There is a great tradition in the Church when it comes to the ordination of a new priest. Typically, the chalice a priest will use over the course of his life is given to him by his parents. Sometimes this chalice is ordered out of a catalog, some are passed down from priest to priest and still others are custom made. Many times, the chalice is engraved with a special message from the family to the priest and usually the wedding rings of his parents are melted into the chalice when they die. Today’s words from God the Father to Jesus as he comes up out of the water are very special to me because they are the words that mom and dad chose for my chalice. Every time I lift my chalice at mass I see those beautiful words, “This is my beloved Son; with whom I am well pleased.”
Honestly, their choice of scripture surprised me. Because that is not how my family is. We aren’t tactile, we are stoic. The attitude we have is, “if it is your job, then do it”. We are not warm and fuzzy, watching the Lifetime channel in snuggles. If we like you, then we tease you and give you a hard time. So now you know that my family probably needs professional help.
The passage on the bottom of my chalice is meaningful to me because I know it is true. It is not something that was tentative, not something I had earned and could be taken away. It was ingrained into my DNA, I was their son. Nothing can ever change that.
Something like that is going on with God in the gospel today. Jesus is affirmed with his baptism. Before he does any ministry, before he works miracles or preaches beautiful sermons, God approves him, loves him, and lets the world know that he is the beloved son.
Can you believe that we become beloved sons and daughters of God with our baptism? That’s why the Church treats it so seriously and wants people to be baptized, even babies, as soon as possible.
But How do we often relate to God? Not like beloved children but frightened ones. Many times like we must earn his love, make him like us. We are afraid as if he might decide he doesn’t really love us any more. Or, we know in our heads that God loves us completely but that knowledge hasn’t made it down to our hearts yet. It doesn’t affect the way we live, the way we think, the way we love. BUT IT SHOULD!!!!
Perhaps this disconnect happens because we sometimes we experience conditional love from people who approve of us mainly because we fill a need or make them happy. Sadly some of you have had this experience in your families or friends. Perhaps some of us even treat people this way. We make others earn our approval or affection. Conditional love is something we humans inflict on each other, but is something foreign to God. He is always all in!
You and I don’t deserve the Father’s Love, it is given freely. There is nothing in the world we could ever do to deserve that divine approval; it has already been given. And yet, how sad that we usually interact with God as if it were up to us and our actions to make him like us. As if it were in our hands to do enough to persuade God to send a little love our way. No wonder we beat ourselves up so much when we sin and fail and realize our weaknesses!
Think about this:
What would look different in your life if you believed that God loved you unconditionally? How would it change your perspective? Would it make you more daring in living out your faith, knowing that you always had a loving God at your side? Imagine the freedom that would come with knowing in your bones that no matter what you did, successful or not, you can not lose the love and approval of God! How might it change the way you treated other people? Realizing that the One who is madly in love with you is also loving them in the same way? Would it add passion to our faith, our prayer, our daily lives?
You are beloved sons and daughters, even if you don’t feel it or realize it yet. You are alive because God loves you, thinks of you and wants you running around. Every moment of every day he is thinking of you specifically, he is smiling and crying and feeling everything you do, all with the perfection of the one is being and beauty and every other transcendent good thing.
How it must have felt for Christ as he came out of that water and heard the voice of his Father! If you have never heard that voice, I pray for you now, I want let you know that God is crying out those same words every day, all the time. He wants us to know of his mad love for us fickle and sinful children, that is why he sent his beloved son in the 1st place, to shatter our deafness and indifference.
Let’s listen, let’s believe, let’s receive this good news and then fly out of here and share it with other people. amen.
