The first Sunday of Ordinary time and the last Sunday of the Christmas season in the new calendar is the Baptism of the Lord. We still continue to meditate on the growth in wisdom and grace of the Child Jesus until the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord on February 2nd, but we begin the transition to the apostolic period of Christ’s life with the feast of His Baptism. What defines this moment? How does the feast of His Baptism help us begin to reap the fruits of the Christmas Season and live out the Christian mystery in the ordinary of our lives?
Saint John Neumann, bishop
We have all heard that God is love – that’s probably the most powerful statement about God that we have. Even people who don’t go to Church or think of themselves as very religious like the idea that God is love. But what does it mean when we say that God is love? What is love? Have you ever thought about it? There’s an old joke that went around when I was a kid. Someone would ask you if you love something: “Do you love pizza? Do you love ice cream?” If you answered, “Yes!” then they would say, “Well if you love chocolate why don’t you marry it?” A really silly thing to say, and of course no one is going to get married to a piece of candy. The reason is because there are different kinds of love. There is the love you have for pizza, the love you have for your cousins, the love you have for your parents, the love you have for your grandma and grandpa – lots of different kinds of love. God is not all the different kinds of love – God is one kind of love: the love that He had for us by sending His Son Jesus to die on a Cross and save us when we are lost.
Epiphany
Several days ago we celebrated the Nativity of our Lord – His birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary – today we celebrate His Epiphany. The word Epiphany brings together two important ideas: light and knowledge. Light is something we almost take for granted: the human race used to be much more dependent upon natural light to perform daily activities. When the days became shorter, the kinds of activities that you could expect to do were different from when the days were longer. Summer and Winter were not just warmer and colder, but the change in the amount of daylight meant that you couldn’t work the same way all day every day of the year. Today we have enough artificial light to work almost the same way all year long – most people work on screens that produce their own light and it is only some combination of discipline, boredom, and exhaustion that make us set them aside. We get light from electricity, and we have a fairly extensive control over electricity so how much light the natural world is willing to provide us with at any given time hardly seems limiting.