The Baptism of Jesus – Humility
January 11, 2010
On the first Sunday of Advent, I compared the birth and life of Jesus with the lives of some of our modern-day leaders. And I made the point that, while our modern heads of state live lives that are very different from the people they lead, Jesus truly became one of us – our creator chose to save us by becoming one of us – by experiencing the human condition – not from 30,000 feet – but right there with us. As Father Paul said last week, during his public life Jesus didn’t even have a fixed address.
In the Gospel today, we hear the story of the baptism of Jesus. We see another example of Jesus standing side-by-side with us, humbly choosing to be baptized by John. Jesus had no need for baptism. The baptism of John was a baptism of repentance – and Jesus had no need for repentance. Jesus’ baptism was an act of solidarity – again, Jesus showed that he was one of us.
We actually see two acts of humility in the Gospel. We see Jesus beginning his public life by joining with his people in the Jordan, but before Jesus’ baptism, John, gives us another example of humility. The people were asking him whether he – John – was the Messiah. I’m sure I would have been quite flattered. But John would have none of it. He deflected the admiration of the crowd, and said: “…one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In those days, it was beneath the dignity of even the Hebrew slaves to untie their masters’ sandals, so John’s statement showed great respect and humility.
Now the account of Jesus’ baptism that we heard today was from the Gospel of Luke. The Gospel of Matthew shows John’s humility even more clearly. In Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus approached John for baptism, John said: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” So John, the man that people thought was the Messiah happily stepped aside. In another gospel John the Baptist was talking to one of his disciples who was concerned because Jesus had begun baptizing people. John the Baptist said simply: “He must increase, but I must decrease” – what a wonderful example of humility for all of us.
It’s this gentle and humble approach that Isaiah spoke about in the first reading. We heard him talk about God bringing back the Israelites from exile, saying: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
A little over a year ago, I was visiting our sister parish in Jamaica. It was a Saturday, and I was sitting in the rectory, working on Sunday’s homily. Across the field, I could hear what sounded like someone shouting through a megaphone, or maybe just a bad PA system. I couldn’t make out many of the words, but it became clear that this was a preacher, yelling at his congregation. I mentioned this to one of the parishioners later that day, and she said to me: “Yes, it’s so nice in our church that people don’t yell at us like they do in most of the churches.” There are many ad hoc evangelical churches in Jamaica, and their usual method of exhorting their flock is yelling.
And I don’t understand it. These churches claim to be Christian churches, but the Jesus we see in the Gospel today was not like the brash, self-righteous screamer that I heard in Jamaica – Jesus was a humble servant. That doesn’t mean he didn’t understand who he was. If he had any confusion, it would have been cleared up when God spoke from heaven saying: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” So when we say that Jesus was humble, it doesn’t mean he lacked an understanding of who he was, or that he lacked confidence.
I think we get confused about humility. We think that people who are humble lack confidence or feel inferior. In fact, humility is a gift. I think I’ve told you before about my experience with open heart surgery. During my recovery, especially in the early days, I wasn’t able to do many of the things I used to do. I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without stopping to catch my breath. For the first time since I was an infant, I was almost totally dependent. Some people react to this kind of dependence by getting angry or depressed. For me, accepting my limitations – learning that I didn’t have to be strong or capable – was liberating – it was a blessing. And I think that’s how we should view humility – not as something that we accept when nothing else works – when the world dumps on us – but as a priceless blessing.
Now humility is not the same as humiliation. Humiliation is what a bully tries to do to you in the schoolyard, what an oppressive boss tries to do to you at the workplace, what the abusive spouse tries to do at home, or even in public. They try to take away your self-esteem – usually to build up their own sense of worth – often because they don’t really have much self-confidence themselves. When people try to humiliate us, we can accept humiliation, or we can reject it – but either way, that’s not humility. One of our parishioners said it well. She told me: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself – it’s thinking of yourself less.”
