Shift needed

Today’s readings: Isaiah 42, 1-4.6-7; Acts 10, 34-38; Luke 3, 15-16.21-22.

“People are baptised for all sorts of reasons,” wrote Timothy Radcliffe in his book Take the Plunge.

I think we really need to take a plunge in this respect. There was a time when the mission of the Church revolved around making Christians, and the making of a Christian always started and practically ended with baptism. Now the mission of the Church is about making disciples.

Today’s gospel account of the baptism of Jesus contrasts John the Baptist’s baptism with that of Jesus.

John the Baptist was the apocalyptic preacher, focusing on the urgency of conversion. Jesus subjects himself to this baptism and hence to this conversion, yet he marks a radical shift from the Baptist.

Jesus was himself the light, and his baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire stands for the outpouring of God’s infinite love on those whom he adopts as sons and daughters.

Baptism has always been seen as a trademark. To be a Christian, one has to be baptised, and if one is baptised then one is a Christian. That sounded very clear and logical, and for so long that was how baptism was understood.

But there is much more to it than that. It is precisely the radical shift from the Baptist to Jesus that we still find difficult to make in the life of the Church. The result is that since the Edict of Constantine in the 4th century and in the wake of Christendom, the Church continues to be happy counting numbers and baptising unbelievers.

There is involved in baptism what is called ‘incorporation’, coming to form part of a body, belonging to a body or to a community. This is perhaps the aspect mostly ignored today given that increasing numbers of people have problems with belonging.

What needs to be emphasised today, but which unfortunately is actually ignored, is the fact that baptism does not leave the human body unchanged.

Baptism functions in terms of what St Paul calls ‘adoption’, which is to be understood as a second nature in us. But we all acknowledge that in Church practice and for too many people, baptism has actually become too cheap to really grasp what it actually signifies.

In the way baptism is celebrated, there are very important highlights of the human predicament, and baptism is presented as the remedy to Satan’s captivity, to darkness, to sin and to an enslaved human nature. What this entails for community and society alike is simply not perceived, or at least it transpires nowhere.

Baptism is primarily a liminal step into a new communal reality with its new possibilities and obligations.

That is why for St Paul the body provides the major model organising his understanding of the Church. He uses the analogy of the human body to elucidate his teaching that Christians form Christ’s body.

We do not grow into becoming members of this body; we are initiated into it through baptism, which far from simply cleansing us from original sin, places in the heart the seed of a new nature, a new creation. Belonging to Christ’s body is not the same as belonging to any other body or group because the Church is Christ’s body in the sense of a risen organism.

Isaiah in the first reading speaks of a mysterious figure who seems to incarnate all the traits of the chosen people. This is the first of the four so-called canticles of the Suffering Servant seen as collectively representing the future people of God and giving a foretaste of a healed nature of man and a healed society.

This is a mission statement which sees the baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire as a launching into a new future. This is the future already unfolding in those who as Christians mean business and are really and effectively concerned with bringing true justice and true freedom in a world still hungering for them.