Where have we been and where are we going this liturgical year? The Liturgical Year began with the season of Advent. We heard from the prophecies of Isaiah, the promises of God to send a Savior to Israel, and we heard those same prophecies echoed in the preaching of John the Baptist. And concluding Advent, we heard God’s promises beginning to be fulfilled, as the maiden of Nazareth consented to God’s Holy Will, and the word took flesh in the Virgin Mary's womb.Advent longing made way for Christmas rejoicing at the birth of Our Savior, God made flesh. We traveled with humble shepherds to adore him who was born into the humble poverty of the Bethlehem stable. Last week, we celebrated the great feast of the Epiphany, and traveled with wise men from the east. What made them wise? They set out on the great journey—the greatest journey: to find God. They left their worldly comforts that they could behold the face of the Christ. And upon finding him, they honored him as God and King and Savior.
We celebrate now, at the end of the Christmas season, the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism. Fast forward 30 years from Bethlehem. For 30 years, the one named Jesus, lived in virtual obscurity. These are sometimes called the hidden years of Jesus’ life because Scripture does not go into detail into the intervening years between the Lord’s birth and the beginning of his public ministry. What we do know is that during the greater part of his life, Jesus shared the condition of the vast majority of the human race: a life spent without evident greatness, a life of manual labor.
Jesus lived a life of simple faith, obedient to Mary and Joseph in the house of Nazareth. He learned the carpenter’s trade, he worked with his hands, he worshiped at synagogue, he made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and celebrated the Jewish Feasts, and he he lived a life of virtue, preparing for his great mission of preaching the Gospel and dying for the atonement of our sins.
Around the age of 30, Jesus’ cousin, John, the son of Elizabeth and Zechariah was preaching a baptism of repentance down at the Jordan River, at the very spot where Israel had come into the promised land after 40 years in the desert, the very spot where Elijah was taken up into heaven on a flaming chariot. In fact, John was dressed quite a bit like old Elijah and proclaiming Elijah’s warning: “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
At the Jordan, Jesus’ season of hiddenness came to an end and the season of his public ministry began—a time of miracles, and healings, where the power of God’s kingdom would be manifest. “It was time” to do battle with the forces of evil and the prince of darkness. “It was time” to fulfill his Father’s will, no matter how much suffering he would have to endure.
Throughout the upcoming Liturgical Season of Ordinary Time we will hear and reflect upon the Lord’s words and works. But I think it is quite significant that the season of Christmas, in which Christ is adored and honored as God, ends with this event, his baptism, in which he associated Himself with us. John preached to sinners, that sinners should turn their lives over to God, and to mark that new beginning with a ritual, with baptism. And Jesus underwent that ritual. The sinless Son of God associated himself with sinners.
If Christmas has taught us anything, it’s that God is not interested in remaining distant from us. He is born into poverty like most people in human history. He lived a hidden life of manual labor like most people in human history. And in his baptism he identifies with all of us needing to hand over our lives to God to make a new beginning, an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness.
So that’s where we’ve been: in a season of hearing about how God wants to break into our lives. Where are we going? Ordinary Time. Monday morning, I will don the Green Vestments once again. Why Green? Because Green is the color of growth. And in Ordinary Time, we focus on the spiritual growth the Christian Disciple is to always be seeking.
What does spiritual growth consist of? Becoming more like Christ. Allowing Christ to live in us. Christ yearns to live through the members of his mystical body, and that means we must learn to place Christ at the center of everything we do and say and are: including Him in our daily schedules and activities, meals, chores, conversations, parenting, work, vacations, civic responsibilities, decisions, problems, crises, accomplishments, and losses. It means going down into the waters with him and rising out of them with less selfishness, perversion, greed, sloth, anger, and impatience. It means allowing the whole of your life to become charged and changed by God’s presence—allowing the grace of our baptism, and the grace of the sacraments to unfold in your life, to bear new spiritual fruit.
Every season ends that it may give way to something new. Christmas ends, that the one born at Christmas, may impact, infuse, change, and transform our Ordinary Lives. Today, the Christmas season ends and the season of Ordinary Time begins, a season where each of us are to focus on putting the teachings of Jesus Christ into practice in our ordinary day-to-day lives.
So we do well to consider: what from our past needs to come to end that we may begin something new? What vices need to end that we may more faithfully live out our baptismal discipleship? Where in my life does spiritual sloth need to come to an end so that new spiritual practices may begin: daily scripture reading, visits to the blessed Sacrament throughout the week, a daily rosary perhaps, time volunteering at your parish. Where does lust need to be put an end, in order to begin a new life of purity. Where does resentment and bitterness need to come to an end, in order to begin a new season of peace and gentleness and gratitude and joy?
Pope Benedict wrote: “Immersion in the water (of baptism) is about purification, about liberation from the filth of the past that burdens and distorts life—it is about beginning again, and that means it is about death and resurrection, about starting life over again anew…in a world marked by sin, it is a Yes to the entire will of God and solidarity with our estranged brother.”
May all that is sinful come to an end, that, in the words of our second reading, we may reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ,” for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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