Great fidelity
January 11, 2026 – Baptism of the Lord and First Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Reading I: Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7; Psalm 29: R. The Lord will bless his people with peace. Reading II: Acts 10:34-38; Gospel – Matthew 3: 13-17
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” With this beatific vision in the Baptism narrative this Sunday, Jesus clearly understood his identity and mission. This is Jesus’ vocation story.
Let us reflect on this story and use it as our lens to reflect on ours, too. We will look at vocation or mission, the fidelity to mission, and its completion.
To appreciate Jesus’ vocation story, we must bear in mind that he was fully human. As such, he gradually understood his identity and mission. In more colloquial language, who he was and the why of his life.
We begin with the definition of vocation by Frederick Buechner. He stated that the place where God calls us to is where our deep gladness and a deep hunger of the world meet.
The world in which Jesus was born into was longing for the Messiah. For centuries—from the covenant with Abraham, 42 generations according to the Lord’s genealogy—there was a hunger for the Messiah.
We saw how the Lord responded to this hunger. Crowds formed and followed him wherever he went, longing to hear his words, experience his healing, and have him expel demons.
This was Jesus’ deep gladness: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.(cf. Luke 4: 14-22).
In his first public appearance after his baptism and 40 days of prayer and fasting, Jesus proclaimed what he was set out to do. This was his deep gladness.
Thus, his identity was shaped. The beloved Son who was to do his Father’s will. In his three years of public ministry we saw this consistently lived out.
Who he was became clearer as he lived out his mission. His identity evolved into why he was sent into this world. This is where fidelity to one’s mission or vocation becomes a conscious choice.
Fr. Juan Alfonso de Polanco, S.J., secretary to St. Ignatius of Loyola, described St. Ignatius’ three important qualities in living out his mission or what he discerned as God’s will.
St. Ignatius had great energy in undertaking extraordinarily difficult tasks, great constancy in pursuing the tasks, and great prudence in seeing the tasks to completion.
So fidelity is not simply living out one’s identity and mission, but a fidelity lived out with great energy, great constancy, and great prudence in bringing the mission to completion.
We saw this in Jesus. He tirelessly responded to people’s hunger. His sense of service marked by compassion was constant, even setting aside his personal needs to serve.
And amid all this, he prudently lived out his mission or vocation as he discerned with equal constancy in prayer and solitude if what he did was according to how his Father wanted him to accomplish his mission.
The final expression of being the beloved Son who was pleasing to the Father was in Jesus’ fulfillment of his mission: his death on the Cross and his Resurrection; his offering in loving obedience to the Father with his death on the Cross and the Father’s response in the Resurrection.
This is a grace and a path available to us. This is the gift of the Incarnation. Jesus took on our humanity to show us the path to divinity through loving obedience to God’s will and mission, our vocation.
This is the path and the lens through which we are to reflect on our own identity and mission.
Jesus we gradually discover and at one point become very clear as to who we are and why we are here. It is when we begin to understand our journey and our own story.
Often external influences first guide our journey and write our story, but at a certain point of the journey and story, we realize we need to make our own choices.
There is a life-changing moment of grace for all of us when we see clearly our identity and mission, and hear clearly God’s call.
At this moment we need to make a choice. And the choice—if we say “yes”—is lived out with great fidelity.
And the choice to follow God’s call and mission will always be with great energy, never lukewarm. The fidelity of living out is always constant, never part-time. And the bringing to completion is through prudent prayer and discernment, never reckless and left to chance.
The grace we pray for today is the beloved sons and daughters in whom the Father is well pleased.
