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Last Sunday was the culmination of the Christmas Season when we celebrated the Baptism of our Lord. Today we go back to wearing green vestments signifying that we have returned to Ordinary Time. Jesus lived the first 30 years of his life in obscurity, living an ordinary life, but the last three years of his life, his salvific ministry, was all but ordinary. His baptism is considered the kickoff of his public ministry.

The fact that we have entered ordinary time has significance to how being baptized affects the way we live our day to day ordinary lives. Jesus’ baptism and our baptism are linked. Like Jesus, our baptism signifies the beginning of our ministry. Our ministry is our call to be Christ to others, of continuing Christ’s ministry in his name. Many of us were baptized as an infant, but if our faith is properly nourished by our parents, family, and church community, our ministry literally begins then and lasts our entire lives.

The innocence of a child, the unconditional love they give us, the joy they exude in experiencing the simple things of life is a window to how our entire life should be. It should be a continuous joy-filled expression of all the gifts God gives us each and every day. It took almost half of St. Francis of Assisi’s life to come to this realization, which he then joyfully lived for the remainder of his life.

Guess what? The first half of his life he lived in luxury, yet the joyous time of his life was in poverty. Money is nice but has nothing to do with true happiness which only comes from embracing the missionary spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean you have to live in poverty, but it does mean to do whatever it takes to let go of the allure of the sinful enticements of this world, so that we can clearly see what truly matters.

This ultimately points to living a life of self sacrificing love. Our ultimate example of self sacrificing love is of course Jesus. Why is sacrificing central to the Christian life? We must die to ourselves, meaning giving up our selfish desires putting God’s will and the needs of others ahead of our own. We are called to make the love of Christ present for all the world to see.

In the Gospel today John the Baptist said, “I did not know him …”. He did not recognize, The Christ, until he was divinely inspired to clearly see who Jesus was. Do we truly know Jesus? Would we recognize him if we saw him? We are challenged to clearly see Jesus active in the world around us, to recognize him as through the eyes of John the Baptist. What did John say when he saw Jesus approaching him? He said, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” We say this at every Mass. Do we know what it means when we say those words? Are we just reciting them or are we exclaiming with great joy and excitement what we are witnessing?

What was John actually exclaiming when he said those words? We must look through the eyes of John. Animal sacrifices were performed on an altar throughout the Old Testament. John was the son of a priest. He grew up with animal sacrifices as a religious act in the Temple. The Temple was a place of worship where animal sacrifices were performed on an altar for centuries. The typical animal sacrifice in a Temple was a lamb. John would have witnessed this many times. The animal sacrifices represented atonement of their sins to draw closer to God where the shedding of blood symbolized life for life.

What John is saying when he sees Jesus, based on his background, is that he is announcing that Jesus is the Lamb of sacrifice that will take away the sin of the world. Remember, an altar is a place of sacrifice. At every Mass you attend, the priest is performing a sacrifice on the altar. This idea of the Lamb of God is central to our worship as Christians. Sacrifice is necessary to address the problem of sin in the world. Jesus of course was the ultimate sacrifice, the last of the bloody sacrifices. But an unbloody sacrifice is performed at every Mass, on the altar, as a sacramental offering making his body and blood truly present.

Why is a sacrifice necessary? If we look at our own lives, we make a sacrifice every day, driven by our love, to address even the basic things we care about. Let’s just use the example of the daily sacrifice we make by going to work to support our family? I am sure it may sound enticing that instead of going to work we grab a latte and read a good book while sitting on the beach. But for the love of your family, you make the sacrifice to get up to work a long day and come home still striving to be loving parents to your children as you get them dinner, help them with their homework, spend time playing with them and then getting them ready for bed.

As hard as those days may seem as you are living through them, you look back later in life with a true sense of the meaning and purpose of self sacrifice and longing to experience one of those days again. This sacrifice for those you love is worth doing over and over again. Hopefully this helps us relate to Jesus’ sacrifice for us as one that he is willing to do each and every day for us, because of his unconditional love for us. We honor his sacrifice during Mass where each and every day a priest performs this sacrifice on the altar.

We are called to embrace the love Jesus has for us, to live a sacrificial life as he did expressed through the love we have of others. Behold, all sacrifices done for the love of God and others is the central call of all Christians in making Jesus present in the world, where others will recognize Christ’s love reflected through us. Hopefully when others see our loving acts, we make real Christ’s love active and alive in the world; where it can be clearly seen and recognized with their hearts proclaiming, “Behold we clearly see God’s love for us through you.”