Beloved

[A reflection on the Gospel for the First Sunday after the Epiphany, January 12, 2025, which may be found with the other readings here.]

What does it mean to be "beloved"?

Grammatically speaking, this is a past passive participle, a verb-become-adjective that denotes that the person or thing described is the focus of someone else's love. Whether the love is returned is immaterial, all that matters with that word is that the agent of that love (remember, this is a passive verb, so there's always an agent or perpetrator, implicit or explicit). So if you are beloved, then you are the absolute focus of someone's love, nigh to the point of distraction.

So turning to St. Luke's account of the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, we see Jesus suddenly gifted by a bodily manifestation of the Holy Spirit with the voice of the Father referring to Jesus as "my Beloved." There is no doubt here, Jesus is the beloved, and the agent of that love is undeniably the Father. With the visitation of the Spirit the onlookers are all seeing a manifestation of the perichoresis, the love between the persons of the Holy Trinity manifested in a voice, an apparition, and an actual human. Here the Father calls Jesus "my Son" and that the Father is "well-pleased" with him, a sentiment not given lightly.

We are later to learn that the Father indeed loves all of us, but is not necessarily well-pleased with us. So the Father sent us one with Whom He is indeed well-pleased, the anointed one (the action of the Holy Spirit) who is to effect the mission of the Messiah, not just anyone off the street, but the One Whom the Father loves beyond all boundaries. Because of that love, the Beloved came to teach us the Father's way, the Father's truth, to suffer at the hands of people who either did not understand or chose to reject His message, and to die because of it, only to rise again to reconcile to God those with whom God was not well-pleased and to remake their nature whole and incorruptible.

This then is the Beloved. How great a gift is this that the Father should send Him to us? That tells us that we too are Beloved if God should do such for us.