Vatican City, Jan 8, 2006 / 22:00 pm
In his weekly Angelus reflection, given Sunday on the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI encouraged a crowd of thousands let their own baptisms renew them in the image of the new man--Jesus.
In his comments, the Pope said that Jesus’ "was a Baptism of penance, using the symbol of water to express the purification of heart and of life.”
“When Jesus was baptized in the Jordan,” he continued, “the Holy Spirit came down upon him in the bodily form of a dove, and John the Baptist recognized that He was the Christ, the 'Lamb of God' Who had come to take away the sin of the world.”
Thus the Baptism in the Jordan, he said was also an “epiphany, an expression of the Lord's messianic identity and of His redeeming work, which culminated in another 'Baptism,' that of His death and resurrection, by which the entire world was purified in the fire of divine mercy."