Scattered among Ignatius Loyola’s prayer methods is a device called “repetition.” If a praying session went particularly well, or maybe if it did not, Ignatius would instruct the retreatant to repeat the exact same topic for their next session.

Honestly, I admit that this was the method I disliked most when I first made the Spiritual Exercises. “Oh no, not again,” I would groan if the retreat director assigned it.

Only later did I begin to understand what repetition was about. It was not that I should try to re-create each and every feeling from the first time. Not even that I should expect to meet God in the same manner. Nor rack my brains more vigorously trying to figure it out.

Repetition meant simply that I should go to the same shady spot in the forest, the homey place where God and I had met in the previous meditation. Maybe God would find me there again, or show me depths I had missed. If not, my privilege would be to remember what happened then, like Mary “pondering these things in her heart.”

This week we find another reference to the Baptism of the Lord, this time by John. The Church has prescribed a Gospel reading that we could easily take as a repetition. As in the Exercises, such a repetition must have a purpose. Let us look.

What do you notice in the Gospel reading? Pause here if you want to consider it.

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For my part I was struck by what John the Baptist said as he saw Jesus, words that were not included in Matthew’s description: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”

Behold the Lamb of God. We hear the phrase at every Mass, but most of us never really think about it very much. The Baptism story gives us a chance to do so.

Lambs held a special place in the Jewish temple of those days. An offeror would bring one (or another animal) with them in order to sacrifice it. Sacrifice? Why sacrifice? One belief was that since the innocent creature would be released from this world by dying, and thus would go up to God’s pure heavenas a gift. But because its roots were thoroughly of the earth, it became a sign of the union between God in heaven and the people down below.

Jesus, by being baptized, was offering himself like a lamb, surrendering himself at the table of sacrifice. And, like the lambs, his roots as a human being were of this earth, with death releasing him to be the complete union of God with the people that he was also. Symbolically, he was showing us that he belonged to both realities, heaven and earth.

So, this Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, like a prayer repetition, yields deeper understanding of baptism, Jesus’ baptism, and his name, Lamb of God.* He was already united with God, but he was also a innocent member of the people. He carried this people’s lives and even their sins right into God’s forgiving bosom.

Phew. This is a lot of yield for one Sunday’s readings. Much of the above consists of “understanding,” but it provides material galore for meditation, both during the week before Sunday’s Mass and them during that Mass.