We have just heard St. Luke’s account of Our Lord’s baptism in the River Jordan. Whereas St. Matthew and St. Mark tell us that as Our Lord came up from the water, the heavens opened, the Father’s voice was heard, and the Holy Spirit descended on Him, St. Luke tells us that it was after the Baptism, while Our Lord was praying, presumably privately, that all this happened to Him. St. Matthew’s account of the Father’s words suggests that the announcement “This is my beloved Son, my favour rests on Him”, was meant for others to hear. St. Luke, and for that matter St. Mark, both tell us that the Father’s words were addressed to Our Lord himself: “Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased.”
We do not have to speculate which of these accounts is the most historically accurate, which of them tells us what actually took place – for in a sense all of them tell us different aspects of the same wonderful event. What today’s Gospel shows us is that the Baptism of our Lord was a moment for Him of endowment with the person and power of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord is true God from true God. Yet the Father chose to intensify this special moment when He anointed His only Son with the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit by proclaiming: “Thou art my beloved Son!” For in His sacred humanity Our Lord needed to grow. Just as He grew in stature from a little child to an adult man, so too St. Luke tells us that throughout the hidden years of Nazareth He grew in wisdom and understanding, and in favour with God and men.
St. Luke in a special way is the Evangelist of Our Lord’s sacred humanity. This doesn’t mean that, the more human our Lord seems to be, the less fully can He be God. Rather, Our Lord’s humanity belongs to the beloved Son on whom the Father’s favour rests. God the Son has been with the Father since the beginning, before all time, before anything was created, but now that the Son has become a man, by being born of our Blessed Lady, the Father also recognises and acknowledges the same Son as now truly human.
St. Luke has a special insight into the humanity of the Son of God for a particular reason: it is because he listened with great care to the words of one who had the greatest understanding of any human being of what it meant for God to become man: Our Lord’s own mother. It is St. Luke who tells us on several occasions that Mary “kept all these things in her heart and pondered on them”. For it can only have been from Mary that Luke was able to gather and pass on the account of Our Lord’s conception, of His birth and of His infancy and childhood. It is for this reason that many ancient icons of Our Lady are attributed to St. Luke, and he is portrayed in later centuries painting Our Lady’s portrait.
Our Lord had none but God for His Father. He knew that even as a twelve year-old boy, when He said to Mary and Joseph, “did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” But His blessed Mother gave Him His humanity. God became a child in His mother’s womb; He was her special charge and care; He was her love above all things.
This is what St. Luke passes on in his turn to us. His understanding of what it meant for the Son of God to be man was drawn from carefully hearing what His Mother had to say.
What we learn from St. Luke, and through him from Our Lady, is that God profoundly respects the integrity of the human nature He has created. Our Lord chose to appear in the world not in the appearance of man, but as a true man, like us in all things but sin. In this way He pays us the highest compliment. He does not think it beneath His dignity as God to take to Himself every aspect of our state, including the necessity of our growing in understanding as well as in body. The incarnation of the Son of God, which we celebrate during this Christmas season, is the culmination, the crowning point of God’s originally having chosen to “make man in His own image and likeness”. As God’s Son and Mary’s Son, Our Lord hears the words “Thou art my beloved Son”. He receives the Holy Spirit, descending on Him in bodily form because He is Himself present in the human world in bodily form. He receives the Holy Spirit to sanctify and empower His humanity for the work on which He is about to embark in His public ministry and His forthcoming Passion and Death. Moreover, by becoming man, Our Lord makes us no longer just creatures, for although human nature was already endowed with the dignity of being made in “his own image and likeness”, in His incarnation our Lord has made us His own brothers and sisters. He receives the Holy Spirit as one of us, for us. He hears the words “Thou art my beloved Son”, as one of us, and on behalf of us.
It is for this reason that we Catholics have such a high regard for human life, since God Himself has shown us His own infinite regard for it. This is why we believe passionately that it is our right and our duty to defend it from all mean-spirited reductivism, that would see it as only good when it serves some other end. For there is a spirit abroad now that is not Holy; a spirit which proclaims that no individual human life has value of its own, but only for what it is judged to be able to contribute to society. So, if a particular individual human life is inconvenient, because conceived when not expected or wanted, or because it is deemed to be burdened with a handicap which will place demands on its family and on society, or if a particular human life seems to be no longer productive through illness or old age, or seems no more to be conscious, or is in some way judged to be burdensome to itself or to others, then that life is expendable. Indeed, that spirit goes further than saying such lives are expendable, to saying that it is a duty to do away with them. We are now in a state which is actively preparing to legalise assisted suicide. But we should look at countries where euthanasia has already been legalised, as in the Netherlands, where infirm or elderly people are now frightened to go to hospitals which were built to save lives, not do away with them, for fear of being pressurised into accepting death as a duty to society. In the Low Countries, even children who are depressed are put to death. It is this lack of respect for the individual dignity of every human life which must be opposed, because God Himself has shown us the infinite value of each and every human life made in the image of His beloved Son. As the brothers and sisters of Jesus, we must defend all human life, because He has shown us infinite respect by becoming human like each one of us, and in sharing our nature He has given us the hope of reaching heaven.
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