Baptism of Jesus

With the Baptism of Jesus, Christmas time comes to an end. It is a pity because we love Christmas and we have to wait for another year; but we are beginning a new year, with all the excitement that this brings about. Today Jesus begins his public life, a life where he manifests his divinity and gives us the good news of the Gospel. And he starts in the same way we begin our Christian life: washing away with water our original sin.

Jesus is God, sinless; he didn’t need to be baptised, but he wanted to go through John’s baptism, to purify the waters and give them the power to cleanse us. John the Baptist didn’t want to baptise him; he wanted to be baptised by Jesus and we understand him. They almost had a fight, but John was sympathetic to Jesus’ request. The early Church was a bit ashamed of this baptism, finding difficult to understand it, because Baptism is meant for the salvation of sinners. Eventually they realised that Jesus, like in his death on the Cross, took with him on his shoulders all our sins, our iniquities, our infidelities, and buried them in the waters of the Jordan River. In the same way the waters of a river wash down everything in its path, the same happens to us when we are baptised.

Do you remember your Baptism? Most of us were baptised when we were babies and we don’t remember anything. Some of you maybe have videos of the moment and maybe you can see yourself crying because the water was too cold and you were sleeping peacefully beforehand. But it is a good moment today to think about what happened to us at that moment. If we could see the change in the soul of the baby, the moment the water is poured onto his head, we would be amazed and greatly surprised. It is an automatic transformation, from a soul closed to any grace from a God, pitch black, surrounded by darkness, to a completely clean surface, full of light and shining, everything bright and white. Suddenly the sky is open and God appears like the sun in all it’s splendour, telling us that we are his children, taking us into his strong arms. Almost similar to what happened during the Baptism of Jesus, when the heavens opened and the voice from above declared: “This is my beloved son.”

We are baptised in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Today we have the great manifestation of the Holy Trinity. We see in action the workings of the three divine persons, fully present. The Father represented in the voice, Jesus, the Son being baptised, and the dove, the Holy Spirit. It is the first time in the New Testament, that we have a graphic image of them, acting before our senses in an exterior manner. It is a good representation of what happens to our soul when we are baptised, when we are in a state of grace, when we share friendship with God, that the whole Trinity comes to our soul and abides in us.

Baptism means to immerse. Today we can have our immersion, we can plunge ourselves into the immensity of God. We can die a bit to ourselves, to become a new creature, ready for this new year which begins for us, full of hope and promises. We come out of the water like the Phoenix, renewed and transformed. In the same way the water of the River Jordan touched Jesus’ skin, today we allow Jesus’ grace to touch our soul, washing away all our imperfections.

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Epiphany

The three wise men saw the star and followed it. This is the story of their lives, of their encounter with God, of their place in history. It is an amazing one; by following a star, they met a baby, and they discovered the Messiah. Humanly speaking it was crazy. Why did a passing star provoke that reaction on the Magi? How do you follow a star? Where or when is it going to stop? These are questions that belong to our lives. We too discovered a star, we are following it, and hopefully it will lead us to Jesus. It is crazy, but it is a divine adventure.

How do we discover the star? Good question. It is not easy. The three wise men dedicated their lives to astronomy, to the study of the sky, looking for clues to their own existence. Man has always looked at space to try to understand where we come from and where we are going to. We too need to spend time discerning the signs, the sparks, the footprints, God has placed in our way, to discover his will for us, to find our path, to hoist our sails towards the right wind. It is a work of prayer, contemplation, silence and reflection.

It is not enough to discover the star, but we need to follow it. Many people see the star but they don’t do anything about it. Others begin to walk, but they get discouraged; they stop and they go back. It is not easy to persevere on an unknown quest. We don’t know how long it is going to take, where it is going to finish, if it is really the right path, or we lost our way; perhaps we even missed an important crossroads. Sometimes the road goes through a desert, through a rough terrain, across wild plains, deep gorges, dense jungles. Other times there are robbers waiting for us, to attack us when we are distracted; there are beasts ready to devour us, unexpected rivers in flood, precipices that stop us from going ahead, fires raging from the bush threatening our path, sand storms, plagues of locusts and lightning strikes. From time to time, the star disappears behind the clouds and we think she is not there anymore.

