REFLECTION
The baptism
of Jesus: the Decision
Esteve Redolad
The baptism of Jesus is probably one of the most important events in his
life. Its feast, a week after Epiphany, merely tiptoes through Christmas
celebrations as perhaps one of the most depreciated and less valued celebrations
of the liturgical calendar.
It could be seen as just a minor episode, when in fact it was perhaps
the fundamental event of his inner life, the moment in which he assumes his
mission and begins his public ministry, most probably still without knowing the
full scope and significance of his decision. Sometimes popular culture makes us
believe that very early in His life, almost at birth, Jesus would be endowed
with the capacity to be all knowing as to the events that would unfold during
his time on earth. Thus, we assume that he knew in advance that he was going to
be baptized by John at the River Jordan, and that he knew his mission and
identity. If that is the presumption, then the baptism episode loses its
significance.
Deep down, there may be in us the need to believe that in Jesus’ baptism
there was no rational and conscious decision, but that everything was somehow
predetermined. To believe that Jesus didn’t have a choice, thus having doubts
during his life before and after his baptism, comes from the fear of compromising
his divinity and making him too much like one of us. This is why, despite the
fact of his humble and simple birth, we have made him a superman, endowed with
superhuman powers, in this case, the power of omniscience even at his birth. The
problem of course is that in the effort to avoid compromising Jesus’ divinity we
run the risk of questioning his full humanity.
We should be careful with the superhuman characteristics that we often
ascribe to Jesus to protect his divinity. In fact, the more special and
super-human we make Him, the less human he becomes. In this process of
"super-manning" Jesus we lose the key and transcendental element of
the Incarnation and therefore of our faith: Jesus is a person like all of us,
no less and no more.
True, he is also God, but the divinity of Jesus does not come from
alleged super-human attributes but from his ability to be open fully to the
will of God by his radical capacity to love and give himself to others. This is
the greatest paradox of our faith, of the faith in the God made man: The more
human we are the freer we are to love, and in a way the more divine we become.
In sum, if in this longing to make Jesus super-human we believe that
from an early age he had his messianic role, his life and his fateful end very
clear in his mind, then his baptism is irrelevant.
The experience of Jesus in the Jordan is not just another episode preset
and known to him; it is the fundamental experience of his life. At his baptism,
Jesus makes the decision to dedicate his life for the liberation of others and
he recognizes himself as the Messiah. The crucial part of the baptism is that Jesus
is able to change the traditional messianic expectation characterized as a victorious,
powerful, exclusive, political and religious Messiah to a universal Messiah centered
on the poor and based on compassion and tolerance, not only political but for
the integral liberation of the person as a historical, social, religious,
cultural and psychological subject.
From the time of his baptism, through the call to his disciples and
throughout his public ministry, Jesus' mission tries to convey to others and to
us what kind of Messiah he is and how we can imitate him. At the end, the
attempt will cost him his life, but it will also enable us to follow him.
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