Pulp Fiction: the miracle a divine intervention: God came down and stopped those bullets. A miracle God makes the impossible possible. You don’t judge the stuff on merit, you felt the touch of God, God came down. Because of that, he gave up his life, he repented. The other guy didn’t and he ended up getting killed. A moment of clarity.
Matthew sets the baptism after the genealogy of Jesus that this action is part of Jesus receiving the full inheritance of the royal line of David. John the Baptist was out in the desert, this was what was seen as the Essens community that separated from the temple and had developed distinctive institutional rituals. John’s has the quality of religious absolutions only this baptism could not be repeated. It was thus connected with a new way of thinking and acting. Repentance means this new way of thinking. It also meant the preparation of a divine intervention that he would come from hiddenness to judge and save.
John’s baptism also had an aspect of confession of sins. It was general but also particular, to leave behind the sinful path to a new, changed life. Baptism symbolized death, but also the river showed new life, moving water, starting anew.
Jesus is the one who wants to be baptized. He wants to intervene into history and be with us. Jesus steps into the place with and on behalf of sinners. We must go to meet him as he comes to meet us, as he intervenes and performs a miracle, we are called to know the presence of God. We must also have a moment of clarity and leave behind our sin which is also to leave behind our place of isolation. Our baptism is a place of election.
Baptism: faith and repentance. Baptism is meant to perform in us what it symbolizes so thus it destroys sin, washes it away, and gives us new life. Jesus has entered the waters he has now entered our souls. We can’t go back. Baptism is unrepeatable. We can never leave the same way we enter we will always be forever in someway changed. Our change must take place every single day. We in our baptisms are called to live as people who choose to look at and see the intervention of God in everything. We are called to think differently and by so doing to change our ways, to leave behind the sins. All of us will find various moments where at the drop of a hat we go from being on the side of speaking about mercy and such to then the one needing God’s mercy. Our baptism is meant to open our eyes to see this reality in life and how God walks on the side of us, how he is born into our hearts.
Lady in prison brought the divine mercy image. She is marked as one who is called to give out mercy but also one marked as needing mercy.