The Ultimate Relationship

The Monday Mystery Part 6: The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River

“You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11)

Welcome to the sixth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.

It’s hard to be a missionary. I know because I was one for three years. I worked at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta with a small team of passionate young adults. We eagerly threw ourselves into the task of engaging a mass of busy college students to try and somehow get them to care about religion. Needless to say, we experienced a lot of rejection. The bulk of these happened during outreach week. In the first week of classes we’d set up tables and try to convince passersby to join the club associated with our ministry. This required a lot of courage, creativity, and thick skin. During my three years I approached hundreds of people. With varying degrees of rudeness, I was rejected by the vast majority of them.

Some of these stung. One day during my first year I felt particularly worn down physically and emotionally. I tried to strike up a conversation, and the guy glared at me with pure contempt and asked ‘what do you want?’ On another day I would have brushed this off like it was nothing. People had been far more rude to me in the past. But that day I didn’t have the bandwidth. I walked away so humiliated and discouraged that I started crying when I talked to my friend about it.

I’m not so embarrassed about this today. That memory served as compost. Compost is disgusting; but a slop of rotting-rancid, putrified waste can still help a beautiful garden grow. Hitting my emotional breaking point reminded me that I’m human, and that I only have a finite capacity for people treating me poorly. Paradoxically, knowing my limits (even just knowing that I had them, period) helped me grow in my resilience and self confidence. Best of all, it helped me better understand what I was trying to do as a missionary.

What exactly was I trying to do as a missionary? Essentially, I was trying to convince students to follow the first commandment. I was trying to get them to love God with all their heart, soul, and body.

When you love God with everything you have, that doesn’t mean you don’t love other things. It means that other loves find their source and context in your relationship with God. A married couple can still have friends. Not only can they still have friends, their marriage will probably deteriorate without this support. And besides, even if they could manage alone, who would want to? But if my friend spends so much time with me that his marriage suffers, the friendship has gotten off track. Part of what makes our friendship a good relationship is that it doesn’t not interfere with the more important one.

This is why my ministry, Catholic Christian Outreach, called our relationship with God, ‘The Ultimate Relationship.’ Just as my relationship with my friend is secondary to his relationship to his wife, so every other relationship in our life, including marriage is secondary to our relationship with God. We don’t get married to God in a literal, physical, or romantic way. But marriage gets us thinking on the right track when it comes to the level of intimacy and commitment the first commandment entails. We summarized this with the idea of having Jesus at the center of our life. Many people call themselves Christian, but Jesus revolves around their life. Their other priorities, relationships, decisions, and activities take precedence. When we have Jesus at the center of our lives, Jesus doesn’t revolve around our life, our life revolves around Jesus. Our other priorities, relationships, decisions, and activities find their source and context within our relationship with Jesus. We determine their value by asking ‘how does this help me know, love, and serve Jesus better?

What does this look like practically? I believe that whether or not we have Jesus at the center of our lives is revealed most concretely in the following question: Where does my sense of security, identity, and self esteem come from?

My sense of security is my sense that I am safe, that everything will be ok, and that I can face any threat that will come against me. This can come from a variety of places. “I will never run out of money because I have a diversified investment portfolio that insulates my wealth from economic downturns.” “I own a gun, and so if a serial killer invades my home I can defend myself.” “I live in a safe neighborhood, and my doors are locked.” Whether it’s money, padlocks, barb wire fences, military might, skill in combat, or powerful allies, the world offers no shortage of methods to feel safe.

These aren’t all bad, but when we choose these as our ultimate source of security, we are like the child who hides under the covers thinking they will protect him from monsters. The covers provide some comfort, and they certainly give a sense of safety. But if there were a real threat in the room, the child would need his parents. We too, need our heavenly Father. In the end, all other forms of security are illusions - comforting rituals we perform to make us feel better about the fact that nothing can keep us totally safe, and nothing can ultimately keep us from suffering and dying.

My sense of identity answers the questions: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where did I come from” Who or what do I belong to?” Deep down we all realize that we don’t exist as mere individuals. We exist as parts of a larger whole, whether it’s a family, country, sports fandom, job, or charitable organization. Well adjusted people find tremendous comfort and fulfillment in belonging and contributing to something greater than themselves.

With Jesus at the center of our lives, we find our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God. All baptized Christians share in Christ’s humanity. This is why we refer to the Church as ‘the body of Christ.’ This mystical body is the ultimate greater whole which we can form a part of, because we share in the divinity of God himself. So when the Father says  to Jesus in today’s mystery, “you are my beloved son” he’s talking about all Christians who have been born again of water and the spirit (see John 3:5). As a baptized Christian, you are God’s beloved son, or his beloved daughter.

This in turn, ought to be where our sense of self esteem comes from. My sense of self esteem determines whether and why I believe I am worthy of love and respect. When I was crushed by the cruel rejection I received as a missionary, it was in large part because I invested my self esteem into whether or not people liked and approved of me. At other times, I’ve invested it in how well I did in things like school, competition, dating, and work. But the reality is that in God’s eyes we are worthy of love because God loves us. In fact, God’s love is the very reason we exist.

And this is not a sentimental poetic flourish. If you take a theology class, one of the first puzzles you’ll likely work on will be:  ‘Why did God create us?’ If God is the way Christianity says he is - totally perfect in every way - then it’s not clear why he’d want to create anything. Because anything that is not God is by definition inferior to him.  As my friend Fr. Isaac Longworth put it, God wasn’t bored in heaven. He wasn’t lonely, he didn’t need anyone to tell him how good he was, and he didn’t need any help for anything. What do we add to him? Strictly speaking, we add absolutely nothing. So why create?

My favorite way of answering this questions comes from asking another question: what does a child add to a marriage?  Babies are cute, but they are also expensive, noisy, smelly, and demanding. They aren’t particularly engaging conversational partners, they don’t help out with chores around the house, they don’t bring in any income, and they massively reduce the couple’s ability to spend time together and pursue enjoyable activities. They cost a small fortune, a quarter lifetime, and the remainder of the spouses’ youth. Practically speaking, in just about every way the baby takes more than he or she gives. So why bother? The answer is love. In Christian theology we say that love is diffusive: when we have it, and feel perfectly secure in it, we naturally want to share it with others. We realize that love is like a candle. A flame is not in any way diminished when it lights another candle. God chose to create us not because he was lacking in anything or needed anything from us, but as a pure gift in order to share his love with us.

So when you do your test run today, pick one area where you face the greatest struggle: security, identity, or self esteem. As you pray and meditate on the mystery, imagine yourself with John the Baptist in the Jordan river. Feel the water you’re submerged in going up to your waist. And imagine the Holy Spirit descending upon you, and listen to the Father say, “You are my beloved Son” or “You are my beloved Daughter.” This is what we were created for, and this is what we receive at baptism. If you are not baptized, I invite you to turn your life over to Christ and seek out this incredible gift. May God bless you as you pray.