This is what Jesus’ public ministry was about – thinking of himself less. Instead he was focused on doing the will of his Father. In John’s Gospel we hear Jesus say: “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me.” And later in the same Gospel, Jesus said: “…for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak.”
There’s a lesson here for all of us. We are nothing more than the gifts God has given us. This is true humility. If we start to take credit for the many blessings we’ve received, then humility is gone. All that’s left is pride and arrogance. How many of our supposed heroes – the entertainers, the athletes, the wealthy business people – have forgotten this? Maybe that’s why we see things like the Tiger Woods scandal, and the never-ending stream of entertainers in and out of the courthouses.
If we see all of the good things about ourselves and about our lives as gifts from God, then we do understand that we are nothing more than the gifts God has given us. And we are nothing less – unless we choose to be.
A little more than two weeks ago we celebrated the birth of Jesus into the human condition in humble circumstances. Last week Father Paul talked to us about the visit from the Magi who found the baby Jesus in modest surroundings, and yet they acknowledged his kingship with a gift of gold, and his priesthood with a gift of incense. Today at the start of his public ministry, Jesus again acts in humility, being baptized by John – doing the will of his Father.
Can we do anything less?
Holy Family 2009
January 5, 2010
Last spring, I went down to Jamaica with one of the three groups that went to do missionary work with our sister parish and with the orphanage that we support down there. After our week of painting and fixing and praying with our Jamaican brothers and sisters, Laura and I spent a week at one of the resorts. As we walked down the beach, people approached us trying to sell a whole variety of things. Anyone in sales knows that to be successful, you’ve got to establish a relationship with your client. Some of the guys on the beach had an interesting way of starting the conversation. They would come up and say: “Do you respect me?” My immediate answer was: “Yes, of course I respect you.” Now, I didn’t know this guy from a bar of soap, so the basis of the “respect” that I claimed to have for him was the fact that he was a child of God – he was loved by God no less or no more than I was. And besides, after spending a week confronted by the dramatic difference in the opportunities that exist in Jamaica compared to the opportunities available to us in Canada, I could hardly say: “No, I don’t respect you.” I had too much Catholic, Canadian guilt to do that.
But I found it so interesting that this guy, who was trying very hard to get me to part with some of my hard-earned money, wanted to begin the transaction – the relationship, if you will – by establishing respect.
The readings today, on the feast of the Holy Family, are all about relationship and respect. The first reading is from the book of Sirach. This is part of the Old Testament “wisdom literature.” We’re more used to hearing from the prophets in the Old Testament, like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. The job of the prophets was to tell people what they were doing wrong, and try to get them to return to God, or to stay faithful in difficult times. The wisdom literature is different. The wisdom literature is a collection of insights about how to live a successful life. This reading is mostly about how children should treat their parents, but if you listen, you don’t hear: “Obey your parents – or else!” “Get to bed right now, or I’ll send your father up!” The writer is telling the children that if they honour their father and mother, their lives will be better – it will be like laying up treasure, and they will have joy in their own children. How many of you have seen kids who get into trouble a lot, and then they grow up and get married, and their children give them as much trouble as they gave their parents? You can predict a lot about how a person’s life will turn out by looking at the relationship that they have with their parents.
The reading also tells us that the relationship between children and their parents should be based on respect, even as children become adults and their parents grow old. And in this regard we have a wonderful example in our own parish. Many of you know that Father Paul is very involved in the ongoing care of his mother. And he has done this in addition to the heavy responsibility for managing and providing spiritual guidance for our parish of almost 2,200 families. Father Paul, we thank you for your personal witness and example.
In the second reading, St. Paul speaks first in general terms about relationships, and then specifically about families. He says that we should enter into relationships with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And he tells us that we shouldn’t do this just for show – like the guy on the beach in Jamaica who really just wanted to sell me something rather than build a lasting relationship. St. Paul tells us that we must “clothe ourselves” with these qualities – in other words, they should become part of us. At the end of the reading, we hear that husbands and wives should love and respect each other, and that children should be obedient. Some who focus only on the line: “Wives, be subject to your husbands,” get angry, because that sort of message doesn’t fit well in our society. But when the whole reading is viewed in the context of the society of the day, where the husband had absolute authority in the family, this was a revolutionary description of family life. Revolutionary because it emphasized the responsibilities of the husbands as well as their rights, and because, in Christ, the family became a unit where compassion, kindness, and patience were more important than authority.
