Brief synopsis of the readings: In Isaiah God speaks of his servant who will bring forth justice to the nations. This servant will be “a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.” In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus approached John the Baptist and asked to be baptized. John was puzzled, suggesting that Jesus baptize him (John) instead. But Jesus replied that “it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” After being baptized the heavens opened up and “the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him.” Then a voice came from the heavens: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Let’s begin with the question everyone asks, even John the Baptist: Did Jesus really need to be baptized? Clearly Jesus thought so, and John did baptize him, though he may still have had his doubts. It’s a great question and it reveals how our understanding of baptism continues to change and develop.

If you’re a baby boomer or older (and recognize that our population continues to decline) baptism shortly after birth was of critical importance. We were taught that we were all born with the “stain of original sin,” only baptism could remove it, and you couldn’t get into Heaven unless it had been removed. You can see where this is going: what happens if a baby dies without being baptized? In a unsuccessful attempt to assuage the fear of new parents, we somehow came up with the idea of “limbo,” a place that wasn’t Heaven but also wasn’t a place of suffering, like Hell. Unbaptized babies wouldn’t get into Heaven but at least they wouldn’t suffer in Hell. This proved to be of little comfort.

Mercifully the concept of limbo was never an official teaching of the church and it has been largely abandoned. Amazingly (!), we’ve decided to rely on God’s mercy in these cases. But old beliefs die hard and I suspect there’s still a sense of relief when a child is baptized. And that makes the baptism of Jesus even more puzzling. Each December 8th we celebrate the feast of the Immaculate Conception which marks Mary as having been conceived without sin; can we imagine that Jesus was born in sin? Frankly this is a rabbit hole I’d rather pass by, but you get the point: God did not create us with a barrier to salvation that can only be remedied by human action (baptism).

OK, so what do we think about baptism? What did baptism provide Jesus, and what does it provide for us who follow? Jesus told the reluctant John that he should be baptized to “fulfill all righteousness.” This phrase doesn’t come with an easy answer but I think there’s something to be said that baptism welcomes us into the community of the faithful.

By the time Jesus began his public ministry, John had already begun gathering disciples and by the time Jesus approached John there was already a small community of John’s followers who had been told about Jesus. A case can be made that baptism was celebrated as a way of belonging to John’s community. If this is the case then certainly Jesus should be baptized because the leader of a community also belongs to the community.

I believe this image of baptism as a welcome into the community makes a great deal of sense. Of the seven sacraments it’s the one that must be celebrated first and, along with confirmation and holy orders, cannot be repeated. I remember hearing about a six month old who was baptized at a regular Sunday mass. The priest began the baptism by taking the baby in his arms and saying this to the congregation: “This is Susan. She’s been with us for a few months and likes it here. She’d like to stay.” It was a humorous moment I like the point it made. Clearly a six month old baby can’t ask for admission into the community of believers but the community can select her. The community proclaims that “before you knew who you were and before you knew who we were, we knew who you were and we claimed you as our own.”

It also allows the community to say about the newly baptized, as the voice from the sky said about Jesus: “This is my beloved [child] with whom I am well pleased.” We never know how someone’s life will turn out but we know that everyone has the opportunity for greatness, and part of the baptism ceremony includes a promise from the community to be a part of educating and forming the newly baptized. All of us, even the Pope, once approached the baptismal font.

Finally this recognizes that we are not a community simply because we gather. We are a community because God has created us to journey together. From the days of the Exodus we have been bound by a covenant not only to God but to each other. We “fulfill all righteousness” when we support and build up each other and recognize that the blindness and confinement Isaiah speaks of comes from isolation.

I’d like to say that this is easy or that we have accomplished this but we all know we haven’t. On the bright side, advances in communication and mass media have made us aware of needs in far reaches of our world and natural disasters are often met with an outpouring of support. On the other hand we still find that our “enemies” are sometimes people who we see as competition for limited resources. We divide people according to melanin levels (skin color) or dozens of other distinctions we’ve made all by ourselves.

At the end of day Jesus’ baptism by John reminds us that all are invited. Not everyone will be baptized but all are included. We are all called to open the eyes of the blind and end the confinement of prisoners.