by Father Michael Panicali
Every Christmas season, I eagerly look for the illuminated cross sitting atop Coney Island’s stationary and darkened Wonder Wheel. It is a sight to behold against the blackened winter sky. Placed there by the amusement park’s owner, it lends inspiration to the amusement ride that, bound by cables, seems packed up for the cold and windy winter.
Alternating in red, white, and green, the cross is the only light that emanates from this otherwise ebullient landmark of the warm months. It is a powerful sign that Christmas is about Jesus’ birth, and that faith in Christ is alive and well, and that even in secular amusement parks, Christ and the Gospel are boldly and appropriately proclaimed.
We human beings use signs to navigate our complex world. Signs, in short, call attention to, direct, and signify. In today’s Gospel from John, known as the Book of Signs, John the Baptist receives the sign that Jesus is so much more than his maternal carpenter cousin from the unspectacular town of Nazareth.
After seeing the heavens opening and the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus in the form of a dove, John spectacularly declares, “Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.”
Speaking on the Baptism of the Lord on Jan. 13, 2008, the late Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI explains that within Jesus’ “first public appearance after 30 years of a hidden life in Nazareth, the eyewitnesses of this singular event were, besides the Baptist, his disciples, some of whom would, from that moment, become followers of Christ. We have at the same time a Christophany, and Theophany: Above all, Jesus manifests himself as the ‘Christ,’ the Greek term that is used as the translation of the Hebrew ‘Messiah,’ which means ‘anointed.’
“He was not anointed with oil, in the matter of the kings and high priests of Israel, but with the Holy Spirit. At the same time, together with the Son of God, there appeared the signs of the Holy Spirit and of the Heavenly Father.”
He continues that “the profound meaning of this deed which Jesus wanted to accomplish, overcoming the resistance of the Baptist, to obey the Father’s will,” emerges “only at [Christ’s Death and Resurrection].
“Receiving baptism from John together with sinners, Jesus began taking upon himself the weight of the guilt of all humanity, as the Lamb of God who ‘takes away’ the sin of the world. This is a task that He will only bring to completion on the cross, where He also receives His ‘baptism.’ Dying, in fact, He ‘immerses’ himself in the love of the Father and pours out the Spirit, so that those who believe in Him can be reborn from that inexhaustible font of new and eternal life.”
We as Christ’s followers “are baptized in the Holy Spirit to be liberated from the slavery of death and ‘have the heavens opened to us;’ that is, have access to the true and full life, which will be ‘a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.’ ”
Much like the cross atop the Wonder Wheel every Christmas, the baptismal font in each and every church signifies so much more than a bath where a water ritual takes place.
Indeed, it is the entryway to eternal salvation, to the life overwhelmed with unending joy.
Father Michael Panicali is the parochial vicar for St. Helen Church in Howard Beach.