Feast of the Baptism of Christ 2026
Readings: Acts 10: 34-43 and Matthew 3: 13-end
Fr Marc Voase
“God anointed Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit and with power… he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed, for God was with him.”
+May I speak in the name of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit Amen
The lectionary for today gives us Peter’s cogent, patient explanation of the Christian gospel to the gentile believers in the house of Cornelius. On this feast when we celebrate the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is no less important for us, whether we have been Christians from the cradle, or only since last Christmas itself, to hear that message again, and to recognise that salvation is a universal gift, intended for all people in all circumstances.
In the baptism of Jesus, God the Father concretizes at the River Jordan what is begun in the arrival of the Magi at the manger of Bethlehem, to reveal his Son, the Beloved, to a weary, waiting world. All of this is a continuous epiphanytide. We should never regard the events of the incarnation as stand-alone phenomena, but always as constitutive of redemption’s drama entire in the foreknowledge of God.
God the Father’s interaction with his creation is itself something consistently recreational, reiterative, whereby the divine communication manifest in the Word made flesh announces the Kingdom afresh, “in many and various ways… to every nation: [to] anyone who fears him and does what is right,” as the reading from Acts puts it
This gift of baptism for “my Son the beloved,” then, is not a flaw in the plot of salvation history; Jesus is not baptised by some mistake. Rather it is an intentional, creative move by the Father of everything to gather everything more deeply into the mystery of the Godhead’s infinite love, and to continue to transform creation for the flowing movement of grace - God’s free gift of Godself to the world – that that grace may hallow the world by the recreational power of love.
Jesus is baptism itself, of course. It is necessary for him neither to have his sin washed away nor to be reconciled to God, being the sinless image of the invisible God whom he is. Yet as the Baptist consents to sanctify his master in today’s feast, so divinity itself initiates a further new channel for the mediation of love. Through this channel – the baptismal font writ large at the River Jordan – we can see who Jesus is and identify our connection with him as co-heirs of all that the Father has and makes possible to us.
God in Christ Jesus now enables a kingdom to be opened that will include and embrace Jew and gentile, slave and free alike as Spirit and Word breathe and preach their unstoppable, regenerative speech for the renewed life of the world.
Our Lord goes down to the depths of the Jordan, both to fulfil all righteousness and truth and to enable them. The living Word today refreshes the hope of all of us in the baptism of Godself, as the Father actually makes possible the participative life of the trinity to whom we are eternally united by adoption and grace, as St Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans.
The baptism of Christ is a mysterious, infinitely prodigious gift. In it, to paraphrase St Augustine, we receive who we are as Our Lord’s anointed descends with us to the depths, that we, as we share in his incarnational life, might be raised with him, at length, to the heights of life eternal.
Baptism is the sacrament that draws us into the gracious, unbounded love of God’s very life and gives us access to its ceaseless recreation and generativity.
Reception of the Eucharist is a tangible and enduring promise of the baptismal life, to which we draw near again in faith now, there to be united once more with the beloved Son, Jesus of Nazareth, who ever makes present in himself all the creative potential of God for the sake of all that God has made, its prosperity and its good.
The Mass confirms us in the joy and suffering of our baptismal journey and reminds us of Jesus’ sharing in it with us to death, before he enters into the promised land of resurrection to prepare a place for us there with his heavenly father. No one is shut out from such dignifying joy. In this Baptism of Christ, we can remember our dignity, as St Leo the Great expressed it, just as dignity itself remembers us in the sharing of himself in our human being and belonging.
So as dignity again beholds us in this sacrament may our dignity remember us as we behold his baptism today, the better to reconnect with our own baptism, receive to ourselves the kingdom it heralds, and catch others into the wideness of its mercy, its freedom and light, with all the potential and peace they offer the still waiting, weary world.
God grant that I have spoken to you in his name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN