THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

One of the most effective ways we have of keeping God at a distance and not allowing him into the centre of our lives where he might do something radical and new, is to tell ourselves that the people we read about in the Scriptures are different from us and so what happened to them could not possibly happen to us. But this is not true. Just as Abraham was called to leave the place he was in and go to another place that God would show him, so each one of us is called to make that same journey of faith in our own lives. And just as Isaiah or Jeremiah were called to interpret the times they lived through and proclaim God’s truth to a people unwilling to hear it, so we are called to interpret these times and proclaim God’s truth to the people who share them with us. And the oldest question known to humanity, why bad things happen to good people, a problem explored in the Book of Job, is one we all struggle with at various times in our lives.

But what is harder to understand is that this is also true of the things that happened to Jesus. At Christmas, we celebrated the fact that, in Jesus, God becomes one of us and shares our human experience to the full. What happens to him happens to us too, and this includes the experience described by St Matthew in today’s Gospel. Every single one of us has ‘seen’ – in inverted commas – the Spirit of God descend on us, and we have all ‘heard’ – again in inverted commas – a voice from heaven say ‘This is my son or daughter, the beloved; my favour rests on her/him. God, as Peter realised in the Second Reading, has no favourites. He does not do for one what he does not do for another, and if you tell me today that you have never had the kind of experience Jesus had that day in the Jordan, then I can promise you that you have. It’s just that you have forgotten it. And so my prayer today is that, with God’s help, you will remember it again.

My own outstanding experience of this kind happened in the spring of 1957 when I was only eleven years of age. And it might be helpful to know that there is evidence that many, if not most of us, have our most powerful experiences of God when we are young. Teenagers, contrary to what we might think, are extremely open to such experiences, even if they rarely happen in an overtly religious context. Mine happened, in fact, as I walked in the back door of our house in Muirkirk after several hours of playing football on a piece of waste ground across the road. It had got too dark to play and I remember so vividly the bright yellow light as I walked in to find my mother standing at the cooker making chips. And as I walked past her into the living room, she spoke the fourteen most important words of my whole life. ‘Father Conway was here’ – she said -he was the parish priest at the time - ‘to see if you do want to go to Blairs.’ Blairs was the national minor seminary just outside Aberdeen and the reason for the question was that, ever since we had started school, three of us in our class, Michael O’Brien, younger brother of Mary, Canon Matthew’s housekeeper, Andrew Moreland and myself had said we wanted to be priests. And as I walked past my mother, while I had one foot in the kitchen and the other in the living room, I had the single most powerful experience of God in my whole life. It lasted less than a second, but in that short time I knew with absolute certainty that the answer to Kevin Conway’s question was yes. And so began a long and sometimes difficult journey which has brought me here to West Kilbride. That fraction of a second in 1957, my Jordan experience, has shaped my whole life and, no matter what has happened over the years I have always known that I had to be faithful to it.

And this, of course, is the key to the whole thing. As I said earlier, God has touched us all in some way in the course of our lives. The experiences we have had will be very different from each other. No two will be the same, so there is no point in comparing them. But at some point in all our lives we have all been touched by God in a way that moved us deeply. It may have been the day you were married, the day a child was born, the day someone close to you died; but it could equally well have happened in Tesco’s, at the pictures or as you crossed the road. But what matters is that we remember these moments, trust them and live our lives out of them. The danger is that we forget them and live our lives as if they had never happened.

And we can see the importance of remembering such moments in the life of Jesus himself. What happened at the Jordan was something he would have had to hang on to during the darkest moments of his passion, especially at that most human of moments when, hanging on the cross, he felt abandoned by God. Sometimes in our lives we can feel that way too, and when this happens it is so important that we remember the times of consolation and trust them. If God touched us once and that touch was real, then that same God continues to be real even if every bone in our body and every thought we have tells us the opposite.

And we see the same in Mary. Her great experience of being touched by God was the Annunciation when the Angel told her that she was to be the mother of the Messiah. But then, St Luke tells us, the Angel left her. The experience was over and for the next thirty years of nappy changing, cooking, cleaning and drudgery, right to the foot of the cross, Mary had to remain faithful to that brief moment. And how difficult it must have been at times! But she did it. She kept on trusting. She kept believing that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled and by doing so came to the fullness of the kingdom.

And it’s the same for us all. God has touched each of our lives deeply. Maybe you have forgotten. But if you have, ask the Spirit today to take you back, to remind you, and give you the grace you need to live out of that experience now.

BIDDING PRAYERS

It is not only possible, but very common, for people to have quite deep and powerful spiritual experiences of God only to forget them within a few days, sometimes even a few hours. And so we ask the Spirit of God to move deeply among us this weekend, stirring our memories as only God can, so that we can bring back to mind moments, possibly from many years ago, when we have known and felt the presence of God in our lives, so that we can draw strength and encouragement from them again now..............Lord hear us

Not everything that sounds like God, quotes the Bible or uses pious, holy language is from God. Satan himself, in the story of the temptations in the wilderness, quotes the Scriptures at Jesus. Nor is every apparently good thought we have of God and we should be very wary of gods who agree with us all the time. They are mere projections of ourselves. And so we ask God to pour into our lives the gift of discernment by which we begin to recognize in our lives what is of God and what is not............Lord hear us

One sometimes surprising sign of God moving in us is that after we have experienced his presence, we begin to doubt it and wonder if we made it up or if it ever really happened. God has given us the gift of freedom and remains deeply respectful of it. He never forces himself on us and so, no matter how profound the experience may be, he leaves us free to believe or not believe, accept the experience or not accept it. And so we pray for the grace to see how this has been happening to us all our lives............Lord hear us

The story of Cornelius in the Second Reading this weekend marks a very important moment in the history of the early Church. Peter, through a revelation from God, has come to understand that God does not have favourites and that people from every part of the world are acceptable to him. The gospel message is for every human being. There are no more barriers between peoples. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ. And so we pray that the world will finally hear this message and understand it...........Lord hear us

The first reading from the unknown prophet of the Exile in Babylon speaks of one who does not cry out or shout aloud or make his voice heard in the street. He does not break the crushed reed nor quench the wavering flame, but faithfully brings true justice. And so we pray for the Church at this time, that it will be both a sign of God’s deep compassionate love for humanity in all its weakness and at the same time a voice speaking up for victims of injustice everywhere..........Lord hear us

This weekend, a great opportunity is on offer to the families of our parish. Through a programme called Living Faith in Family life, which we will hear more about at the end of Mass, parents and children are being invited to reflect on ordinary daily experience of life as the place where we meet God. This is a new course and we are the first parish to experience it. And so we ask God to bless it and stir in us a desire and a willingness to be involved for the sake of the parents and children in our midst.......Lord hear us