Homily for the feast of the Baptism of Jesus
Today, the Church takes up the threads of life again after the Christmas season. That life resumes, or perhaps more correctly, it begins, with the Baptism of our Lord. The sacrament of baptism has been a much discussed topic in the history of Christianity. The debate revolved generally around two controversial topics: 'Why was Jesus baptised?' And 'Why are infants baptised?' After all, the Church teaches that Jesus was born without sin. The Church teaches that baptism is for the removal of Original Sin. How do you square that circle? And it is more difficult still to accept that a newborn baby has a mortal stain on its soul. Now these debates would have been harmless enough had they not influenced radically some Christian practices. Not until St. Augustine in the 5th century was the doctrine of Original Sin developed. So it doesn't make sense to speak of the baptism of Jesus as a removal of original sin from his soul.
As we know from the scriptures and early Church documents, adult Baptism by immersion was the norm in the early Church. And it was also the norm to administer baptism just once a year, as part of the Easter Vigil. The adult neophytes, as they were called, began the final stages of their preparations for the sacrament on Ash Wednesday. The progressed through seven stages during the seven weeks of Lent. They then walked naked into the baptismal bath during the Vigil and emerged to be wrapped by their sponsor in a white shawl. Of course that white shawl is retained as a central symbol in the baptism ceremony up to this day. By the time of Augustine, adults and infants seem to have been baptised in equal measure. In fact many scholars believe that Augustine devised the doctrine of original sin to justify the practice of infant baptism. In time it worked: baptism came to be regarded as a ritual removal of original sin.
By plunging into the river Jordan, Jesus was signalling his complete immersion in human experience. He wasn't, as it were, going to remain a spectator on the river bank while human experience flowed by. He would experience life in all its ambiguity, good and evil.
His baptism signalled the beginning of his public life. With his private life at Nazareth now completed, Jesus is initiated into his public ministry. The baptism of Jesus is a very public event, an action witnessed by an entire community. As happened at our own baptisms, his identity is established, his name is called aloud. Baptism is first and foremost the sacrament of identity.
Hitherto, I suppose, Baptism was seen as primarily a washing away of original sin, the restoration of the infant to a condition from which it was presumed to have fallen. As the emphasis on Original Sin grew, baptism as a sacrament of identity fell out of focus. Baptism became privatised. In fact the baptism was often performed at the hospital where the infant was born without any reference whatsoever to the local community. Baptism, so rich in symbol for the early Christians, was reduced in time to a mere ritual cleansing. For the early Christians, plunging into the waters of baptism symbolised a plunging into the Christian community for the new member. But, in our own day, the water had been reduced to an instrument of purification.
This no longer happens in practice. In fact as you know in this Church, most of our baptisms take place during the parish Sunday mass. This represents a return to the original understand of the sacrament: an immersion of a new member into the Christian community in the presence of the Christian community. During the year a great debate revolved around the existence of Limbo. Culturally and spiritually, there is still a great legacy of anxiety about the non-baptism of infants. This anxiety normally attaches itself to believing grandparents. And the Church must not look down its nose at that anxiety since it was the church that implanted that anxiety there in the first place.
Today's feast may help us towards an understanding of baptism as an adult sacrament. The infant is baptised into the adult faith of its parents or close relatives. Throughout the entire ceremony, the parents, godparents, relatives and members of the parish community rather than the infant are addressed. In addressing the adults present, the church is trying to reawaken and develop the faith of the parents who present their child for baptism. If the parents or close relatives espouse no faith, the baptism ceremony itself becomes a mere sop to superstition? We are then back to the bad old days of Baptism as a private ritual of purification rather than a public sacrament of the Church. However, in Ireland still, an infant is being baptised into a believing community, a community that consists primarily of an extended believing family. Of course infant baptism still makes eminent sense in this context.