COMMENT ON THE LITURGY OF THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
Collect
Almighty and everlasting God, who dost govern all things in heaven and earth; Mercifully hear the supplications of thy people, and grant us thy peace all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Readings
Rm 12:6-16; Mk 1,1:11
In the weeks called "after the Epiphany" - which separate us from the Sunday of Septuagesima, (that marks the beginning of a pre-Lenten period) - we find three evangelical episodes that represent the three most important moments of the manifestation ("epiphany") of the Lord to humanity.
The first episode is the one narrated in the Gospel for the mass of January 6: the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. The magi were precisely priests and magicians who had come from the East, who, scanning the sky, had identified the birth of the Son of God, and went to worship him. They represent non-Israelite peoples, who recognize - or will recognize - in Jesus the Savior.
Since the early Christian centuries the Epiphany has been associated with two other important events, narrated in this Sunday's Gospel and in that we will read next Sunday. This Sunday the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark presents the account of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist. The following Sunday we will find the story of the miracle at the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus transforms water into wine, manifesting his power through his first public miracle.
Both episodes are a manifestation of the divinity of Jesus. At the Jordan, where he undergoes the penitential baptism of John (not because he had sinned, but to descend into the waters and sanctify them) the heavens open and the voice of the Father resounds to testify, also through the Spirit appearing in the form of a dove, that Jesus is the Christ, the beloved Son, in whom God is well pleased.
At the Jordan not only is the divinity of Jesus revealed, but at the same time God manifests himself as the Trinity.
The immersion of Jesus in the waters is a prefiguration of his "immersion" in the pains of the passion and in the "waters" of death, and we too are called to participate in baptism in this mystery.
If John's baptism represented a substantially penitential rite, which served to forgive sins and to mark an important stage of conversion to God in view of the new messianic era, Christian baptism has a different nature and represents a more radical stage: in it we are incorporated into Christ and at the same time we receive the gift of the Spirit which allows us to call God "Father".
Baptism in the Jordan is an image of the rites of Christian initiation: baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist, which in ancient times - and still today in Eastern churches - are administered together and considered in close complementarity.
Chrismation represents the seal of the Spirit. In fact, incorporation into the Son is unimaginable without the gift of the Spirit that the Father pours out on him and that the Son gives back to the Father, in the circularity of divine love. At the same time, a Christian initiation without the Eucharist would be incomplete. Because the Spirit is the One who allows us to recognize ourselves as members of the same body, in the different charisms that have been given to us (Rm 12,4-8; 1 Cor 12,4-11).
The Eucharist realize the communion with the body of Christ, which manifests itself in the Church and allows us to participate in the gift of the Spirit, to receive it and communicate it in faith. In this way Christian initiation - baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist - are never private events, which concern the individual believer, but are the one and tripartite mystery, through which the Church is revealed to us as a supernatural reality, the Mystical body of Christ, built with living stones and vivified by the Spirit.
In Christianity there is no room for a faith lived in a purely individualistic way; authentic faith transforms us in our relationship with God and with our neighbor, because through it the Lord makes us an efficient and effective cause in the building up of his Kingdom, to grant humanity days of authentic peace; his peace, not the peace as the world gives, but that only the Spirit of God can give. Then every man regain dignity and humanity and can discover itself as something more than the arithmetic sum of single individuals.
- Rev. Dr. Luca Vona
