john-the-baptist

SUNDAY 18 JANUARY 2026: SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME.

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The Lamb of God: Triumph and Salvation, Stained Glass Inc., Greenville, Texas, USA.

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John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.      John 1:29.

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The Old Testament is very clear about the sacrificial offerings to be made to the Lord. Among many other instructions, every day, one lamb, spotless, without blemish, was to be offered in the morning, and one to be offered in the evening. On the Sabbath, two were to be sacrificed in the morning, and two in the evening. The lamb was chosen presumably symbolizing purity and innocence, offered as an atonement for the sins which we humans have committed. Originally these sacrifices were to be made outside the Tent of Meeting during the 40 years wandering in the desert, then in the Temple in Jerusalem (which was discontinued after its destruction by the Roman army in AD70). Certainly there is something about lambs gamboling about in the joy of life. They are an expression of innocence and vivacity! It is entirely possible that the  crucifixion of the Lord took place at the time when the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Temple, preparing for the Passover celebration… So, for John the Baptist to have declared Jesus to be the Lamb of God certainly has a depth of meaning which is astonishing. Jesus, like the lambs, was utterly innocent of any crime or misdemeanor yet underwent a death as brutal as can be imagined. We Christians say that he was punished for our sins in order for us to be liberated and live as the children of God. We have no excuse in that case for any sins we might commit; in a sense we add to the suffering of the Lord when we sin. That thought should at least give us pause before entering upon a sinful pathway. So, instead of lambs being offered as atonement for our sins, God’s Only Son offered himself in their place. The wages of sin are death; Jesus dying for us in a sense changed that – we now can enter heaven when we leave this world having followed his teaching and, especially, his example. After all, he conquered death itself! And that echoes the blood of the lamb marking the homes of the Hebrews in Egypt when the 10th plague was visited upon the country, the death of the first-born sons. Those homes with the blood of the sacrificed lamb were spared death – so the sacrificed lamb’s blood meant life. So imagine, how much more, the blood of Christ, the Anointed One, THE Lamb of God, allows us to live lives pleasing to God, with sins forgiven and our soul’s life spared.

John the Baptist, in today’s gospel, states that he was witness to the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism, and that was, indeed, the very reason he had been called by God – to bear such witness to the arrival of God’s Son, the longed-for Messiah. Isaiah’s teaching in today’s first reading is, as it were, a premonition of that event. That Jesus was, indeed, the light to the nations, and that God’s message would be extended to all the nations of the world, even to the Gentiles. And today’s second reading, to the Christians in Corinth, was one of salvation: “called to be holy, with all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” quite a message to a rough and ready port city. Typically ports at all times and places were, and are, not exactly places of peace and quiet but are often rough and ready places of vice of every kind. The message and power of Christ took root even there! There is something to be said of peace, hope and the happiness of clean living!

The Lamb of God, AI Generated, unknown provenance.

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SUNDAY 11 JANUARY 2026: THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD.

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The Baptism of the Lord, Fra Angelico c.1440, Convent of St. Mark, Florence, Italy.

After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”    Matthew 3:16-17.

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The baptism of the Lord marks the beginning of his ministry, the reason why God, his and our Father, had sent him to earth. It is possible that Jesus until then had no real idea what God expected of him. He was probably a carpenter as was the man who had adopted him; that would be normal. But on hearing the activities of John, the wild one living on “locusts and wild honey” both specifically permitted in the book of Leviticus 11:22: “All kinds of locusts, bald locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers” and Leviticus 20:24, and God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, he and many others had traveled into the wilderness to see what this man was all about. But it was all unusual, even then. So I imagine that people became intrigued at this strange man, and came just to see what all the fuss was about, perhaps even Jesus (after all, John was his cousin!). Some must have thought John was the promised Messiah, as he was so intent on making sure that they did NOT think that by saying “I am not the Messiah” (John 1:20). But some did indeed follow him even down to today, an ethno-religious group called the Mandaeans. But Christian scripture is quite clear that he was not the Messiah, but all this does suggest that he did have a following. Into this mix of the curious came Jesus from Nazareth. And when John baptized him, everything changed, as you can see above, in the quotation from Matthew, today’s gospel. Two things happened. God’s Holy Spirit descended on him “like a dove”. And there came a voice from the heavens proclaiming that this man was “My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” Two events then, each highly significant. The Spirit of God anointed Jesus. In Hebrew the word is Messiah, and in Greek the word is Christos, both meaning “Anointed One”. Jesus therefore received his Vocation at that moment – he was the Messiah! Now it was his vocation to fulfill all the prophecies concerning the Messiah as proclaimed down through the centuries. The Messiah had, at last, appeared. Not only that, but the Voice from Heaven, clearly God’s voice, declared him to be his Son… Jesus then received his Identity. He was God’s Son clearly with the powers of God prove it! Not surprisingly Jesus had to figure out what had happened to him and what it all meant, hence the desert experience of 40 days and 40 nights. 

