Living Our Baptism: Part I: Jesus Lord
Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM
D uring the years I lived in Asia I hardly remember ever leaving my house without seeing situations I would wish to have changed for the better. After years of pastoral experience in my corner of western Europe, I am also aware of circumstances which need to be changed – not least within one-self – even though the surface picture of need is not so obvious. ‘Compassion fatigue’ was coined to speak of the almost overwhelming scale of need which can almost swamp the finite willingness to help.
The Guide to Life
Living in such a world as a Christian, it is practical to say, “Lord, I know you know. If you want me to see, say or do something, please tell me.” Circumstances, presumably, not visions will do the talking. If I try to be alert to God and life in the present moment, I shall be invited to act, but the ideal will never outrun the real.
The basic pattern for this was set at baptism. It is from there that my relationship with God and neighbor is established. Life is to be lived, therefore, as an expression of that primary sealing as God’s own. Despite the many claims on me, and perhaps because of them, only if I anchor myself in the practical reality of baptism can I hope to cope. St. Louis Marie de Montfort, as a pastoral priest, was ever alive to this. Perhaps this series on baptism and its implications can help to bring this out.
In the Christian context the person of Jesus Christ is the guide to reality:
“Jesus our Saviour . . must be the ultimate end of all our devotions otherwise they would be false and misleading … he is the only Teacher from whom we must learn, the only Lord on whom we should depend. … Every edifice which is not built on that firm rock is founded on shifting sands .. .” (TD61).
Montfort there, with his primary stress on listening to Christ and acting in the light of what we hear, echoes the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount. This is God’s world, and Jesus Our Lord is the way into and through it. As Christ lived for his Father’s will in any and every circumstance, so too should we. This is the core insight of Christian reality. In so far as we nail ourselves to Christ in God so we live to some purpose. ‘God Alone’ was the dynamic driving St. Louis-Marie’s every venture.
The logic of this means that God’s will is the underlying reality in every situation not excluding death. If I try to discover what God wants of me and then try and follow where I am led, I shall come to see purpose in life. To identify with God’s will and to act through Christ in his name, is to be powerful and effective. I reflect what I see and hear, and because God under-writes it, the currency can never be devalued. There is an underlying integrity to life.
The Baptism of Christ: Italian painter: Paris Paschalinus Bordone: 1535-1540
The painting resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
If I try to discover what God wants of me and then try and follow where I am led, I shall come to see purpose in life. To identify with God’s will and to act through Christ in his name, is to be powerful and effective.
A Relationship Set in Baptism
Baptism (or Christening) is the gift which establishes the possibility of this relationship with Christ in God: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation . . . every-thing has become new! All this is from God . . .” (2 Cor.5:17-18). Marked and sealed by God’s Spirit in baptism means more than a minor adjustment in outlook and life – if we genuinely accept responsibility for what we have been given. St. Paul speaks of root and branch change – a new creation!
This Paul sees in the person who is overwhelmed by the love of God in Christ to such an extent that he or she lives now, “no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (2 Cor. 5:15). That the once crucified and now risen Lord came through a grave to be with me, so colors reality that whoever glimpses this, then marches to a different drum. In the gift of God in Christ, we have received everything.
Jesus Lord
This grasp of basic Christianity St. Louis-Marie made his own through his realization of what it means to be baptized. As with Paul so with Montfort, “. . . we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2Cor.4:5). Jesus too is Montfort’s Lord who, in the stunning gift of himself, takes him out of himself into a reality underpinned by the unfathomable riches of Christ. Like Paul, he is bound to Jesus risen by hand, foot and head.
As Jesus’ slave he can, like his Lord, give himself utterly to anyone and everyone – “when I am teaching catechism to the poor in town and country, I am in my element. I have been teaching catechism to the beggars in town . . . I visit the inmates of the prisons and the sick in the hospitals, preaching to them as well as sharing the alms I receive. Even in the poorhouse, I do not wish to be separated from my mother, divine Providence, and with this in mind, I am happy to share the meals of the poor and to have no fixed salary” (Letters 9 and 10).
Enlightened
To live in faith as free as Paul and Montfort, living no longer for themselves but for God giving himself in Christ through the Spirit, argues a particularly strong attraction to Christ: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor.4: 5-6). St. Paul compares the coming of Christ into his life to the creation of light! However life presents itself on good days or bad, it reflects what God is like in Christ. This is true illumination. Paul is lost in wonder, and so is taken out of himself to God and his brothers and sisters for whom Christ died.
St. Louis-Marie too is similarly illumined:
“This splendor of dazzling and incomprehensible light (Jesus) of which the apostles caught a glimpse at the Transfiguration, filled them with delight and lifted them to the heights of ecstasy . . . My words fail to give even the faintest idea of his beauty . . . gentleness, and fall infinitely short of his excellence . . . You alone, great God, know who he is and can reveal him to all you wish” (LEW 19).
If the Christian wants to glimpse what these saints see, like them he should grow in the understanding of what it is to be baptized into Christ Jesus. As a first step, perhaps, I should try to open myself to receive the gift of God in Christ. Jesus my Lord has come from a grave to be with me wherever I am. The initial reaction to this should be a sense of wonder – if this is true, what does it say to me of myself, my worth, and,’ my world? In so far as wonder takes hold of me, I shall be given light through the insight of faith. Then, the competing claims on me which began this reflection, can begin to come together in Christ.
(to be continued)
