out to him, receive his healing where we need it, and like Bartimaeus, live out our joyful calling to follow after him.