It’s easy enough to be confused around today’s Feast of The Lord’s Baptism. Scarcely two weeks ago, we beheld an infant in a borrowed stable and now we celebrate the baptism of a man aged thirty.
The timing may well give rise to confusion but the intent is to focus our minds on the reality that the child did not remain a child. Boyhood gave way to adulthood because work had to be done.
Maybe there’s something being said to us about the need to allow the Faith grow with us too. There may well be in, all of us, a tendency to live faith in a childlike way that doesn’t take into account the natural call to grow in maturity and awareness. The subjects we covered in National School serve as a solid foundation for the more focused studies of Secondary School and University. That foundation is essential but the purpose of any foundation is to build on its solid structure.
Likewise the child in faith must become an adult. Jesus, born in Bethlehem, had to meet the waters of the Jordan so that his public ministry could commence.
Where are we along this road of faith? How can we declare ourselves ready for the sharing of the Good News? What have we done to build, brick by brick, a solid faith?