As Pope Francis says, “Jesus allows himself to be found by those who seek him.” We know that we are not alone, that he travels with us, even though we don’t see him. To seek him we need to leave behind whatever slows us down; to travel light, we cannot carry much weight, to be able to keep pace with the star; and to keep our eyes fixed on the horizon, without getting distracted with the marvellous things we come across in our way. The devil is trying to slow us down, to get us stuck in the mud, to deviate us from the right direction, to turn us back to where we came from. If we persevere, we will find him. Whatever happens, the star is always up there.

We arrive at the crib empty handed. We came naked from our mother’s womb and we leave without anything. Pope Francis’ grandmother used to say that the shroud we are going to be buried in won’t have any pockets. What can we give to baby Jesus when we arrive in his presence? We haven’t got much. All we can do is to offer ourselves. It is easy; a baby brings out the best in us.

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Mary Mother of God

We begin our year with Mary our mother, and we celebrate her most important feast: Mary, mother of God, her divine maternity. We used to celebrate today the feast of the name of Jesus, Emmanuel. But the Church with wisdom swapped the feast, because when we have a baby, we have a mother. There is no baby without a mother. He is so defenceless, that Mary these days is the important one. We normally represent Jesus sitting on Mary’s lap, seat of wisdom, throne of glory. Baby Jesus became conscious of himself, when he realised another was looking after him. His first identity came from his mother, who gave him all the love and affection she had in her heart. She fed him with milk, kept him warm under woollen clothes, chaged his nappies, sang lullabies to put him to sleep, rocked the cradle, taught him to talk, held him whe he began to walk.

Today we celebrate this feast because nine months ago Mary said yes to God’s plans for her. It was the beginning of the incarnation, God becoming man, taking our human flesh, coming to us in the same way all of us enter this world. It was the beginning of our salvation, the work of our redemption. And all started when a young girl answered to God’s call. It reminds us of the importance of following God’s plans for us, without being afraid of their consequences. We don’t realise how God in a way, conditions his designs to our affirmative decisions.

The dogma was defined in the year 431 during the Council of Ephesus. It was necessary because some people were calling her just the mother of Jesus. But the logic is clear: if she is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is God, therefore she is the mother of God. Not of his divinity, but of the person of Jesus Christ. It was an important definition, because it has a lot of consequences for us. It places us close to Mary and close to Jesus. She is our mother, the mother of Jesus and my mother, the mother of all human beings. Therefore Jesus is our elder brother and we all are sons and daughters of God.

The closer we are to Mary, the closer we are to Jesus. To access Jesus as a baby, we need to go through his mother. We cannot bypass her. She is our short cut. It is a pity Protestants have some apprehension about the mother of God. The devil hates her, because he knows her power, coming directly from her Son. It was foretold at the beginning, when the serpent attacked Eve, and the coming of a new Eve was prophesied. He knows that he cannot do much against her, and tries with all his might to separate us from the help of our mother.

Saint Josemaria was very proud of his love for Mary. You could almost feel it. He used to say that if anybody wanted to imitate him, it should be his devotion to her. He wrote a strong statement about her: “We go to Jesus, and we return to him, through Mary.” Once somebody asked him if he would write this again, thinking that it was a bit too strong, and it could be criticised by people who didn’t share his love for her. Saint Josemaria said yes, defending what he had written, but then he stopped, thought for a moment and said: “I would write now: Mary, the only way.”

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Holy Family

Once we have a baby, we have a family. The Church uses three different Gospels for this feast day, the presentation and finding of the child Jesus in the temple, and today the flight to Egypt. In them we see the Holy Family together in three very different settings, today flying away from Herod who wants to kill the baby. We see Joseph sleeping peacefully, after the coming of the three wise men. Pope Francis has a lot of devotion to the sleeping Joseph. He’s got a statue of him on his desk. Joseph is peacefully dreaming about what to do with the gold left by the Magi, either to buy a faster donkey or to refurbish the old kitchen at home. It wasn’t to be; the gold is for the trip. He can still do with the old donkey.

