I feel I have been neglecting you since the Christmas break, but as are now back and I am feeling somewhat better, time to get back into teaching mode. Here are some thoughts on this weeks Gospel. (John 1:29-42)
Last week was the feast of the Baptism of the Lord and
this week we find another description of the same Baptism of the Lord, this
time by John.
But, why two of
them?
Scattered among Ignatius Loyola’s prayer methods is a device
called repetition. If a praying session went particularly well, or sometimes if
it went badly, Ignatius would instruct the retreatant to repeat the exact same
topic for their next session.
To be honest, I admit this was the method I disliked most
when I first encountered it.
Only later did I begin to understand what repetition was
about. It was not that I should try to re-create each and every feeling from
the first time. Not even that I should expect to meet God in the same manner.
Nor rack my brains more vigorously to figure it out.
Repetition meant simply that I should go to the same
shady spot in the forest, the homey place where God and I had met in the
previous meditation. If we did not meet again, exactly, then my privilege would
be to remember what happened last time, like Mary “pondering these things in
her heart.”
This is a reason for the Gospel this week. The Church
has prescribed a repetition. As in the Exercises, this repetition must have a
purpose. Let us look.
Do you see a description of the baptism in this week's
Gospel? Pause here if you want to consider it.
Only a minimal description. Something else struck me
more, what John the Baptist said as he saw Jesus, words that were not included
last week’s reading from Matthew: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the
sins of the world.”
Behold the Lamb of God. We hear the phrase at every Mass,
but most of us never really think about it very much. This Baptism story gives
us a chance to do so.
Lambs held a special place in the Jewish temple. An
'offerer' would bring a one (or another animal) in order to sacrifice it.
Sacrifice? Why sacrifice? One belief was that since the innocent creature was
released from this world by dying, it thus would go up to God’s pure heaven as
a gift. And because its roots were thoroughly of the earth, it became a sign of
the union between God and the people down below.
Put simply, Jesus, by being baptized, was offering
himself like the lamb. He surrendered himself to the waters, just as the lambs
were surrendered to the table of sacrifice. And, like a lamb, his roots as a
human being were of this earth. But death released him to be the complete union
of God with the people. Now, symbolically, he was showing us that he belonged
to both realities, in a much more profound way than any simple lamb or pigeon
could.
This Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, then, like a prayer
repetition, yields deeper understanding of baptism, Jesus’ baptism, and his
name, Lamb of God.
Phew. This is a lot of yield for one (or two) Sundays
readings. Much of the above consists of “understanding,” but it provides
material galore for meditation, both in the week before Sunday’s Mass and
during that Mass.*
