“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
Romans 6:3-4
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus
As the Orthodox Church all over the world reflect the glow perceived during the Theophany of our Lord Jesus Christ, when Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan and the Triune nature of God was revealed, I was trying to link the baptism of Jesus and the baptism a believer receives at the beginning of his/her Christian life and the reason for it, I was struck by the similarity it bears to the death of Jesus Christ and His resurrection.
Baptism is a fact that people undergo for formally being brought into the Christian community. Today we have different forms of baptism, viz. infant baptism, adult baptism, baptism by being dipped in water or having water poured over them. The word ‘baptism’ originally just meant ‘dipping’. If we turn to the New Testament we find this word featuring in the ministry and teaching of Jesus, and also, quite extensively, in the letters of St. Paul.
Jesus speaks of the suffering and death that lies ahead of him as a ‘baptism’ he is going to endure (Mark 10:38). That is, He speaks as if His going towards suffering and death were a kind of immersion in something, being drowned or swamped in something. He says that he has an ‘immersion’ to go through, and until it is completed he will be frustrated and his work will be incomplete (Luke 12:50). So it seems that from the very beginning, baptism as a ritual for joining the Christian community was associated with the idea of going down into the darkness of Jesus’ suffering and death, being ‘swamped’ by the reality of what Jesus endured. St. Paul speaks of being baptized ‘into’ the death of Christ (Romans 6:3).
We are, so to speak, ‘dropped’ into that mysterious event which Christians commemorate on Good Friday, and more regularly, in the breaking of bread at every Holy Eucharist.
Out of the depths
As the ancient Church began to reflect more on this in the early Christian centuries, as it began to shape its liturgy and art, another set of association were developed.
In the story of Jesus’ baptism, He goes down into the water of the river Jordan, and as He comes up out of the water the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove and a voice speaks from heaven: ‘You are my Son’ (Luke 3:22). Reflecting on that incident, the early Christians soon began to make connections with another story involving water and the Spirit. In the book of Genesis, at the very beginning of creation, we read that there was a watery chaos. And over that watery chaos there was the Holy Spirit hovering or a great wind blowing.
First there is chaos, then there is the wind of God’s Spirit; and out of the watery chaos comes the world. And God says, ‘This is good.’ The water and the Spirit and the voice: we can see why the early Christian fathers began to associate the event of baptism with exactly that image which St. Paul uses for the Christian life – new creation.
So the beginning of Christian life is a new beginning of God’s creative work. And just as Jesus came up out of the water, receiving the Holy Spirit and hearing the voice of the Father, so for the newly baptized Christian the voice of God says, ‘You are my son/daughter’, as that individual begins his or her new life in association with Jesus.
In the icons reflecting the baptism of Jesus, we can usually see Jesus up to His neck in the water, while below, sitting under the waves, are the river gods of the old world, representing the chaos that is being overcome. So from early on baptism has been bringing powerful symbols around itself. Water and rebirth: rebirth as a son or daughter of God, as Jesus Himself is a son; chaos moving into order as the wind of God blows upon it.
As the Church reflected on what baptism means, it is not surprising when it came to view baptism as a restoration of what it is to be truly human. To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend?
To understand what did God intend from his most prized creation, stay tuned to the blogs.
Your brother in Christ Jesus
Jobin George