We are getting used to the angel appearing to Joseph in his dreams. We are also normally used to seeing Joseph getting up in the middle of the night, taking the mother and the child and running away from Herod’s soldiers. But let us take for one moment the place of Joseph. If an angel of the Lord appears to me in a dream and asks me the same as Joseph, my first reaction when I wake up would be of rebellion: that was a nightmare! Or maybe it is the devil. My second reaction would be to challenge God: Why do we have to move? Can you get rid of Herod? Is this baby truly the Son of God? But of course, Joseph is not me, and did what God wanted him to do, without complaining, without asking questions, waking up straight away, without waiting for the morning to say good bye to the people in Nazareth, just in case Herod’s soldiers were at the door.

The Holy Family went to Egypt to fulfill the Scripture. But it could have been written differently. There are places in Egypt that today still hold the tradition of the passing of Jesus through their land. Joseph gives us an example of docility and trusting in God’s will. We all have the experience of many things that happen to us that we don’t like, that we don’t understand, that we complain about. We rebel and we ask: Why me? The question should be: Why not me? Some things we’ll understand later on; other things we need to wait till eternity. We should be patient. Eventually everything will make sense.

Again we are used to seeing the flight to Egypt in traditional paintings as something beautiful and romantic. It wasn’t like that. They didn’t book a flight on the internet. It was hard, in the middle of the night, looking back to see if they were followed, going to a new country with a different language, with hieroglyphic handwriting, as refugees. Joseph had to begin again, find a job, build a new house, make new friends. They even didn’t know how long they had to be there.

After few years of hard work, the Holy Family were settled. They built a beautiful house, Joseph had plenty of work and Mary made good friends. Jesus began to talk with an Egyptian accent. Joseph was again dreaming about a well deserved holiday at the beach, at the mouth of the Nile, when again an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and told him to go back home. And he went back without complaining. Then he spent his years surrounded by the most amazing treasures you can have in your life: Jesus and Mary. God’s plans for us are always the best for us. When we get older we realise that he knows best. And the opposite; when we do our own thing, things go wrong and we get frustrated. Joseph died accompanied by his two greatest loves. Let us follow in Joseph footsteps.

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Christmas

During this Advent, in our quest for Jesus, we have been following the example of John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary. They have led us to him. We have arrived at our destination. We have reached the center of our lives and the focus is a baby. Now we realise that baby Jesus is all that matters. These days of Christmas are days of calm and serene contemplation of baby Jesus. All we need to do is to look at him, to plunge into the mystery of God becoming man, admiring the mingling of humanity and divinity. Just that, to look at him, and nothing else. Trying to enter deeper and deeper, into the infinite abyss of God’s love for us, a bottomless pit of his majesty and power. And all this is concentrated in a little tiny baby.

Why did he have to come to us? He didn’t. But he wanted not only to live with us, but to become one of us, and go through the same things we are going through, except sin. And he is now as we were when we were born, just a baby. A baby that cannot open his eyes, doesn’t have teeth, he cannot utter a word, and he’s got his little hands closed. All he does is eat, sleep, cry and dirty nappies. He is completely useless, a hundred percent dependent on his mother. All he can take is his mother’s milk. A God so defenceless, that if you leave him alone, he would die. At this moment he cannot even smile. His face is red and he doesn’t have much hair. If we could open his eyelids, we would see his beautiful brown eyes.

And this baby is what we need to contemplate, even though he cannot look back at us; he is sleeping. It is a one way gaze, trying to learn from his professorial chair, from his cathedra, from his open book, the book of his life, his first lessons of his life on earth. He could have come to us as a grown up man, but he wanted to start from the beginning, because we are slow learners. We need hours of patient contemplation in front of the statue or a painting of him in the manger, suffering cold, or in his mother’s arms, sleeping peacefully. Two simple, important lessons we learn straight away: poverty and humility. He came like us, with nothing, and when he goes, his only possession is going to be the wood of the cross. And what about humility? Can you find a better example than God coming to us as a baby?

