Gospel Sunday, January 11th
(Mt 3,13-17)
With the gospel of this Sunday, the public life of Jesus begins. Jesus is a seeker affected by the pain and hopes of his people. He is not content with reality as it is, but yearns for a profound transformation of reality and the hearts of people. With this desire for change and conversion, he approaches the novelty of John’s proposal and asks to be baptized. But John recognizes in Jesus a proposal loaded with a radical novelty that goes far beyond his own penitential tradition of Israel. That is why his resistance to baptize him.
The baptism of Jesus is a baptism of the Holy Spirit that expresses his radical availability with God’s dream: human brotherhood and sisterhood beyond all unjust norm or legality, and that recognizes the centrality of people and their dignity above the interests of institutions or traditions. It is a foundational experience in which God confirms him as Beloved Son, covering him with his Spirit and enabling him for the mission.
A mission, as we read in the first and second readings, that will lead you to go through life doing good, encouraging hope from the most fragile situations: the broken reed will not be broken and the flickering ember will not be snuffed out, an unwavering commitment to justice from the smallest and most invisible (Acts 10,34-38; Is 42,1-4.6-7).
In this way, in Jesus, God breaks into human history identifying fully with it. Therefore, we can say that Jesus is the greatest accessibility of God, his language and his grammar, his incarnate Word. In Him and through Him, we are given the experience of filiation that helps us to live rooted in love, as the origin and source of life, and united with all humanity and creation. However, this brotherhood is always threatened by the dynamics of selfishness, indifference, suspicion of the different or individualism that also nest in the human heart and the heart of social structures. Therefore, fraternity and sorority always ask for our complicity.
We are becoming brothers and sisters each time that in our most everyday choices we choose, as Africans and Africanas say, Ubuntu: the conviction, made relational and historical praxis, that *we are if the others are also* and for that it is necessary *to load, take charge and take care of reality*, as Jesus did. *Hell is not the others, but hell is forgetting that we are with others.* Only from interdependence, proximity, and the responsibility of illuminating *an inclusive we* where *all lives matter* does humanity reach its meaning and fullness.
We too, both men and women, through baptism, participate in this mission of Jesus. Where do we recognize today that fraternity and sorority are most threatened in our environments and that we need to renew our commitments with more imagination and radicality?
The Gospel of today also speaks to us of God’s complacency, of his full joy. In what and in whom does God delight today in our contexts? How can we approach these realities and people to participate in this joy and fullness and let ourselves be infected by them?
Pepa Torres Pérez
English version translated with AI