Baptism of the Lord 10 Jan 2010

Homily for the Baptism of the Lord 10 January 2010 (Year C)

Today the Church asks us to recall the moment when Our Lord came to John the Baptist and asked him for baptism, an event that is recorded by all the four evangelists, although, typically, each of them describes it a bit differently. St Mark has John the Baptist saying “I will baptise you with water but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit” and in St John’s Gospel John the Baptist has had a vision- he says “he who sent me to baptise with water said to me….”this is he who baptises with the Holy Spirit”. But St Matthew and St Luke both add something: in Matthew’s account, John the Baptist says “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” and in today’s reading also this is what Luke has John the Baptist saying- “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. What is all this about fire, I wonder?
First of all, we need to remind ourselves of how the writers of the Gospels saw fire- it is not, as we might expect, a symbol of punishment, fire as a destructive force, but a symbol of what fire can do that is positive, it is a symbol of refining, of purification. You know the sort of thing, when metals are heated up and all the dross is burnt off and falls away and only the pure metal is left. That is the sense in which Our Lord talks about fire himself- you remember perhaps that later in Luke’s Gospel (in chapter 12) Jesus says “I came to cast fire on the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” He means, how I wish that the human race was being purified even now! Interestingly, when Jesus says this, he goes on immediately to add “I have a baptism to be baptised with and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” This fire, this purifying, this refining, is something the human race stands in urgent need of, and until we have been refined in some way – as if by fire- then we are apparently holding back the work of the Lord, that is what this text means.
So, as St Luke tells us this evening, Jesus is coming to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. For me, I make sense of this by remembering that in Genesis we are told that God created human beings in his image and likeness. St Thomas says, we are created in the image of God because we have two vital attributes: we have our brains, we can think things out- what we call Reason- and we have the ability to make choices, to choose to do something or not to, what we call in theology Free Will. We can think, and we are free agents, we can do what we like. But how- here is the question- do we achieve the likeness of God? How do we become like God, how do we acquire some reflections of the divine nature in our own lives? Here I turn to that great theologian of the second century, St Irenaeus, the Greek bishop of Lyon in central France. He says we are born in the image, but we have to grow into the likeness. I look at myself when I examine my conscience at the end of the day, and when I prepare for confession, and I have to admit I am not much like God, there is very little in my life that can bear any comparison with the divine nature, which as we know is all about loving and forgiving, giving and not counting the cost. We are all like that aren’t we- all far from achieving this all important likeness to God. So St Irenaeus says acquiring this likeness, or our salvation in other words, is a process. We engage in the process of becoming more like God every day, and we do this by the simple process of the decisions we make, which will either be good decisions, decisions for the good, or bad decisions based on our own selfish motives. And for St Irenaeus, there is a momentum about this, in that the more good decisions we make, the more good decisions we will find ourselves able to make, just as the more bad decisions we make, the faster we will go down the road of our own self-destruction.
How does this fit into the whole idea of Baptism, the baptism by the Holy Spirit and by fire? Well, as we know, in Baptism we are brought into the life of Christ, we become members of his Church and as such caught up for ever in an intimate relation with him as his brothers and sisters, and that close union with him is achieved and maintained by the gift in our Baptism of the Holy Spirit, a gift that is later strengthened and brought to maturity in us by the further sacrament of Confirmation. But the gift of the Holy Spirit to us is a gift that needs activating- for the Holy Spirit to be really effective in our lives, we need to co-operate with Him, listening to his prompting in our conscience and letting nothing stand in the way of those holy desires that he arouses in our hearts. And I have come to think that this co-operation with the Holy Spirit in our lives comes about chiefly in the way we respond to the trails that come to us, the various adversities and troubles, the injustices and sufferings that come to all of us sooner or later. At the very least, these give the Holy Spirit in us a kick start! This for me is the fire- these bad things that happen to us can of course if we let them just damage us and embitter or enrage us, diminish us in some permanent way, so that we become people who can never forget what has happened to us, can never get over whatever it is. Or- and this is the challenge I know- we can let these calamities refine us, we can come out the other side of them- hurt yes, but having grown through the hurt into kinder, more thoughtful, more reflective people, more ready perhaps to sympathise with the troubles of others, less eager to condemn, more willing to forgive. That is the refining fire- suffering that suddenly puts everything in our lives into sharp perspective, that enables us to see the wood for the trees, to understand with a new clarity what really matters and what doesn’t. Our response to the fire when it comes to us will be our great chance to lean more completely on God, and in so doing to grow that bit closer to the likeness of God, to have something more of the divine in our lives than before. No wonder then that Jesus says he has come to cast fire on the earth – to set up the whole process of the refining of humanity- and no wonder he is impatient for this fire, this process, to get really under way- for until humanity is refined and purified of all its selfish ways his Kingdom is likely to be held up in its expansion or at least proceed at a slower pace than it should. How we need that fire! Yesterday Fr Chris reminded me of what that great Spanish mystic St John of the Cross said: “we are all logs on the fire”. May we let the fire do its work in us, let us allow ourselves to be purified, to be refined, to develop in our lives an ever greater likeness to Our Lord. I end with one of the prayers for Pentecost- “May that fire which hovered over the disciples in tongues of flame burn out all evil from our hearts and make them glow with pure light” for Our Lord has a baptism to be baptised with and we long for it be accomplished. Amen.