And now in front of this baby, what do we do? We don’t need to do much. What do mother’s do with their babies? They look after them, giving them attention, love, tenderness. Many of us we don’t know how to look after a baby, but we can give him plenty of love. Some people don’t know how to love. This baby can teach us how to do it, just hold him in your arms, being careful not to drop him. We drop him many times a day. We can also offer ourselves to him. A baby brings out the best in us. In front of him we cannot say no. We need to be ourselves. The first thing he tells us when we get closer to him: get rid of your fancy clothes; be yourself. We cannot pretend, show off or try to deceive him.

But maybe the best thing we can do is to sit down in a corner of the cave, out of the way, hidden in the shadows, and contemplate how Mary looks after Jesus. It is an amazingly beautiful scene. She tends him knowing that he is God and man. She teaches us how to deal with his humanity and his divinity. You cannot become tired of looking at the mother and the child. Many artists tried to catch a glimpse of it. It is all in our imagination.

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Fourth Sunday of Advent

What happened to Saint Joseph? He was the last one to find out about the good news. They came to congratulate him and he was puzzled. He was supposed to know as a husband and a father, but he was left confused and bewildered. Mary kept silent. She let God follow his plans. She looked at his worried face. A few times he tried to ask her a question, but he changed his mind. God normally allows his loved ones to experience trials.

Joseph didn’t judge her, he couldn’t; she is so good and so pure. And now that she is expecting, she looks more beautiful, more feminine; she is glowing. She looks so innocent and full of God. But why did she keep the secret to herself? Why is she not talking to him, about such an important matter that concern them both? She must have her reasons.

What can he do? He cannot blame her, he knows it is not her fault. For sure, she must be doing what God wants her to do. Then, he must take the blame; he has to get out of the way, leaving God in command. He can assume the responsibility for the pregnancy, he can take the blame, look in the eyes of the world as the guilty one. But, he doesn’t want to leave her; he can’t. That’s the hardest thing for him. He can take the blame, but he cannot abandon her. He loves her so much! He has put his heart in her hands. They had decided to live a life of consecration to God and he was very happy to be with her and look after her. He was over the moon and was looking forward to bring her to his home. And now this unexpected pregnancy. This has thrown overboard all his plans. And she is acting as if nothing has happened.

Joseph gives us a great example of how not to judge. Qui iudicat Dominus est. Who judges? He is the Lord. It is not our task to do it. We don’t have all the facts, we don’t know all the circumstances. Even though we think we know, because it has happened before, because it is very clear, because there is no other explanation; but Joseph gives us an example of how sometimes we can make mistakes, and we can assume things that are not true. All of us, we have made erroneous judgments in the past. Whenever we want to judge, whenever we think we know all the facts, we should think about Joseph.

Joseph goes to bed without having solved the problem. It doesn’t allow him to sleep. He keeps going over and over it in his mind, but eventually he gets tired and falls asleep. And an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream, most likely Saint Gabriel, who is very involved in this business, and tells him the whole truth. Imagine Joseph’s joy on hearing this news. He woke up straight away and went to Mary’s house. She looked at him, at his radiant face, and realised immediately that he was now in the loop. We need to dream big. The devil wants us to get discouraged, to drag our feet through the mud, to paralyse us, to drug us with little compensations. He knows that God’s plans for us have big consequences, and he tries to play them down. Like Joseph, he confuses us and tries to get us to blame others. All we need to do, like Joseph, is to be faithful to God’s plans for us, even though many times we do not know where they are taking us. We need to be patient and sleep well.

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Third Sunday of Advent A

“Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient.” Today’s second reading from the letter of Saint James encourages us to be patient. We are waiting for the Lord and we don’t know when he is coming. We know he is going to be born on Christmas’ day, but we don’t know when he is coming for us, to pick us up, to take us to the place he has prepared for each one of us. He is very keen to show it to us, but we are not ready, because we are still here.

