Called and Formed for Mission: Spend 5 with Jesus: January 9, 2023

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. Why are you baptized? What does it do? Why is it important? And why did Jesus, the Divine Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, why was it he was baptized? It is perfectly understandable to see that Saint John the Baptist might have had more than a few questions about his baptizing Jesus. The section you might hear from Isaiah (you could also hear the reading from the Acts of the Apostles) is one of the Servant Songs, usually seen as a foreshadowing of Christ and applied to his ministry and person in the New Testament. The celebration of the baptism of Jesus today becomes important insofar as it is something that is the ideal that we are called to imitate.