You may recall the delicious comedy/romance, Chocolat. The film is set in a small French village completely dominated by an austere, overbearing form of Catholicism as championed by the intimidating mayor, the Comte de Reynaud. He is a controlling and frightening character, and the whole town lives under a blanket of fear and uncertainty. Into this austere, grey community comes a woman called Vianne Rocher who, together with her young daughter, makes a striking contrast by opening her chocolaterie just when Lent is beginning. Vianne's chocolate shop is the antithesis of everything the town stands for.
We still find similar contrasts in the forms of religion we perpetuate and the openness represented by the Spirit of the Lord. What we stand for at times is the antithesis of what we are called to be in the world.
John's baptism with water was only a prelude to the real baptism with the Holy Spirit. Unless we venture beyond the façade of traditions, we risk remaining blocked in the prelude. Today's Gospel in some sense recounts a non-routine changing of the guards. John the Baptist is not distant chronologically from Jesus. Yet between them there is a breakthrough. There is a discontinued continuity from the old, as represented in Jewish rites, to the innovation that Jesus brought about. "A man is coming after me who ranks before me because he existed before me," says the Baptist.
The baptism of John is already different from the usual religious ablutions. It is meant to be the concrete enactment of a conversion that offers a new direction to life. It points to a new way of thinking and acting, but above all it is connected with the announcement that someone greater than John is coming. It is highly significant that the Baptist in today's Gospel insists so much that he "did not know" this greater personage. But he does know that his own role was to prepare a path for this mysterious other.
John the Baptist is here presented as the rite of passage from the old to the new. This is the threshold we need to go beyond in our frame of mind. Our mission is also that of preparing the way for Him whom we are discovering gradually. The kingdom of God, inaugurated in Christ, and which we for so long identified with the Church, is in reality extends over all creation and provides the right perspective from which to see all things. The Church willed by Christ is the sign and instrument of this reality which is much bigger and by far broader.
When the Baptist saw Jesus, he said: "Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world". These are the words we repeat before we proceed to receive communion. This lamb symbolism takes on a fundamental importance to understand Christ. Isaiah speaks of the lamb that is led to the slaughter and Jesus was crucified on the feast of the Passover. In this light, the sacrament of baptism appears as the gift of participation in Jesus' world-transforming struggle. As Cyril of Jerusalem says, "When he went down into the waters, he bound the strong man", referring to the 'enemy' we face daily in our spiritual combats.
Life according to the Spirit finds expression precisely in terms of this combat, in our daily commitments, in so many choices we have to make, if and when they are made in the light of faith. Above all, what rests decisive is the encounter with Christ, an encounter that only starts in baptism but which needs to be activated throughout life. In all the gestures and symbolism of baptism, there is a wealth of meaning that needs to come out.
Like the Baptist, we do not know Jesus; yet in the power of the Spirit, we continue to prepare his path and to encounter Him as the mysterious one.