You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts.

Today is Wednesday, October 28th.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we have been talking about the baptism of Jesus.

We read the story.

We talked about the setting, which is just outside of the city of Jericho.

And this week we're going to talk about some of the other details from the baptism and what they would have meant to the Jews that saw the baptism happen.

So the first one is the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Now, even throughout scripture, both when the gospel writers were writing

and when St. Paul was writing his letters, they talk about the baptism of Jesus Christ as an

anointing. Now, maybe that word doesn't mean a lot to you, but it would have meant a lot to a Jew. And here's why. When God

finally allowed the Israelite nation to have kings, he asked the prophets to anoint them. They would take

oil and they would do a special blessing of the person chosen to be the king. When the prophet did this to Saul and he was

anointed, he immediately started to prophesy. He was given special access, special gifts of God

through that very active anointing. Then we know the next king was King David. He also was anointed. And what did he do shortly after he was

anointed? Well, he went. And even though he was a small boy and only had a slingshot, he defeated the giant

Goliath. Sometimes we forget this. We think that David was just a remarkable person.

Certainly, he was a remarkable person, but the reason why he defeated Goliath, and even he says this,

is because God is fighting for him, and he has special access to God because he has been

anointed. So that is what they would have seen. The Holy Spirit coming down and God

himself, not a prophet standing in for God, but God himself, anointing Jesus as the Messiah.

Now, the next thing that's remarkable, of course, is that God himself spoke from heaven.

...