Among the thoughts and feelings and revelations and realizations that he must have gone through at that time, today’s first reading from Isaiah must have become real:

I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice,
I have grasped you by the hand;
I formed you, and set you
as a covenant of the people,
a light for the nations,
to open the eyes of the blind,
to bring out prisoners from confinement,
and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.

– today’s first reading. And all the other prophecies must have presented themselves to him, including those of the Suffering Servant also in Isaiah. The glory and the suffering, the challenges and the fulfillment are all to be found in Scripture, and for a man tutored in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, such as Jesus, he would now apply them all to himself. His identity and vocation, both given to him by his Father and confirmed by the Holy Spirit, were  clear. 

One further revelation was present at Jesus’ baptism, that of the Blessed Trinity. Until that moment God was thought of as a single Omnipotent Being clearly responsible for all creation. At the moment of Jesus’ baptism, three clear elements, or persons, appear, utterly unknown until that time: Father (the Voice from heaven), Son (declared to be such by the heavenly Voice, hence had to be the Father) and the Third Person, “as of a dove” descending upon the Lord, the Holy Spirit of God, anointing him as the Messiah. Thus began two thousand years of debate, controversy and argument as to the Nature of God following this event and the other allusions to it in Jesus’ history. Suddenly, God was revealed to be Three Persons, yet One God. This was an utterly new reality, unique in Judeo-Christian thought, rejected by the other Abrahamic faiths, but completely intelligible, though challenging, to Christian reality. The God of Love was at last revealed, the all-powerful generative essence of the Father and Spirit showing forth forever in the Son. This revealed Almighty God as the essence of Love. And we are, each and every one of us, is invited to respond in kind.

The Holy Trinity, ©LPi

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SUNDAY 14 DECEMBER: THE THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVEnt: GAUDETE SUNDAY.

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St. John the Baptist, Matia Preti c.1665, de Young and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, USA.

Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John…. “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”   Matthew 11:7, 11.

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First, a word about today’s special designation. “Gaudete” is the Latin word for “Rejoice”, and it is in the imperative: we must rejoice! There is even a song  which was recorded in the 1970s in Latin which became very popular. Incredible as it might seem, it comes from the Middle Ages and is based on that same word: Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus ex Maria Virgine, gaudete! (Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born of the Virgin Mary, rejoice!). There is much more here. Even the priest at Mass today has the option of wearing rose vestments to emphasize the joyful feeling, that Christmas is near! This is today’s opening antiphon at Mass (which is usually not said if there is an opening hymn):

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice! Indeed, the Lord is near”. 

So clearly the theme here is to be excited at the approach of Christmas, that moment when the Savior of the World entered into that world as a helpless babe, utterly dependent on those around him. And yet, looking at today’s gospel, this was the one who would enable wonders to be performed that the world had never seen before, and have the good news proclaimed. In a nutshell, this was Jesus’ vocation laid out before him, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 35:5–6, today’s first reading: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf cleared. Then will the lame leap like a stag, and the mute tongue will sing”. Jesus sent this message to John the Baptist who was, at that time, in prison for criticizing King Herod, but had heard that it seemed these prophecies were being fulfilled there and then. And John had been preaching that this would be the sign that the Messiah had arrived. Indeed he had. So John, in the eyes of us Christians, was the last prophet of the Old Testament, announcing the arrival of the Messiah, the Anointed One (Χριστός – Christos – in Greek) when he actually had arrived. That explains why Jesus said that John, of all those born of women, none was greater than John the Baptist. But as he could not benefit from becoming Christian (he was executed shortly after), “the least in the kingdom of heaven (that is, Christian) is greater than he” as he was not present at the Descent of God’s Holy Spirit at Pentecost, inaugurating the age of Christianity. We are  therefore more fortunate than John! We are God’s adopted children, taught by the Son of God and guided by God’s Holy Spirit and powered by God’s love of us: what could possibly be better than that? Hence our joy today. But, as ever, we have to be just a little patient. Just as our ancestors were waiting for the Messiah, we await the Second Coming, but we wait in the presence of the Lord. We do not walk into that night alone; we have a guide who is strong, one whose foot is sure, who can lead us directly into heaven if we follow him. In the meantime, however, we have an intermediate goal – commemorating the arrival of that child in swaddling clothes, warmed by a beloved mother. It is almost time…. And here is a sample of one glorious Christmas Hymn composed by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych.

The Nativity, Ghirlandaio c.1492, Vatican Museums, Vatican City State.

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