Some people have strange minds and see the world in a different light than most others. Tim Burton, the director of movies like as Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, the Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, is a prime example. When I have watched his movies, I often think, “how does he come up with this stuff?” However, he had an experience which topped anything he depicted in his films, an experience that not even his unusual mind was prepared for. He said, “You really can't prepare for it. It's the most natural thing in the world yet the most shocking, somehow.” Tim Burton was referring to the birth of his first child.
Burton makes a good point. Nothing on this planet can really compare with the birth of a baby. Each child possesses a potential and a value which cannot be quantified; babies bring hope. As the Bible teaches, we are created in the very image of God. That we can participate in the conception of such a being, whose soul and resurrected body will live forever, should stun us.
That natural event, with its power and potential, rightly amazes us, yet something else should shock us even more. Today’s feast of the baptism of the Lord reminds us that something similar happens in the spiritual world whenever someone receives the sacrament of baptism. In beginning his public ministry, Jesus risked misunderstanding by allowing John to baptize him. It made him appear as less than John and of somehow needing spiritual cleansing. Neither was true, as John himself testifies. But the fact Jesus would accept such a risk shows how important he considered baptism to be to his message of salvation. It would become not only a vehicle of conversion, but of new birth. The early Christians struggled with this. Why did the sinless Christ accept a baptism that implied repentance? As St. Augustine and other Fathers pointed out, Jesus was baptized not for his sake, but for ours. The waters did not transform him; he transformed the waters.
Our family has been blessed with many babies. I personally believe being around little ones softens the heart of a person in the best possible way. That’s why I always want our families with young children to feel welcome here; their presence benefits all of us! For example, one of the blessings of holding a little baby is how peaceful and happy they make us. People spend hours simply holding their children and looking at them with love. Even the smallest thing they do brings such delight to their mother or father: a little smile, a funny face, a goofy sound. People delight in their babies, not for what they do but simply for who they are.
What we do for babies, God does for you and me at every instant. You might say God spends all eternity contemplating us. And his attention is never divided. Even though he has lots of children, he focuses completely on every one of us with undivided affection. Not because we have done something to deserve it, but because of Jesus, who instituted the sacrament of baptism, which allowed us to be adopted into God’s family. Because of those saving waters, God has said to us the same sacred words he proclaimed to Jesus, “You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. With you I am well pleased!”
You and I don’t earn the Father’s Love nor have we done anything to deserve it. But he doesn’t care about that! In spite of our unworthiness, He gives it freely and unconditionally. There is nothing in the world we could ever do to make God love us more. 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 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 could not lose the love and approval of God! How might it change the way you treated other people? Realizing 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?
How good it must have felt for Christ as he came out of the water and heard the voice of his Father! If you have never heard that voice, I pray for you now, I want you to know that God is crying out those same words every day, all the time. You are alive because God loves you, thinks of you and wants you here. Every moment of every day he is thinking of you specifically, he looks on you with love, he is smiling and crying and feeling everything you do. 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 first place, to shatter our deafness and indifference.
When you find your faith tested, perhaps by sickness or financial problems, by struggles in your family, or even abandonment by the people who should be there for you, remember Jesus has claimed you. We belong to him and in him we belong to each other. Because of him we also hear the Father's voice, “You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. With you I am well pleased.” Shocking, undeserved, but ultimately and always true!
