I called you for victory ... but who's "you"? Reflection, Baptism of the Lord Year A

 

Pro-life / pro-immigration reflection on the reading for Sunday, January 11, 2025, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. (Year A)

 

The first reading is from Isaiah 42, including verses 6-7: “I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice, “I have grasped you by the hand; I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”

 

The reading is stunningly rich, but perhaps we can note three tiny details.

 

The Lord says, I formed you. Pro-lifers, with good reason, take this to heart. We were formed by God, beginning with an explosion of life in our mothers’ wombs. Don’t hold me to these numbers; these are approximations to begin with, now showing up in my memory which is broken instrument, clunky to begin and getting worse every year: but I think that a human experiences cell division for the entire body 42 times. One cell becomes two; two become three; three become five; five become eight; etc. Our bodies grow and grow, from a dot to adult. Of these 42 divisions, 35 are before birth. You can chart the growth of a body, with a graph that climbs and climbs for about 18 years or so and then levels off. You can chart the speed of growth, that starts out with an explosion, with significant changes in hours – then slower, measured in days – then slower, measured in weeks – then months – then years – then it flatlines around age 18 years. The size chart starts near zero at conception and climbs then levels off; the rate of growth chart starts way high and plummets to near zero and levels off long before death. So if you take the speed of growth – not size, but the speed of growth – as the visible measurement of life, an impressive fact pops out. By that measurement, we are most alive in the first few hours, and then we decline steadily. When we are born, with 35/42 cell divisions completed, we are already approaching senility. We reach towards adulthood; we grow for years; but the speed of change and growth begins with an explosion and drops to zero for adults – young adults, mind you. We are most alive when we are smallest, when we are dependent, when we are closest in time to the moment when God took us in hand and started forming us.

 

So the reading addresses a pro-life matter, the question of origins.

 

Second, the Lord says that you are to be a light for the nations, to the seas and beyond. (Who’s this “you”? Big question! Not now.) God’s respect for other people throughout the world is supposed to be visible in your life’s work. You have a responsibility to bring light to the world. So you were/are a tiny dot, with global responsibilities. So hang on tight to the Lord’s hand!

 

The reading addresses the fundamental immigration question, the boundaries of God’s love made manifest in your life.

 

I note also – briefly, ever so briefly – the question of blindness. This is, obviously, a metaphor. You are responsible for sharing the things that you know. The knowledge that the Lord has given you has freed you from stupidity and sin, but that freedom and light and knowledge is not yours to keep: use it or lose it. Give it away, or die in the dark. But also, note that you have to deal with two very different black lacks. There’s blindness, something wrong inside that person’s eyeballs or brain; and there’s also the dark of the dungeon, something that society has done to that person. You are responsible for addressing personal sins and also social evils. You bring light to people one by one, but also to nations. A nation is not a person and another person and another person; it’s a different thing. It’s pretty common among Christians today to find teachers and preachers who insist that we are called to respond to the troubles of individuals, not societies. That is so – well, actually, so blind, inexplicably blind, awaiting light and repentance.

 

The call, responding (among other things) to matters of life and immigration, both, applies to individuals to whom God speaks tenderly one by one – and also to nations – both.

 

I have called you for victory, says the Lord. Who in the world is this “you”? You?