This Sunday’s liturgy celebrates and recalls the Baptism of Jesus. It is the event in which God the Father presents his Son to us, as our Savior, and thus culminates the Christmas season. 
It is one of the events at the origin of Christian baptism. In the Gospel we are told that the Jewish people were in expectation. That is to say, there was a presentiment in the air that the definitive intervention of God was imminent. Undoubtedly, the preaching of John the Baptist contributed to this expectation, since he offered a baptism of penance and forgiveness in preparation for God’s forthcoming intervention. Some even thought that he might be the promised Messiah; but he did not take advantage of the people’s opinion to give himself importance.
He always said that behind him would come one mightier than I, whom I do not deserve to untie the straps of his sandals. He will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Among the people who came to receive John’s baptism, Jesus also approached. The evangelist Luke implies that Jesus mingled with the sinners he had come to save, just as he would be crucified between two thieves as just another criminal. However, Jesus mingled with sinners, not because he was just another sinner, but because he came precisely to save sinners and identified himself with us sinners, to save us from sin. After receiving baptism, while he was praying, visible and audible signs took place. The heavens were opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in a sensitive form, as of a dove, and from heaven came a voice saying: “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased”. The voice spoke to Jesus, but those present heard it. The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, but those who were around saw him. In this way, the Father presented Jesus to us as the one through whom the heavens were opened for the Holy Spirit to descend and remained open for the grace of God, through Jesus, to be distributed to all mankind.
The voice of the Father also presented him as his beloved Son in whom he is well pleased. The Father is pleased with the Son who fulfills the mission for which he sent him: to seek sinners for their salvation.
This presentation that God the Father makes in baptism has its antecedent in the presentation that God makes of his faithful servant in the prophet Isaiah: “Behold my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom I am well pleased. I have put my spirit in him, that he may bring forth righteousness to the nations”. And he continues further, “I have formed you and appointed you a covenant of a people, a light of the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out the captives from the prison, and from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.” The servant of the Lord is the light that opens the eyes of the blind who do not see the meaning of their lives; that frees from the prison of their vices those who live captive in them and brings out of the dungeon of death those who live in the darkness of fear, fear and frustration.
Finally, there is a third presentation of Jesus, this time by the mouth of Peter in the second reading. The apostle has arrived at the house of the centurion Cornelius, a pious Gentile, sympathetic to Judaism, who has had a vision in which God commanded him to bring Peter to his house. When Peter arrived and began to proclaim the gospel, the Holy Spirit came visibly upon Cornelius and his family, whereupon Peter understood that the gospel is for everyone. He said, “Now I realize that God makes no distinction between persons, but accepts the one who fears him and practices righteousness, no matter what nation he may be.” 
In other words, the Christian faith is not an ethnic or cultural matter, limited to the Jewish people. The Christian faith is offered to all, as long as they recognize God by faith and practice righteousness through ethically upright conduct, because all must be saved from sin and death. At that juncture, Peter also introduces Jesus: “You know what happened in all Judea, which began in Galilee, after the baptism preached by John: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the power of the Holy Spirit and how he went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed by 
the devil, because God was with him.” The presentation of Jesus carries with it the statement of his mission. He is the man who receives the Spirit to distribute it to others. He is the man sent by God who brings the light of truth and the medicine of mercy and forgiveness. But if God presents Jesus to us, how should we respond to that presentation? How do we know Jesus?
For two or three centuries and up to the present day, there has been doubt about Jesus. First, there were doubts about his historical existence. 
After the real existence of Jesus was established, according to the methods of history, the effort to reduce Jesus to what we now consider plausible according to science continues. Jesus existed and preached the love of God and neighbor, announced the Kingdom of God, died crucified. But all the extraordinary things like his miracles, his transfiguration, his resurrection and his virginal conception would be ways of exalting his figure, but they would not be real, because they are things that are out of the ordinary. They even question the words of Jesus transmitted in the Gospels, 
because at that time, they say, there were no tape recorders to record them reliably. These doubts even affect people who dedicate themselves to theological studies, such as priests, seminarians and lay people, if they do not recognize the limitations of science.
“Who do people say I am?”
Historical studies about Jesus are useful because they provide a firm historical basis for faith. But they are only a starting point. When Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” he then asked his disciples what they thought of him. On that occasion, Peter took the floor and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus replied, “This has not been revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father who is in heaven.” That is to say, to know this identity surpasses the purely human capacity, because the 
knowledge of faith reaches dimensions of reality that fall outside the scope of human science. The real Jesus is not the one that results from historical reconstructions, but the one we know in the Gospels, the one preached by the Church and who is the only one who can save us, because only that Jesus is man and also God. For if Jesus is only a moral teacher, but gives neither eternal life nor forgiveness, he does not deserve our faith and adoration.