The men and women who were baptised by John in the river Jordan were answering his appeal to repent their past sins and make a new start in their relationship with God, and that means that there's a bit of a puzzle in Jesus presenting himself for baptism, because he didn't need to leave behind a life of sin and re-dedicate himself to God.
We'll probably never know exactly what Jesus himself intended by receiving John's baptism, but it seems to have something to do with his having reached a moment of decision: the decision to leave behind the "hidden years" in Nazareth and embark on his public ministry. In other words his baptism marked the point where he embraced his unique vocation and mission.
Personally I would see a kind of parallel between Jesus' baptism and our Christian baptism. In Jesus' case it marked the moment he began his life's work as our Saviour; in our case baptism is the moment we each begin our life as his follower, accepting Christ as Saviour and living the way of the Gospel.
I'd like to suggest that there are three commitments that we undertake when we embark on the way of life that baptism initiates. The first commitment is a commitment to penance.
When St Peter met Jesus for the first time he was overwhelmed by a sense of Christ's holiness and godliness, and that meant at the same time being overcome with a sense of his own weakness and sinfulness. "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man," he said.
That's an experience that every sincere Christian goes through at some point in their spiritual pilgrimage. Contact with God, contact with his goodness and love and justice always exposes our lovelessness, our injustices towards others, our susceptibility to temptation.
One of the main objections to the Christian religion is that it fills people with an exaggerated sense of guilt and makes them frightened of God's "wrath". We can't deny that this has happened in the case of some individuals, but of course it's a distortion of Christian faith. But the opposite tendency, a sort of complacency, is possibly more common today: "I'm all right. I'm a good person, basically. How could God not like me, just as I am?"
Both those tendencies miss the point of genuine conversion and the need for penitence. A genuine encounter with God always has the effect of making us realise the areas of weakness and selfishness in our character. It always involves being sorry for them and relying on God's grace to change those areas of our life, to chip away at our sinful motivations and to strengthen our capacity for love - love of God and love of our neighbour. In Christian spirituality, a sense of our own frailty and the conviction that with God's help nothing is impossible are two sides of the same coin.
The second commitment which is tied up with the vocation we embrace when we're baptised is a commitment to prayer.
Prayer isn't only for monks or nuns in an enclosed community. They've got a particular vocation, but surely it's part of the vocation every Christian has to set aside time every day to put ourselves in God's presence, to thank him, to ask him to carry on looking after us, to say sorry for our various lapses, and generally to open ourselves more completely to his influence.
For people who are busy with work and family commitments and so on - most people, in other words - it's not possible to spend several hours a day in some kind of silent contemplation. But even five or ten minutes, a couple of times a day, withdrawing from all our activities to address ourselves to God, to voice our anxieties to him, to ask him to guide us, is something that we can't overestimate the value of.
Another valuable thing we can do is to take one of the gospels and read a small part of it every day, reflecting on Christ's words and actions during his ministry and allowing our character to be moulded by the gospel picture of Christ's character.
And one other step we could take is to make an effort to come to Mass and receive Communion on some day in the week other than Sundays. Dedicating time and effort to God in that way benefits us spiritually, and in fact these are all ways of offering ourselves to God and uniting ourselves with God. They're all different forms of prayer.
Last of all, our baptismal vocation involves a commitment to service.
In today's second reading St Peter describes the way that, during his ministry, Jesus "went about doing good and curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil".
Jesus spent a lot of time practically demonstrating God's compassion and care, especially for people who were suffering in any way, and it's always been a basic part of our vocation as his followers to imitate that compassion and care. There's never going to be a time when all forms of suffering are eradicated. Ill-health, death and loss, loneliness, poverty and exploitation, etc. are always going to exist. And as long as they exist Christians are bound to stand alongside the victims and to try to ease their burden.
We can't get away from Christ's teaching that our eternal salvation will depend on how far we've offered, or withheld, practical love to people in need. It's a fundamental and decisive aspect of discipleship.
So these three commitments - penance, prayer and service - to a large extent make up the vocation we take on when we're baptised, and today's feast, commemorating Jesus' baptism, is a good opportunity to reflect on them.
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