Fr. John Ryan

 

FEAST OF THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD

7th Janaury 2006

In his novel 'Sacred Games' Vikram Chandra explores the crime world of Mumbai. The main character is a gangster called Ganesh Gaitonde who reaches the 'top' of that world; he is a 'successful' crime lord.
In the following passage we get an insight into the mindset of Ganesh. "I knew I was going to die, I was going to be killed. There was no escape for me. I had no future, no life, no retirement, no easy old age. To imagine any of that was cowardice. A bullet would find me first. But I would live like a king. I would fight this life, this bitch that sentences us to death, and I would eat her up, consume her every minute of every day. So I walked my streets like a lord of mankind, flanked by my boys."
Is this the mindset of all criminals? Are the hardened members of the Irish crime gangs thinking similar thoughts? Of particular interest to me in the passage cited above is the statement 'I would fight this life'. It sounds so negative. Life is seen as an adversary and not something to be fully experienced and enjoyed. There is no sense of life having positive possibilities. It is as if the very act of getting up in the morning is part of a battle.
Today's Feast, the Baptism of the Lord, calls on us to recognise the new life bestowed on us in Jesus Christ. The sacrament of Baptism is a life-giving sacrament and lifts the human condition into contact with the divine. We become sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters of the Lord and in that we are called to live life to the full. It means that we are not in a battle with life itself. Life is to be seen as a journey, a pilgrimage leading to the new and eternal Jerusalem, the kingdom of God. And in that journeying we bring the kingdom of God into palpable existence.
In Jesus we always have a future, we always have a life, we can hope for retirement and we can because we have a present - a present enriched with the grace of God working in and through us. When we recognise that we have a present then life need not be consumed or eaten up but embraced with all that it offers us. When we try to consume life - when we see it as a negative thing - then we lose sense of its sacred nature, the fact that it is gift from God with God guiding us through the difficult times and rejoicing with us in the good times. We lose the sense of joy infused into the human condition through the Incarnation of the Word.
'I came that you may have life and have it to the full' Jesus says. This statement can be seen in two different ways - we can look completely to the future and the hope we have in attaining eternal happiness in heaven or we can see it as beginning in the here and now and fulfilled in the kingdom. I think that we are asked to see this in the present tense. We should see in Jesus the ability to live this life to the full and then be able to approach the Lord when he calls us with trust in his love and kindness. "This is my Son the Beloved, listen to him." We must listen - in listening to Jesus we find the means of living life genuinely to the full. Ganesh, in Chandra's novel has nothing like this to hold on to. Indeed, it seems that his like in Ireland have nothing to hold on to either. They have lost the sense of the sacred. Life has no destination for them. Instead of living life to the full they try to consume it but invariably end up consuming themselves and others through their negativity, greed and callous indifference to any absolute.
May the Lord of life, the Jesus of new life, change their hearts of stone and make of them hearts of flesh. May our prayers today lead us to recognise that without Christ we lose our purpose and miss the true joy of living life to the full.