Ordo Praedicatorum

Br. Pius Pietrzyk gave his first homily as a deacon on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington DC:

The writer Flannery O’Connor had a great ability to present the human condition and the life of grace in stark and powerful ways. She presents with sometimes alarming realism the struggle of our own fallen humanity. In her short story “The River” she presents with the same iron punch the themes of baptism. The story revolves around 4-year old Harry. Harry lives with rather Epicurean parents, who would rather party late into the night than tend to his upbringing. For Harry, the name of “Jesus” was just another exclamation like “oh!” or “dang it!”. In the story, Harry is taken by his babysitter, a devout old black woman, to a healin’ preacher. There, Harry is baptized in the river. After which, he tells his unbelieving mother “I’m not the same now” “I count”. Harry yearns for the promise of the preacher, to be free from suffering, and to come into the Kingdom of God. So, early the next day,

his parents still passed out from a night of heavy drinking, Harry returns to the river. There, he plunges himself back in, where the “long, gentle hand” of the current pulls him forward and down. At that moment, all fury and fear leave him. This being Flannery O’Connor, we don’t expect a happy ending. She could never have written for Disney. So, although she never says so explicitly, we are led to believe that young Harry is drowned, dying in the waters of his own baptism.

Miss O’Connor presents in the power of her prose these great images of baptism: the water of death and of life. It is a theme, of course, that she does not invent. Baptism was for the Church Fathers both life and death. Thus St. Cyril instructs the newly baptized, “And at the self-same moment, you were both dying and being born; and that Water of salvation was at once your tomb and your mother.”
These images of water, death, and life have their source in Scripture’s own narrative beginning with Christ’s baptism. The Scriptures tell us that it is with his Baptism that Christ emerges from his life in Nazareth; hidden with his Blessed Mother. From this point, especially in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus begins his slow and steady ascent to Jerusalem. Jesus sets his face to Jerusalem , to Mount Calvary. Flannery O’Connor’s young Harry picks up this same message, Baptism is not merely a washing, but also entails a death. With his baptism, Jesus leaves his mother to make his way to his tomb. As Jesus himself tells us later in Luke, “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!”
Now, if Disney were doing the movie version of O’Connor’s story, I suppose at the end the child would be fished from the water and resuscitated, whereupon his parents would see the error of their ways, and all would live happily ever after. You know, there might be something to this Disnification of the story. For baptism is not simply about life and death, it is about new life rising up from death. Just as Christ’s Baptism leads to his cross, so his cross leads to his resurrection.
But, of course, Christ did not undergo John’s baptism and the cross for his own sake. Christ knew no sin, and therefore was not subject to death in the way we are. It was man who brought sin into the world, and that sin that brought about our death. Death is a part of our fallen condition, and it is a reality from which we could not by ourselves ever escape. Rather, Christ fittingly endures the cross for us. Scripture tells us again and again that the Word became man for our sake. Christ was born for us, as our Savior.
For this reason, the Baptism of John could only be a baptism of repentance. By itself John’s Baptism brought only sorrow for sin and death, and nothing more. Only God can bring life from death.
Nonetheless, Jesus underwent this Baptism of John. In his humility, he took on the burden of our own sins. But, by itself his baptism was still incomplete. And so, Christ carried our sins with him to Mount Calvary. There, he took on their full effect – he submitted to the death of the cross. And he submitted out of love. It was in his own death on the cross that Christ united his act of love for the Father to our death caused by sin. So, it was by this act of divine love – Christ’s own self-offering on the cross to the Father – that man’s salvation was brought about. The water and the cross are pieces of a whole. It is Christ’s Passion that gives full meaning to his Baptism. St. Ambrose asks, “For what is water without the cross of Christ? A common element, without any sacramental effect.” Likewise, it was an act of divine power – Christ’s return in glory from the tomb – that gave the baptism of repentance the power to be the “bath of rebirth” .
Thus, we see the wisdom of Mother Church in placing the feast of the Baptism here at the end of the Christmas season. The feast of Christ’s Baptism is like a hinge, linking the joy of the incarnation and the birth of Christ, to his anguish on the cross and the glory of his resurrection.
With the Church, we too move into that time after the Christmas season. Like Christ, we set our faces towards Jerusalem, towards the Passion and the resurrection. So, on this day we ponder that image of water and the cycle of death and new life. We do so mindful of our own baptism, not simply as an event of the past, but as the beginning of our ongoing process of conversion. Here we look not just to the literal death of our bodies, but to our spiritual death to sin. Still beset by the stain of sin, each day calls us once again to die to ourselves; we must die to our own sinfulness, our own selfishness, our own delusions of self-sufficiency. We do so confident in faith that the “long, gentle hand” of God leads us by grace to be reborn in Christ. We aren’t the same, we count now, because Christ has made it possible for our death in sin to bring us new life in His Spirit.
So, like O’Connor’s Harry returning to the waters of his baptism, we return again to the font of our own eternal life. Today, when we came into the chapel, we baptized our hands in the font of holy water, signing ourselves with Christ’s death on the cross. Even more, we were sprinkled with the blessed waters of baptism, and again we marked ourselves with that same sign of the cross. Now, united to Christ in his Baptism, we prepare to unite ourselves to Christ’s own self-offering on the cross made present in the consecration of bread and wine. We are then immersed in the river of Christ’s own blood, mingled with water in the chalice. Thus, what we have allowed to die in us, the Holy Spirit brings to new life in grace. And after the Mass has finished, we will again leave this chapel, reflexively dipping our hands into that same font of holy water. But we do so not as children drowned in the waters of sin, but as sons of the Father reborn in the waters of resurrection.

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