Baptism of the Lord – Year A

Fr. Joonbin Lim

Preached: January 11, 2026

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Through this Gospel passage, we come to understand how deeply God the Father loves his Son, Jesus Christ.

As I reflected on these words, I found myself thinking of my father, who handed on the Catholic faith to me as a precious inheritance and who has since passed away. After a year-long battle with cancer, he died in a hospice ward. At the time, I was twenty-three years old, freshly discharged from the military, full of plans and dreams for the future.

But life unfolded in a direction completely different from what I had hoped for, and I found myself filled with deep anger—toward my father and toward God. I could not understand how a man of such deep faith could be struck by cancer, nor could I accept the reality that I now had to take responsibility for supporting the family in his place. I told myself that if the God I believed in was someone who simply stood by and allowed such things to happen, then I would no longer believe in Him, and so I walked away from the Church.

I could not understand what sin my father could possibly have committed to deserve such an illness. The father I had known all my life was a good man, a faithful husband, and someone who lived with integrity and example.

For a long time after that, I wandered. My anger toward God eventually turned inward and began to destroy me. Yet because of my younger sibling and my mother, I could not stop working, and I lived each day simply trying to endure. I relied on alcohol almost every night, and there were days when I hoped I would not wake up the next morning.

After my father’s funeral, I read the letter he had left for me. It was a long letter, and much of it has faded from memory, but one part remains clear. He wrote that he blamed no one, that I had been a truly good son to him, and he asked me to hold on to my faith.

Later, I learned from one of the sisters in the hospice ward that my father attended Mass every day until the end and helped feed other patients who could no longer eat on their own. I could not understand how he was able to live in such a way at the very end of a life that was slowly fading away.

My father did not choose baptism for himself; he was baptized as an infant. And in this, I am no different. As someone who also received infant baptism, I did not choose God by my own decision; rather, faith was given to me as a gift through God’s grace and God’s choosing.

This led me to reflect on the baptism of Jesus in today’s Gospel. Why would Jesus, who is almighty God, receive baptism from John, a mere human being? And why would the sinless Lord submit to a baptism of repentance meant for sinners? Scripture tells us that “John the Baptist appeared in the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), and Jesus went to him and received that very baptism. In this way, Jesus began his public ministry by standing in the place of sinners.

And at the end of his public ministry, he stood in that same place. “Pilate had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified” (Mark 15:15). From beginning to end, Jesus placed himself before the world as one counted among sinners. If Jesus committed any sin at all, it was the sin of loving—loving every sinner without exception. He allowed himself to be counted as a sinner in baptism, and he carried upon his shoulders the weight of the world’s sin, more than enough to cover all humanity, and died on the cross.

To be baptized and become a child of God may appear, at first glance, to be our own choice, but in truth it can never happen without God’s will and God’s call. A selective faith—one that comes to church when we are happy and walks away when we are sorrowful or confused—is not the faith we are given. Faith is not something we choose according to our emotions or convenience; it is a covenant between God and
ourselves, a promise that we too will walk the path that Jesus walked.

To live the love that Jesus showed, even knowing that it would lead to death by cancer; to entrust oneself to Christ, who loved us to the very end even though he knew the cross awaited him—this is our faith. And to become like him, choosing love even in moments we cannot understand, rather than running away, is the path of life to which we are called as Christians.