The Gospel tells a familiar story about Jesus being left behind by Mary and Joseph in Jerusalem after the Passover celebration. When our kids were younger, Laura and I took them to a park with another family. One of their boys wandered off, and we were all searching frantically until we found him. Until we found him, his mom was only concerned about his safety, but afterward, she was a bit embarrassed. I suppose Mary and Joseph were probably embarrassed after their panic wore off. Isn’t it interesting that we know so little about Jesus from the time of his birth until his public life, and the one story that we do have shows Mary and Joseph making a mistake by leaving Jesus behind? But it’s the fact that it was a bit embarrassing that helps us to believe that these events truly happened. With so little known about Jesus’ childhood, why would anyone tell a story like this if it weren’t true?
So what can we learn from this precious morsel of history? Well first, Jesus wasn’t being disrespectful to his parents. Joseph was his earthly father, but God was his true father. I don’t know if Jesus ever felt confused about which father to obey, but clearly, he remained behind in the temple to serve his true father, not to cause trouble for Joseph. We sometimes get the impression that Jesus spent that time in the temple teaching the teachers – it sounds a bit presumptuous. But the Gospel tells us that he was listening to them and asking questions. And it was probably his questions that impressed the teachers so much. I have a friend whose son is a very gifted student. I think he’s only about seven years old, but he knows an awful lot. Whenever I’m around him I notice that he seldom asks questions, but is quite happy to tell me what he knows – very annoying.
This very valuable insight into the early life of Jesus teaches us a lot about being a son or daughter. Jesus was focused on doing the will of his heavenly father and his earthly parents. When Mary and Joseph found him in the temple, he didn’t say: “I wanted to show these people how smart I was,” he said that he had to be in his father’s house. There was no arrogance – only obedience and humility. His statement that he had to be in his father’s house tells us that he had some understanding of who he was, and yet, as we heard in the closing verses of today’s Gospel, he went back to Nazareth and was obedient to them. He showed respect for his parents. And through that obedience he grew in wisdom. And for their part, Mary and Joseph showed respect for Jesus. They didn’t completely understand what Jesus meant when he said he had to be in his father’s house but they remembered it – they even treasured it.
It goes without saying that families are not a new invention. The readings we’ve heard today give us some very old insights into one of our most important relationships. And while so many things have changed since these words were written, the advice is as relevant now as it was then. The guy on the beach in Jamaica identified one of the important keys to all relationships, including families – respect. St. Paul used some other words like compassion, kindness, and humility. And throughout the readings we heard about the importance of obedience. We see very clearly that the family functions well when each member of the family has respect for every other member.
Perhaps St. Paul summed it up best when he said: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
Christmas 2009
January 5, 2010
You know, there are some things that just don’t make sense. Laura and I came back yesterday from visiting our sons who moved to Texas recently. One of the boys has gotten very excited about ten-pin bowling – so excited that his brother bought him a bowling ball for Christmas. He went to the bowling alley to get the finger holes drilled into the ball and the guy at the alley gave him a lesson on how to throw the ball. Now it seems pretty simple. There are ten pins – you just try to throw the ball as straight as you can at the head pin and if you hit it right, all the pins go down. Well, the guy at the bowling alley told my son that he had to learn how to not throw the ball straight – he had to learn to start the ball down the right side of the alley and make it spin into the head pin. I suppose it must make sense to someone, because all of the people at the bowling alley who looked like good bowlers were throwing their bowling balls in a curve down the alley. It just seemed backward to me. And my son, who had gotten pretty good at throwing the ball straight down the alley, bowled the worst game of his life when he tried to throw the spinny ball. Still, he’s going to stick with this new way of doing things, and I’m sure that when I go to visit him next time, he’ll look like all the other really good bowlers, and I’m sure that bowling will be yet another sport where he can beat his dad.