Patience is a virtue we don’t talk about much. It is not a glamorous virtue, a talent to be proud of, but we all need it. We all know people we find difficult to put up with: at work, at home, among our relatives or friends, at church, on the street, waiting in a queue, driving the car, or being put on hold when we make a phone call. We get upset, frustrated, we lose interior peace or we become anxious. In all these circumstances we fail to identify the virtue we need to keep cool, to maintain our serenity and to have inner joy. And it is called patience.

It is important to discover how patient God is with us. Just like the parents of small children. This is what they learned when they had their first baby. It changed their lives completely because it has become a twenty four seven job. They grow immensely in this virtue thanks to their love they feel for their children. Love can be crazy and makes parents do things we are not ready to do for other people. A baby is cute and brings out the best in us. But to do the same with old people demands Christian charity. The knowledge of how much our parents have done for us, help us to do what we can for them, when they are in need during their old age.

The same with God. When we look at him as a Father, we realise that everything that has happened in our lives has a meaning. Either he allowed things to happen, used our silly stubbornness to bring out some good in us, or to plan things in a way that events that appear awful, will help us in the long run. We, like little children, are not aware of it, even when we rebel or throw tantrums. When we look back at our lives, we can begin to understand what God has been doing and we become patient and grateful for God’s actions. His plan is a long term plan. We are impatient and we want things here and now. When we see how patient God is with us, we can learn to be patient with others. God is working with each one of us and we need to wait for the other life to understand things completely.

For this virtue it is important to go to our mother Mary. Mothers are schools of patience. You can see how women change when they have a baby; they grow and mature, even physically. Contemplating Mary looking at baby Jesus, we can learn and develop our patience with others.

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Second Sunday of Advent

Today the Church presents to us John the Baptist as a model to follow. He was the Precursor, the one who comes first. His mission was to open the ways of the Lord, to give witness to the light, to prepare men’s hearts so that Christ may enter. Our mission is to follow in his footsteps. He came two thousand years ago; now it is our turn. How do we do that, if we have lost our way and our life is in complete darkness? We need first find the way, and make sure our soul is full of light. This is what we need to do these days. It is our task for this Advent. John the Baptist leads the way and gives us an example.

It is not easy to be a Precursor, to open the way, to go before foretelling the coming of another, becoming a bridge between two different sides. The Pope is called Pontifex, a bridge builder. We Christians are called to build bridges between people, to be forerunners of Christ in the world, torches that shine amid the darkness of this mad society of ours. John leads us to eternity and then other people can follow our path. It is not easy to find the narrow gate that opens to paradise.

What did John do? He went into the desert, to find silence, solitude and simplicity. He ate locust and wild honey and was dressed in camel hair. We too need to seek a wilderness around ourselves, where we can speak in silence, the language of God; to find solitude, to spend time with God alone; and to live the simple life of John the Baptist. What is the desert for me? In this time of Advent we need to find that space where we can develop our spiritual life, to be able to see things with different eyes, through God’s eyes. We eat locust, things we don’t want to eat; we dress rough, with the garments of modesty; and look for honey, the sweetness of God.

John the Baptist was tough. You wouldn’t like to meet him alone in the desert. His body looked like it was made of roots of trees; his skin was hard and burnt; his hair was meshed like a wild beast; his voice had the sounds of thunder; his eyes burned with prophetic fire. You couldn’t hold his gaze. Only Jesus managed to do so, when John didn’t want to baptise him. They almost had a wrestling match. To follow him we need the gift of fortitude, not to be afraid of the elements, to be able to defend the truth, even though we can lose our head as he did. Fortitude is the only gift of the Holy Spirit that it is related to a cardinal virtue.

John the Baptist is the only saint that we celebrate twice, his birth and his martyrdom. We normally celebrate the dies natalis of the saints, the day when they were born to eternal life, when they died. But Saint John, before he was born, he was sanctified in his mother’s womb, when his mother Elizabeth met Jesus’ mother; both were pregnant at that time. This is how both babies met, and John leapt in the womb with the infusion of the Holy Spirit. We, on the contrary, were born in sin and we need to wait till we die, to enter back into the bosom of God. We are now waiting with great expectation the birth of Jesus, who is still in his mother’s womb. We should follow in his mother’s footsteps to be there at his birth.

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