When you get terrific news, don't you just long to share it with everyone you meet? When I got my first full-time job, I remember rushing to tell all my friends, and I know I also wanted to share that news with all the strangers I met on the street, too! Getting a new job - a job that paid actual money - was just too good not to share.

 

Today's scriptures assume exactly that kind of exuberance about the good news of Jesus - and, if you're not feeling too exuberant, today's scriptures want to help get you in the mood! After all, this weekend we celebrate Epiphany, a word that means "showing" or "manifesting." We are celebrating all the ways Jesus is made known to us - manifests or shows himself - to us.

 

Today's gospel reading (Mark 1:7-11) tells the story of Jesus' baptism. But it begins before Jesus' baptism, actually - when John the Baptist is baptizing anyone and everyone who comes to him. Throngs of people showed up to hear John's message and to be baptized. Yet John cautions his crowd: there is a person coming who is greater than he is, someone who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit, God himself.

 

Then, in the very next verses, we see Jesus coming to be baptized. It might have seemed that Jesus was just an ordinary man, just like all the others coming to be baptized. Yet it is in the midst of Jesus' baptism that we readers are "shown" who Jesus really is. The voice of God proclaims: "You are my beloved Son; with you, I am well pleased."

 

And Jesus does go on to baptize with the Holy Spirit, as John says. (We received this gift of God on Pentecost, and all of us are baptized with water and the Holy Spirit.) In today's first reading (1 John 5:5-13), we read more about this baptism of water, Spirit, and (John adds) Blood, for blood of the cross. Water, Spirit, and Blood are all "of one accord", says John - they all show us the same thing. What they show us is we ourselves have God's "testimony within us."

 

How fantastic is this? God lights a fire within us - a fire that causes us to want to spread the Good News and tell the world that we have a new and unique life in Jesus Christ. Jesus is "shown" or made "manifest" to the world in us.

 

Sometimes, we forget that we have this testimony within us. The testimony gets covered up by doubts, or we don't remember that we are living witnesses of Jesus himself.

 

Today, let us take the time to remember and be mindful of God's own testimony within us. Let us be people who think like Jesus, talk like Jesus, and act like Jesus - so that we can be Epiphany for the world.

 

- Jana M. Bennett