11 January 2025
You Are My Beloved
A young boy’s mother looked out the window
and noticed him “playing church” with their cat.
The cat was sitting quietly as he preached to it.
She smiled and went about her work.
A while later she heard loud meowing and hissing
and ran back to the open window to see her son baptizing the cat in a tub of water.
She called out,
“Johnny, stop that!
The cat doesn’t like that!
He’s afraid of water!”
Johnny looked up calmly at her and said,
“He should have thought about that before he joined my church.”
The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord brings the Christmas season to a close,
and that detail matters more than we might realize.
Christmas does not end because the story is finished,
but because it has been fully revealed.
At Christmas, God comes near.
At Epiphany, God is revealed to the nations.
And today, at the Jordan River,
God tells us who Jesus is
—and, just as importantly,
who we are in Him.
What we have been celebrating over these past weeks is not just a series of nostalgic moments or familiar scenes.
It is a steady unfolding of God’s self-revelation.
Each feast answers a deeper question.
Christmas answers
Has God come?
Epiphany answers
For whom has He come?
And today answers
Who is He
—and what does that mean for us?
Matthew’s Gospel is careful and intentional in how this moment unfolds.
Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptized by John.
John is understandably confused.
He knows that Jesus has no sins to repent of.
And yet Jesus insists.
He steps down into the river,
not to confess sin,
but to stand where sinners stand.
From the very beginning of His public ministry,
Jesus chooses solidarity over separation.
This is not an unimportant or incidental detail.
It reveals the very heart of God.
Jesus does not wait for humanity to climb up to Him;
He steps down into the waters of human need.
He places Himself where broken people are,
where repentance happens,
where conversion begins.
Even before He speaks a word publicly,
Jesus preaches with His presence.
As Jesus comes up from the water,
the heavens are opened.
For a Jewish listener,
that phrase would immediately signal divine revelation.
In the Scriptures, when the heavens open,
God is acting decisively
—revealing Himself,
intervening,
making His will known.
This is not a private spiritual experience.
This is a public moment in salvation history.
The Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove.
That image is rich with meaning.
It recalls the Spirit hovering over the waters at the dawn of creation in Genesis.
It echoes Israel’s passage through the Red Sea,
when God brought His people out of slavery into freedom. Matthew is telling us that something new is happening here:
a new creation is beginning,
and a new exodus is underway.
This moment gathers together the deepest currents of Israel’s story
—creation, covenant, liberation—
and focuses them on one person.
Jesus is revealed
not only as the fulfillment of God’s promises,
but as the one through whom God is making all things new.
Then comes the voice from heaven.
“This is my beloved Son,
with whom I am well pleased.”
In Jewish tradition,
a voice from heaven
—the bat qol—
was understood as God confirming identity and authority.
And what is striking is when this voice speaks.
Jesus has not yet preached a sermon.
He has not performed a miracle.
He has not gathered disciples.
Before He does anything publicly,
He is named.
Beloved.
Son.
Pleasing to the Father.
This is the heart of today’s feast:
identity precedes mission.
Jesus does not become the Son at His baptism.
He is revealed as the Son.
What has always been true is now made visible.
The Father declares publicly what is eternally real:
this is My Son,
and I delight in Him.
And notice what the Father does not say.
He does not say,
“This is my Son
watch what He will accomplish.”
He does not say,
“This is my Son
see how much He will suffer.”
He simply names relationship.
Love is spoken before obedience,
delight before sacrifice,
communion before commission.
That matters profoundly,
because the prayer at the beginning of Mass makes clear
that this moment is not meant to remain Christ’s alone.
We pray that we,
“your children by adoption,
reborn of water and the Holy Spirit,
may always be well pleasing to you.”
In baptism,
we are not merely symbolically associated with Christ
we are incorporated into Him.
We are adopted, claimed, and given a new identity.
Our baptism is not a sign that we belong;
it is the act by which God claims us as his own
and makes us belong.
This is why the Church has always taken baptism so seriously.
Something real happens.
God acts.
A relationship is established.
A name is spoken over us,
whether we remember it or not,
whether we feel it or not.
Not by chance.
We didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the right time to be baptized.
We are chosen.
We are claimed as sons and daughters,
sealed with the Spirit,
joined to Christ’s own life.
And that means something very important for how we understand the Christian life.
Too often, we live as though God’s love must be earned.
As though approval comes after performance.
As though holiness is about proving ourselves worthy.
But at the Jordan,
the Father speaks love before action.
Pleasure before achievement.
Relationship before responsibility.
God’s pleasure is not earned;
it is given.
We cannot merit God’s love;
God freely loves us.
That truth reshapes everything.
It should change how we pray,
how we repent,
how we serve,
how we fail.
We do not live the Christian life trying to win God’s affection. We live it learning to trust the affection we already have.
That does not mean that what we do does not matter.
It means our lives flow from gift, not fear.
Baptism does not remove mission
it grounds it.
Jesus will go on from the Jordan to preach, to heal, to confront evil, to suffer, and to give His life.
But He does all of that as One who knows who He is and whose He is.
So should we.
I’ve continued to say Merry Christmas these past few weeks,
even this morning when I greeted you.
This feast closes the Christmas season
because it completes the revelation of this Child’s identity and mission.
The baby born in Bethlehem is not only Emmanuel, God-with-us.
He is the beloved Son who draws us into His own relationship with the Father.
Christmas is not only about God coming near;
it is about God claiming us as His own.
That is why this feast matters so much for ordinary life. Because many of us forget who we are.
We forget our baptismal identity.
We measure ourselves by success and failure,
by productivity and comparison,
by what others think or expect.
And slowly, subtly, we begin to live like orphans
rather than sons and daughters.
We start striving instead of trusting.
Performing instead of receiving.
Hiding instead of resting in mercy.
And when that happens,
even our faith can become exhausting
rather than life-giving.
The Baptism of the Lord calls us back to the Jordan.
It reminds us that before anything else,
God has spoken a word over us.
In Christ, He has said:
You are mine.
You are loved.
You belong.
Ordinary Time begins tomorrow,
and that is not accidental.
The Christian life is lived
not in constant spectacle,
but in faithfulness.
In work, relationships, decisions, and quiet obedience.
But it is lived best when it is rooted in identity
rather than anxiety.
That is the way faith grows.
Jesus enters the water so that we might know where we stand.
The heavens open so that we might know God is near.
The Father speaks so that we might hear the truth about ourselves.
“You are my beloved.”
The question this feast leaves us with
is not whether God has claimed us.
He most certainly has through our baptism.
The question is whether we will live as people who know it.