“I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!” (Luke 12:50)
In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus yearns for his next baptism, namely his death and resurrection. The word “baptism” literally means “immersion,” and so Jesus was to be immersed in the tomb of death before rising from it, just as he had been plunged into the Jordan’s waters by John the Baptist.
In the first reading, Jeremiah was immersed in the mud of the cistern before being rescued, as the psalm (40) describes: “He drew me from the deadly pit, from the miry clay.”
