Christ's Shortcut
by Tom and April Hoopes in Faith on Saturday, January 09, 2010 6:00 AM
(In this weekly column, Tom and April Hoopes share family-friendly ways of observing the liturgical year and celebrating the Sunday readings.)
Sunday, Jan. 10 is the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Sunday, Jan. 17 is the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Jan. 10 Readings
Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7; Psalms 29:1-4, 3, 9-10; Acts 10:34-38; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22
Our Take
All good things must end. After this feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, the Christmas season is definitively over.
But this first feast of the adult Jesus continues a lesson that started at Christmas.
The Catechism, No. 518, says, “All Jesus did, said and suffered had for its aim restoring fallen man to his original vocation.”
Then, it goes a step forward. “When Christ became incarnate and was made man,” it says, he “procured for us a ‘shortcut’ to salvation, so that what we had lost in Adam, that is, being in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. For this reason Christ experienced all the stages of life, thereby giving communion with God to all men.”
So, the answer to the question “Why did Christ do that?” is, at one level, always the same: “to give us a ‘shortcut’ to salvation.”
He was baptized so we would know to be baptized. He also, in the words of Peter in today’s second reading, “went about doing good” so we would know to do that.
God has done the hard part. Our job: Follow him through the shortcut he made. And as Isaiah’s reading points out, he doesn’t even leave that to us: “I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice,” it says. “I have grasped you by the hand.”
—This article originally appeared in our sister publication, the National Catholic Register.
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