This prayer of the priest appears before my eyes in a hallucinative glow on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord: “May the mingling of this water and wine bring us to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity.” The celebrant of the Eucharist utters this prayer under breath while mixing a drop of water into wine in preparation for the offertory. When I said this prayer during my first mass, the baptism scene of Jesus came to my mind without any prior meditation, and it stayed on with me.
The immersion of Jesus into the tasteless, bland water is quite a captivating metaphor for the immersion of the divine into our human nature. If God chose to be part of this humanity, however tasteless and powerless, it has something that captures the attention of the divine, something that woos the divine, rather, bewitches the divine for an immersion into that human nature. The immersion is also an assurance to humanity that all is not lost. They are redeemable. There is the hope of emergence from the bottom. This is true personally as well. No one can be ever so irredeemably lost.
This immersion is different from the fall of Adam, who entrenched himself in the sinful nature of humanity and could not extricate himself from his flaw. Jesus purifies; he makes human nature divine by his immersion. The water that used to carry the dirt of sinful humanity now becomes pristine, beyond defilement, by his immersion. Now, this water is the sign of the spring of eternal life.
Jesus emerges out of the water as a spotless man. The old Adam could not emerge out of his flaw. The one who walked with God, with Grace, had fallen away from Grace. The immersion of Jesus also symbolizes the immersion into that abyss of human frailty. When he emerges from the water, he symbolizes the possibility of redeemed humanity, the possibility of reinstating it to the original grace.
When this conscious immersion is complete, the Father endorses the Son by declaring that he is the beloved Son. A moment when Jesus becomes preeminently aware of his humanity and divinity. His fragility and wholeness at the same moment.
This is the Child who claimed that the Temple was his home. This is the Child who wanted to stay on in the Temple and not move out. Suddenly, when the theophany happens, he realizes his Father is not just in the Temple—he is everywhere. The whole world was becoming the temple of his Father-Experience. He would call on that Name from that moment, in the desert, on the mountains, in the plains, on the seas, when he was alone, or with people.
This is also one moment when Jesus is publicly confirmed that he was not alone. The Spirit comes on him in a superiorly conscious way, and the word of the Father confirms him. He was not alone, even when he felt the Father was not there when he cried out the Psalm, “God, God, why have you forsaken me?” He became aware that he always walked in the accompaniment of the Father and the Spirit. The Father did not have to call him and ask, “Son, where are you?” Adam was shaken to the core when he heard that question. The old Adam was aware of his nakedness; he was aware that he was fully transparent to God, and despite his desperate attempts, there was nothing he could do to hide, and he felt embarrassed about it. He could not afford to be transparent anymore. He was sinful. Here is the new Adam, who is walking with the Father and the Spirit, completely transparent to one another and not embarrassed about it. When sinfulness is removed, transparency is the sunshine of life. In the sinful self, transparency is a nightmare.
The Feast of Baptism of the Lord invites us to look with hope towards our emergence from the frailties. It invites us to walk in the sunshine of divine transparency. The lack of transparency is a slow executioner of families, of joy, of humanity itself. We need to wriggle out of it. I wish you all an emerging and reassuring time.