Brief synopsis of the readings: The first reading from Isaiah speaks of a servant who will bring home justice, not by force but by gentleness. He will establish justice for all and free the prisoner. Mark’s Gospel speaks of Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan River. When Jesus is baptized there is a voice from the heavens who tells everyone that Jesus is the “beloved Son” who should be listened too.

I’m going to start with a question I’ve been asking since I was a child: Did Jesus need to be baptized, and if so, why? And if he didn’t need to be baptized, why was he?

Today’s Gospel centers on Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist and I think this speaks as much to us about baptism and the other sacraments as it does to either Jesus or John.

I find it interesting that this event is told in three of the four Gospels. John does not explicitly speak of John baptizing Jesus but clearly baptizes others. In any case, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have remarkably similar accounts of John baptizing Jesus; biblical scholars will generally agree that Matthew and Luke took their account from Mark since Mark was the first Gospel to be written, but in any case all three thought it important enough to include.

For Catholics of my generation and earlier this presented a problem. We were taught that the purpose of baptism was the removal of original sin. All of us were born with this stain on our souls that began when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and it was passed down “like a recessive gene” to all of us. Only baptism could remove this stain and no one with this stain could get to heaven. What if you die as an adult and weren’t baptized? Sorry, but you’re screwed. What if you die as an infant, or at least young enough that you couldn’t have committed sin? Well….there’s a place for you called “limbo.” This may sound silly to those who did not grow up with this, but limbo was seen as a place on the edge of hell. It was clearly not heaven but those in limbo did not suffer any punishment. Dante’s Inferno, written between 1308 and 1321, describes limbo as a place for innocent infants and virtuous non Christians. The Baltimore Catechism (written by American bishops in Baltimore in the late 1800s and used in most Catholic schools until the 1960s) states this in question 632:

Question: Where will persons go who — such as infants– have not committed actual sin and who, through no fault of theirs, die without baptism? Answer: Persons, such as infants, who have not committed actual sin and who, through no fault of theirs, die without baptism, cannot enter heaven; but it is the common belief that they will go to some place similar to Limbo, where they will be free from suffering, though deprived of the happiness of heaven.

It’s hard to know what the guys in charge intended by this serpentine logic but the response was clear: generations of parents raced their newborn to the church to be baptized “in case something horrible happens.”

In know about this because of an incident in my own family. My maternal grandmother’s younger sister (my great aunt if you’re keeping score) birthed a stillborn child in 1937. This was only spoken about in whispers and I don’t know what caused this baby’s demise but the priest refused to allow the baby to be buried in a Catholic cemetery because he (or she) was not baptized. To my great aunt’s credit the baby was buried somewhere else and when this pastor was transferred she plead her case to the new pastor who chose compassion over obedience and this child is now buried in a Catholic cemetery.

I know I’ve been wandering but if we hold to the belief that baptism removes original sin, why did Jesus need to be baptized? Catholics believe that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was “immaculately conceived” without original sin; it stands to reason that Jesus was also conceived without original sin (since the “recessive gene” was eliminated). If the only purpose of baptism was to remove something that Jesus never had, why do it?

I’ve spoken of “Catholics of my generation and earlier,” but what of Catholics of a later generation? For them baptism was not about removing, but of adding. We baptize someone to welcome him or her into the community of faith. A couple belongs to church, they have a baby, and everyone wants to be there to welcome this baby into the faith. I have to confess that this belief drove me during my priesthood. I had no belief that an unbaptized infant wouldn’t go to heaven and when the rare couple would come to me to baptize a child they had no interest in raising in the parish, they didn’t like my answer. I told them that their child was going to heaven no matter what I did but I didn’t feel comfortable welcoming someone into our community who would never return. The next time you see a TV show about ex-Catholics who left because of an idiot priest, you may find me.

But I stand by those decisions and I use today’s readings for my justification. Baptism, like all the sacraments, isn’t a “get out of limbo free” card, it’s a window on the divine. Sacraments are occasions where we do something, and God does something, to bring us to a glimpse of each other. We get a sniff of heaven and God gets a sniff of what He has created. If we believe that Jesus’ incarnation crashes light into our darkness, how much more is his baptism an aftershock?

Mabye the emphasis on this baptism isn’t about Jesus or even John, but about the encounter between the two. As Catholics we’ve always held that baptism is the first sacrament. We can’t celebrate any other sacrament without this one and this the gateway to the other six.

But baptism, like the other six, call us to closer relationships with God and with each other. It grieves me that some sacraments are done privately, in whispers. Some, like first communions, confirmations, marriages, and ordinations, are public celebrations. Some, like baptisms, can be private only because time is of the essence (“in case something horrible happens”). And some, like reconciliaton and anointing of the sick, are seem to take place under cover of darkness.

Many years ago I ran a CCD (Catholic Sunday School program) in Virginia. At the time we celebrated first reconciliation (aka first confession) and first communion in the same year with 2nd graders. First communion was nothing short of a pageant, so large that we needed to split the 180 children into two groups and have them on consecutive Sundays; the church held 800 but so many families invited friends and relatives that it was too small for one Sunday. But when I tried to have some type of celebration for first reconciliation the priest thought I was crazy. Because part of this sacrament contains a private conversation between the child and the priest he found no reason to make any of it public. It took some doing but I was finally able to convince him that making it private made it look shameful and embarrassing.

It shouldn’t be. Whether the sacraments are initiating people into the church (baptism, communion, confirmation), marking a life change (marriage, ordination), or celebrating healing (reconciliation, anointing of the sick) they should be celebrated as our windows into the divine.

So maybe the point of Jesus’ baptism isn’t that it’s giving him something and it certainly isn’t done to pretend that he needs something. But if we look between John and Jesus, if we look at the interaction between the two, we see that window. We see, if only for a moment, a harbinger of what awaits us. We see the hand of God in our lives.

And we see this even if we don’t hear a voice that proclaims: “This is my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on him.” Because that voice is there even if we can’t hear it.