“In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh has been put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through your faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.”
Colossians 2:11-12
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus
In the series, ‘Being Christian‘ I am trying to share with you the activities that signify a Christian essence in the life of the faithful and what kind of people we might hope to become in a community where these activities are practices. With this hope in mind, we started with the most important sacrament (or a rite) by which an individual is brought to the Christian family – the Baptism.
In the previous blog we tried to understand that just as Jesus was acknowledged in the waters of Jordan as God’s son, we too are given an opportunity to be acknowledged as God sons & daughters by becoming recipients of the Holy Spirit. And in so opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we also are to open up to the needs and requirements of the people around us. We who are baptized are to be found in the middle of the love that God has for us and in the middle of the human suffering showing to the world Gods love for them as well. The baptized person is not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle but also in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That surely is one of the most extraordinary mysteries of being Christian.
Growing out of this blessing – to be in the middle of the heart of God and being in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain, the prayer of baptized people is going to be a prayer that is always moving in the depths, sometimes invisible – a prayer that comes from places deeper than we can really understand. St. Paul says just this in his letter to the Romans:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness… that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words”
Romans 8:26
The prayer of the baptized people is never just ‘rattling off’ the words at surface level. The prayer of baptized people comes from a place deeper that we can penetrate with our minds or even our feelings. Prayer in the baptized community surges up from the depths of God’s own life. Or, to change the metaphor, we might say that we are carried along on a tide deeper than ourselves, welling from God’s depths and the world’s.
The prayer of baptized people is always growing and moving into the prayer of Jesus himself and therefore it is a prayer that may often be difficult and mysterious. It will not always be cheerful and clear, and it may not always feel as though it is going to be answered. Christians do not pray expecting to get what they ask for in any simple sense. Rather, Christians pray because they have to, because the Spirit is surging up inside them. Prayer, in other words, is more like sneezing – there comes a point where you can’t not do it. The Holy Spirit wells and surges up towards God the Father. But because of this there will be moments when, precisely because you can’t help yourself, it can feel dark and unrewarding, deeply puzzling, hard to speak about.
That might be the reason why so many great Christian writers on the spiritual life have emphasized that prayer is not about feeling good. It is not about results, or about being pleased with yourself; it is just what God does in you when you are close to Jesus. And that of course means that the path of the baptized person is a dangerous one. To be baptized is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus’ first disciples discovered that in the Gospels and his disciples have gone on discovering ever since.
It is a great privilege to know and learn about people who live in dangerous proximity to Jesus; where their witness means they are at risk in various ways. And when we get to know people in places like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria or Pakistan living both in the neighborhood of Jesus and in the neighborhood of great danger, we understand something of what commitment to the Christian life means, the commitment of which baptism is the sign. But we also see this when we look at the lives of the great saints whose path of contemplation has led them to deep inner desolation, loneliness and uncertainty. All this results from the upsurging life of the Spirit in the center of our being, coming from the heart of God. Like the saints before us, we tread a dangerous path – which is also the path to life.
As the Indian Orthodox Church and all her children, along with many other Christian communities all around the world prepare for the greatest journey in their life, a journey with Jesus to the Cross on Calvary and from there to the Resurrection and promise given to the whole mankind, the Church remembers all its departed saints and spiritual fathers. When we contemplate on their life, we find that in the inmost part of their life, they had a heart for God and of God, always seeking to be in communion with the Creator, to be in communion with the creation around them and serving God through serving all around them. As we prepare to partake of the journey with Christ during the Great Lent, we look at the path taken by our spiritual fathers and mothers before us.
We find that the path is both dangerous and life-giving for me as an individual believer – but not only for me alone. The other great truth about baptism is that it brings us into proximity not only with God the Father, not only with the suffering and muddle of the human world, but with all those other people who are invited to be there as well. Baptism brings us into the neighborhood of other Christians; and there is no way of being a Christian without being in the neighborhood of other Christians. But we will discuss more of that next week.
In the meantime, do keep me and my family in your prayers.
Your brother in Christ Jesus
Jobin George
