Sunday, January 12, 2025
Is 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Lk 3:15-16, 21-22
In today’s Gospel, a contrast is presented between the baptism that John the Baptist did in the Jordan, a baptism of repentance, and the baptism that Jesus would offer, one of the Holy Spirit and fire. We skip over the verses in Luke chapter 3, where the imprisonment of John is narrated, because of his vociferous criticism of the Tetrarch Herod, who married his brother’s wife.
Later in Luke’s Gospel Jesus describes John as the greatest of the prophets, but that even the least in the Kingdom of God have a higher place. It is only in Matthew’s Gospel that we learn of the beheading of John the Baptist. It seems that John prefigured the baptism of fire that Jesus would undergo, and that many of Jesus’ disciples would endure.
Most biblical commentators interpret Jesus’ baptism as his acceptance of his vocation to be God’s prophet in Israel. But a call to what? The first reading today, from Isaiah chapter 42, is of the first servant Psalm, in which a servant is described as nonviolently bringing true justice to the nations and liberation to the oppressed.
Certainly, this was the prophetic call of Jesus, but interestingly, this is not the passage from Isaiah quoted in the Gospel of Luke. Instead, when Jesus goes to his hometown of Nazareth in chapter 4 of Luke, he quotes from Isaiah 61 with a much more direct call for concern for the poor, liberation of those imprisoned and oppressed, and implementation of the demands of the Jubilee Year, referred to as a year of favor in which slaves are freed, debts are forgiven and land is restored to the original indigenous inhabitants.
Chapter 42 is from the book called Second Isaiah, in which the overriding theme is restoration of the people who had been oppressed in exile and now have been freed to return to Jerusalem, their home. Isaiah 61 is from the third book of Isaiah, in which the theme is the struggle of a small, poor group of people to build not merely a city and temple from the ashes of devastation but also a community that can overcome internal divisions and shine to other nations what God’s will is for the human race. Israel, symbolized by Mount Zion, will shine not because it is God’s chosen people but because it lives out adherence to God’s commandments, especially for social justice.
The third book of Isaiah begins by saying that God’s invitation extends to “foreigners and eunuchs,” those who were previously excluded from God’s community, as long as they too practice the holiness that is expected of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem. Today’s second reading from Acts echoes this theme, when Peter declares that he recognizes that God does not have favorites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God. This is one of the main messages of Jesus, beginning with his baptism.
Thus, it can be said that Jesus saw his vocation as twofold: practicing justice for the poor and oppressed and bringing about peace between all the nations. This should be our vocation as well, stemming from our own baptisms.
It does not take any special revelation to know that poverty and oppression are still manifold throughout the community of nations and that national and ethnic divisions are still rampant. There are 56 conflicts taking place in the world as of the end of 2024, according to a recent statement from the Vatican, many of them civil conflicts within nations rather than between nations.
Overcoming divisions and bringing peace to the nations are perhaps even more crucial vocational demands today than they were in the time of Jesus and Peter. And addressing poverty requires more than charity, as necessary as this is, but also rooting out the structural causes of economic inequality that undergird continuing poverty in a world in which the top one percent own almost as much wealth as the remaining 99 percent of people do, combined.
Let us today renew our own baptismal vows to be disciples of Christ and understand what it means to be baptized in fire and the Holy Spirit.
Maryknoll Father Frank Breen, from Boston, Massachusetts, ministered in Kenya for almost 30 years, where he also served as foreign correspondent for Maryknoll magazine. Currently he is Society Justice and Peace Coordinator for the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns.
To read other Scripture reflections published by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, click here.
Featured image: A child washes himself in Kallyanpur, a slum in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. (UN Photo/Kibae Park/Bangladesh)
