Whoever is begotten by God does not sin!

Homily for Saturday between Epiphany and Baptism

9 January 2010

Year for Priests

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We who are baptized live two lives simultaneously. Two lives side by side. We live a natural life, and a supernatural one. We are begotten of this world by a natural birth, and begotten by God through baptism. St. John makes quite a claim in today's portion of his first letter. He says that one who is begotten by God does not sin! Well, even those who are baptized experience something quite the opposite. We sin all the time. And if we sin all the time, St. John shows us how much we prefer our natural life to our supernatural one. For he says that one who is begotten by God does not sin. Ever. St. John doesn't say that one begotten by God only sins rarely. He says never.

We can understand sin in this way. We usually understand it as our prefering evil over good. And this is true. We can also understand it as a forgetfulness of our being baptized, our being begotten by God. If we can bring this identity we have as a child of God to mind and to bear, then sin instantly loses its power over us. Those begotten by God do not sin. End of story. So it is only when we forget this identity, or choose to go away from it that we are capable of sin. And if we sin all the time, we know that we are unaware of our dignity, or we turn away from that dignity, all the time. Being begotten by God is not an ignorance of our natural life, but is an ability to always bring to mind and to bear the reality of our supernatural life. To put it another way, we not only sin because we are bad. More importantly, we sin because we forget, and haven chosen to forget, who we are.

In today's Gospel, we see John the Baptist doing something remarkable. As the Gospel passage hits my ears, I sense that people are reporting to John that Jesus is ripping him off. John was the first to baptize, and it is reported to John that Jesus is pretending to be John, doing the same thing, and taking customers away. John is not only comfortable with Jesus copying his baptism, he says that he is joyful that Jesus would do him the compliment of confirming his baptismal ministry as true. Not only that, John rejoices that he has fulfilled his mission to prepare the way of the Lord, since the groom has arrived as promised to bring joy and salvation to His bride. Let us remember the humble example of John, and imitate his joy at the success of others, the next time we are tempted to be jealous or envious. Let us pray earnestly that others around us become more holy than we are, and bear more abundant fruit, as long as we faithfully do what the Lord is asking of us! +m