The liturgy represents the summing up of
the epiphany of the Lord. The First Reading declares the authority of Christ as acquired from his
divine appointment and mission. The Second Reading declares the universality of Christ’s mission.
The Gospel demonstrates Christ’s authority and mission as occasioned by his baptism.
There are so many possible topics involved in
this baptismal epiphany that no single homily could possibly enumerate, much less develop them. I
should like to settle on one, Christ’s obedience to the Father.
Obedience has always been a difficult virtue for
us wayward humans as we bear the rebellious genes of our first parents. But it is a quality that
particularly marks Our Lord, for it defines his Incarnation. It was the Father’s precept that
Jesus accept his mission in carrying out the Father’s will. Jesus complies: “Behold I come to do
thy will” [Heb. 10:9]. Jesus’ obedience becomes the blueprint for our moral actions. As the Father
commissioned Jesus for his mission at his baptism, Jesus has commissioned us at our baptism to do
our part in continuing his mission.
Obedience is hard for all human beings. It is
especially hard for us Americans. Our culture, basically Christian, is founded on a combination of
the unorthodox teachings of Protestant Calvinism and certain anti-Christian ideas that wafted in
from the European Enlightenment. Calvin pushed the notion of the individual’s direct relationship
to God to the detriment of the community, that is, the Church. The upshot of this theology is the
culture of individualism where the rugged, independent man and woman came to characterize the
ideal American. We live and breathe the environment of our culture and often catch the virus that
lurks there. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago often observes that American Catholics are
Catholic in faith and Calvinist in culture.
This individualistic attitude not only accounts
for the often uneasy tension between our country and the Vatican on the international level, it
also prompts us individuals to ignore or refuse the teachings of the bishops and the Magisterium
with the attitude that “no one is going to tell me what to believe or how to act.” It is an
attitude that flies in the face of the obedience that so characterized Jesus.
I realize that this renders us culturally
schizophrenic. As Americans we belong to a great country, a land that nourishes us, protects us,
and guarantees our freedoms, a land that we love. But as Catholics we must disown our culture’s
rugged individualism that puts us in the occasion of disobedience to Jesus and the Father. None of
us individual men and women bears in our self the full identity of Christ. Only the Church, the
community, does so. And only as members of the Church community do we enjoy identity with Christ
and can guarantee obedience to the Father’s will.
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