I think Christmas is backward like that. There are lots of things about Christmas that seem backward to me. First off, God – the Supreme Being – who made the world, chose to fully immerse himself in that world by becoming a human person. It’s a bit like Bill Gates taking a job as a shipping clerk in the Microsoft warehouse. And after making male and female creatures of all kinds and creating an ingenious method for bringing new creatures into the world, Jesus was born of a virgin – born to simple parents (a carpenter and his wife) – and born in a barn. We know almost nothing of his life before the age of about 30 – he was not a mover and a shaker. And even when he began his public ministry and his followers tried to make him their political leader, he rejected it. He actually ran away when people started to talk like that. In fact, Jesus spent most of his time with people who had little or no political power. He spoke mainly to the poor – not the rich. He ate with public sinners to the horror of the religious leaders of his day. Children had no political power and yet he often told his followers that they had to be like little children to get to heaven. How often do we as parents tell our kids: “Stop acting like a child?” Jesus had a different message. He connected in a very special way with the lowly people of his day. Again, it seems backward. If he was trying to change people – change society – change the world – wouldn’t he have spent his time with those who were wealthy and influential.
You know, Jesus never even wrote anything down that we know about. We hear about Jesus from the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and others. There’s no letter from Jesus to Peter, the leader of the apostles and the first head of his Church. How was Peter supposed to know what Jesus wanted if he didn’t leave some sort of instruction manual? Isn’t that a bit backward? And in the end, he allowed himself to be killed like a common criminal – well, actually not like a common criminal – it was only people who had done very bad things who were tortured to death by crucifixion.
Does any of this make sense? Well, all I can say is: “It must!” Two thousand years later, the WORLD celebrates Christmas. We enter into a time when selfish people try to figure out what they can give to someone else to make them happy – a time when adults stare at packages under the Christmas tree with the eyes of an impatient child – a time when handshakes become hugs – a time when e-mails and text messages become personal, face to face visits.
What is it about those events that took place more than 2000 years ago that still has such a profound effect on us? They were all backward – weren’t they? Well, you know, I spent a little bit of time on the Internet this morning, and I found out that when people throw a bowling ball down the alley so that it spins into the headpin instead of hitting it straight on, the pins react differently. They have a much better chance of hitting one another. Because of the way the pins are arranged, the curvy ball works better than the ball that’s thrown straight at the headpin – the one that makes more sense – at least to me. Well, there’s something about all of the backward events of 2000 years ago that works better for us. There’s a reason that we still remember – there’s a reason that for at least a small part of the year we become the people that we know we should be.
The reason, of course, is love. When Jesus came into the world, love came into the world as it never had before. His birth, his life, and his death, were acts of unconditional love – and it’s that love that we celebrate each year in a very special way on Christmas.
It’s always so gratifying for me to see so many of you here for Mass on Christmas. I don’t think it’s a sense of guilt or obligation that brings you here – it’s the love that we all recall in a very special way today. By the way, that love is actually available every weekend, and Mass times are listed in the Bulletin.
Over the last two years, I’ve asked you to help me close the Christmas homily with a celebration of love. It’s becoming a tradition.
So please, do something for me.
Turn to the person next to you – even if you don’t know that person very well – and say: Merry Christmas – I love you.
And now, turn to the person on the other side and say: Merry Christmas – I love you.
And now, say after me together:
People of Holy Trinity – Merry Christmas – I love you.
People of Canada – Merry Christmas – I love you.
People of the World – Merry Christmas – I love you.
God, our heavenly Father – Merry Christmas – I love you.
Jesus, our brother – Merry Christmas – I love you.
It’s a very special day today. Things that we wouldn’t do on most days – like telling people we barely know, that we love them – don’t feel unusual or backward – they just feel right.
Merry Christmas to all of you – I love you.