Welcome to the second week of our New Year message series, which we are calling “Baggage.” Most people start the new year by making resolutions of things that they are going to do differently in the new year in order to make their life a bit better. It might be to exercise more, to spend more time with their family, to read more books, or in my case to practice the ukulele everyday. We have hopes and dreams for the year ahead. We want to see progress. We want to be in a better place at work, at school, in our relationships with friends and family, with our health, our finances and other areas of our lives.
However, unless we have dealt with the negative things in the past in a healthy manner, it will be difficult to make a fresh start in the new year. Grudges and regrets add up and weigh us down. They sap much of the emotional, mental and spiritual energy we need to move forward.
This series is about dealing with the past, clearing out resentment and regret so we have the emotional, spiritual and mental health and energy to accomplish the goals we want to accomplish in the coming year, and embrace the good things God has in store for us.
As I mentioned last week, we are basically talking about forgiveness, and forgiveness simply means to cancel a debt. If the mortgage company which owns your mortgage called to tell you that they were forgiving your debt, it would mean that although you legitimately owe them money on your home loan, they were wiping that debt clean and you now owe nothing. As I mentioned last weekend, when it comes to forgiveness, when it comes to canceling a debt, it actually does mean that someone has to pay, someone has to lose out on something they are owed. This is important to keep in mind for this weekend’s lesson, but we will get to that in a minute.
Again, last weekend we mentioned that there are three stages of forgiveness. First there is denial. While this can take several different forms, there are two common forms. The first is making excuses for the other person so to try to convince yourself that they really do not owe you anything. In the end this becomes unsustainable; you can only make excuses for another person so many times before there is a blow-up or a melt down. The other common form of denial is to just refuse to forgive the other person. You are going to hold on to that hurt, anger or whatever. This leads to bitterness. The problem is that this bitterness does not stay focused just on the person who owes us the debt, but it leaks into our other relationships as well.
The second stage of forgiveness is when we recognize that forgiveness would be helpful, but we have not done it yet, or we do not know how to forgive the debt.
The third stage is to actually go ahead and do it; you forgive someone and release the debt. Once you have canceled the debt it is no longer in your head and on your heart. And when you do it often enough you can become quite good at it. It can become a habit, a heart healthy habit.
It is my hope for this series is that you would honestly come to recognize your need to forgive, identify more effective skills to actually make it happen, and develop those skills into habits. As noted last weekend, forgiveness is not natural; rather it is supernatural. It is a grace given to us from God because He loves us.
Which brings us to this weekend’s Gospel. Jesus comes to his cousin, John the Baptist, who has been preaching repentance and baptizing people in the Jordan River. Why would Jesus need to be baptized? He is the Son of God. He is sinless. He has nothing to repent from. If you recall from our Advent message series, “Grace and Truth,” John the Baptist’s call to repentance was a call to recognize that not everything was going all right in your life. It was a call to recognize one’s sins and ask God for forgiveness. Everything was going perfectly for Jesus, and he never sinned, so why would he ask John to be baptized? Apparently that is a pretty good question because as the Gospel relates, “John tried to prevent him, saying ‘I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?’” Jesus answers John, and us, that he needs to be baptized “to fulfill all righteousness.” What does that mean?
“Righteousness” means to be in a correct relationship with God. As the Only-Begotten Son of God, Jesus was in a correct relationship with God, His Father. Yet in uniting our human nature to His divinity, Jesus united all of humanity to Himself, and humanity was not in a correct relationship with God.
God created Man in His image and likeness, and as such, God wants all humanity to live in perfect union with Him; first in this world, and then for eternity in heaven. However, since He is love, which cannot be forced on another, God does not force Himself on us. Rather He invites us into a relationship with Him, and this involves obedience – which just means listening – to Him who created the heavens and the earth. God knows what will bring us the greatest happiness, but when we choose a lesser good, there becomes a gap between the greatest good and what we chose. It is like the hole in a donut; something of the good that should be there is missing. This gap, this missing good that should be there is what evil is; a privation of a good that should be there.
Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were created in a perfect relationship with God – they were in righteousness. However, in their freedom, they chose a lesser good, they disobeyed God. We call this Original Sin, and this Original Sin caused them to lose sanctify grace; the grace that makes one members of God’s family, sharing in His life. Since Adam and Eve were the only human beings in existence at that time, Original Sin effected all of humanity. This means that all human beings are born with Original Sin, we are born into a state of separation for God – we are born with “baggage.” While still in the “image” of God, our “likeness” to God is seriously impaired.
God is infinite, so the offense that Adam and Eve committed was an infinite offense. Neither they, nor any other human being could repair the damage, or pay the debt. Oh, people tried – they tried animal sacrifice, but animals didn’t commit the offense so they could not pay the debt, plus they were finite. Even if every animal in the world were sacrificed, they would not be enough. Some people even tried human sacrifice. In some sense this was closer, because its “offering” was of the proper matter – it were human beings who committed the offense – but humans are also finite, so not even sacrificing every human being in the world would be enough.
How could humanity be restored to righteousness? Only in the person of Jesus Christ. As a divine person, Jesus had the quality of infiniteness, so He could be enough. And since Jesus took on our human nature, He was the just matter for the sacrifice. Through His baptism, Jesus willingly and lovingly embraces His mission – not only to proclaim the Kingdom of God, but to be both the perfect priest and the perfect sacrifice. By His death of the Cross, Jesus pays all of humanity’s debt to God. As I have already said, when it comes to forgiveness, someone has to pay the debt, and Jesus has paid for all of us.
John the Baptist’s baptism merely pointed to the fact that we were in the need of repentance; it swept aside all denial and made it clear that there was a debt to be paid. After His Resurrection, Jesus commissions the Apostles to make disciples of all the nations, “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jesus’ baptism is very different from John the Baptist’s for it points to the fact that the debt has been forgiven and we can once again share the Divine life as God always wanted us to. We, as the whole human family, have been forgiven. By being baptized we are accepting this forgiveness won for us by Jesus, and are made new creatures, members of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church.
If we want to lose our “baggage” so that we can have the emotional, spiritual and mental health and energy to accomplish the goals we want to accomplish in the coming year, and embrace the good things God has in store for us, we first have to recognize this “original baggage” of Original Sin, and appreciate that forgiveness that we have received. We cannot forgive others if we do not first accept the forgiveness that God offers us.
When was the last time that you thought about your baptism? For most of us we have no memory of it because we were babies. Hopefully most of us have been to the baptism of another person, so we have an idea of what goes on. This week, why don’t you spend some time thinking about the fact that you are a baptized Christian, a disciple of Christ and member of the Church. Do you fully appreciate just how important that is?
Let us pray that Christ Jesus will move us to truly appreciate our baptism, and that it makes a difference in how we interact with others. As the 1970s church song says, “They should know we are Christians by our love.”