THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD C
2013 #21
Is 40, 1-5. 9-11
Ps 104
Ti 2, 11-14, 3, 4-7
Lk 3, 15-16. 21-22
Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro,
N.Y.
January 13, 2013
Deacon Tom Cornell
“The Lord will bless his people with peace.”
Our first reading from the Prophet Isaiah
foretells the coming of the Christ “upon whom I have put my spirit,” says the
Lord. He will bring justice, a just
peace, not just to Israel but to the nations as well. And he will do it not by raising an army, but
quietly, gently. “A bruised reed he will
not break.” He will not take advantage of anyone’s weakness but lift up all,
friend and enemy alike. Then in our second
reading from St. Paul’s Letter to Titus, the Lord addresses his Christ and
calls him “a light to the nations to open the eyes of the blind, to bring
prisoners out of confinement and from the dungeons those who live in darkness.” This has an eschatological meaning – that’s a
fancy word that indicates it’s for the End Time, the Second Coming, the final
establishment of His kingdom which will have no end. But it’s also meant to point to present
reality. The mystery of the kingdom of
God is that it is then and there but also here and now. By that I mean the fulfillment of the kingdom
can only come about by God’s own intervention at the end of time, in the new
heaven and the new earth foretold in Scripture, but it is also here and now in
embryo, if you will, because He said “The kingdom of God is within you, in your
midst.” Here and now, if we will have it.
The blind see? The lame walk? Yes!
I saw it happen, yes I did, in Selma, Alabama,
almost 47 years ago. It was Jesus Christ
who led the March to Montgomery in the person of Martin Luther King. Most of the white people of Alabama were and
are good Christian people. But many,
very many were blind, blinded by the racist propaganda fed them by those who
knowingly profited by setting race against race, worker against worker, by
reinforcing negative stereotypes of black people and by propagating scare
stories. Fear is a powerful weapon, and
the root of war, as Thomas Merton put it.
It’s still going on, mass media blinding people, making them believe
that the poor are their enemies, that Muslims are their enemy, or the Chinese. Back then, in 1965, the stories they spread about
us in the news media made us look like degenerate hippies or Russian Reds, wild. But as we marched through town and out on
Alabama Rt. 80, the frightened people saw us for real, not as we were
portrayed, ministers and priests and rabbis, nuns in full habit, and nicely
scrubbed young and middle-aged and old men and women, black and white and who
knows what, but normal, disciplined people, joined in a great cause for which
we were willing to put our lives on the line, and I saw, as they watched us, I
saw the scales fall from their eyes as Black people previously lame walked, as
young and old Black people imprisoned in the dungeons of segregation walked out
into the sun, heads held high. It was a
glorious time.
We won, and we didn’t fire a shot,
killed no one, injured no one, lied to no one, humiliated no one. And we won, through the power of nonviolence,
the ethic of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount put into practice. The President of the United States, Lyndon
Johnson, a Southern white man, addressed a joint session of the Senate and the
Congress, and the American people, and the world, and demanded the Voters’
Rights Bill of 1965 and he got it, and everything changed. The legal structures of racial segregation
were dismantled. The sad, tragic irony
is that today, more than a generation later, racial segregation is again the
order of the day, not just in the South, but in Northern cities where more than
ninety percent of some inner city schools are minorities. God does not show partiality, even if people
still do.
Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles has
Saint Peter come to the realization that God’s saving grace is available to
people of all nations, not just the Jews, as he had been thought. The very
first Gentile Peter will baptize is a soldier, a Roman soldier, a centurion in
charge of one hundred men of the occupation force. That is startling! The first recruit among the Gentiles to the
cause of the Prince of Peace was a Roman soldier! Did Cornelius renounce the use of weapons and
refuse to kill? Military converts were
required to do just that, even if their superior officers ordered them to do
so, but we do not know. The Roman Army
performed many tasks other than war-making, mail-delivery, for instance, and
flood-control. We do know that Cornelius
was of good conscience and the grace of God fell upon him. Many other soldiers, upon baptism or after
deeper conversion, refused further military service, among them Saints
Achilleus and Nereus, Saint Camillus and Saint Martin of Tours, the patron
saint of soldiers who refused to be a soldier.
The Gospel reading simply affirms that this man,
Jesus of Nazareth, is the one, the long-awaited Messiah, Christ. It is he who will usher in the kingdom of
justice and peace. If the evening news does
not reflect that truth, whose fault is that? Jesus Christ is our peace. We are his body in the world. Let’s show it, let’s prove it! The nonviolent Civil Rights movement offers a
template. Jesus is the Commander in
Chief of the nonviolent army. Yes, that
is an army too, the nonviolent movement.
We used to sing, “We are soldiers in the army; we have to fight; we know
we have to die.” But far fewer die in
the nonviolent struggle. And it ends in
reconciliation and healing, not bitterness, resentment and envy.
The Lord
will bless his people with peace! “The
Lord has blessed his people with peace!”
That is the Paschal Mystery, the meaning of the birth of Jesus, his
ministry, his death and resurrection. He
is our peace.
W
