What does it mean to become baptized?
To understand the meaning and event of baptism one must grasp first Who the Church is. The Church is the Trinitarian Communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Church is without beginning, without end and eternal, just as the Triune God, her founder, is without beginning, without end and eternal. She is uncreated just as God is uncreated…the three persons of the Holy Trinity constitute the eternal Church.[1]
The source of that Communion is selfless-love[2] (1Jn 4:8). Everything descends from that initial relationship and fundamental principle. This Trinitarian Communion of selfless-love created all things visible and invisible: “all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:3).
Why did God create the world? Moved by selfless love, God desired to share His life with a creature. Thus, God created the world in order to place within it His own image and likeness, the human person (Gen. 1:26). Saint Basil the Great teaches:
You will finally discover that the world not conceived by chance and without reason, but for an useful end and for the great advantage of all beings, since it is really the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God; since by the sight of visible and sensible things the mind is led, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible things.[3]
As the great Greek Church father teaches, the world is created for the human person as a means by which the human person would come to know and contemplate God. By that knowing and contemplation, the human person was to receive the grace to participate in Communion with God.
Adam and Eve, however, sinned against God and thus lost communion with God, Who is the source of life. The consequences of that first sin[4] were corruption and death. Death is more than the cessation of physical or biological life. Death is a loss of communion with the source of Life – God. The Eastern Church calls it the Ancestral Sin. Thereafter, every choice and every act against God is a movement toward corruption and death, called sin.
In the Old Testament, with the call of Abraham, God began a plan to restore the human person to authentic life. The plan was to enable the human person to become a participant in the Trinitarian Life, the Church. The biblical accounts of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, the Kings, and the Prophets, recount the preparatory steps toward a fully restored communion with God through a series of covenantal relationships.
Through the covenants, God established a particular people, Israel, to be His own people: a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.[5] To His people, God imparted both right worship by the establishment of a priesthood, a temple, prescribed sacrifices and feasts; and right acting by imparting the Law (the Decalogue). So long as Israel obeyed both, the covenant remained intact. Nevertheless, the events of the Old Testament were but a shadow, a prototype, an icon of the reality – restored Communion. They prepared and disposed Israel for the events of the Incarnation of the Word of God and the descent of the Holy Spirit.
It was Jesus the Christ Who came to accomplish what neither worship nor the Law of the Old Testament could do. He declared: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17). As perfectly God and perfectly Man, Jesus of Nazareth fulfills the ultimate meaning (teleios)[6] of Old Testament Jewish worship and Law (Decalogue): restored communion between God and the human person.
The Events of the Paschal Mystery[7] and Pentecost Sunday[8] fully realized the restoration of human nature to communion with God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
When Jesus the Christ ascended into Heaven, He took human nature into the glory of God. Forevermore, human nature is able to participate in the Church, i.e. the life of God. The Greek Fathers aptly have called it theosis, in English – divinization.[9]
Nine days after the Ascension, the Heavenly Father sent the Spirit of His Son upon those who had received and believed in Jesus the Christ. The Holy Spirit consecrated them, making them sharers in the Body of Christ. On the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit began the work of divinization within individual persons, making them participants in the life of the Holy Trinity – the Church.
[1] Saint Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 87.
[2] While there is one word in English “love,” the Greek, in which the Scriptures are written and the Church Fathers wrote, has four different words. The word used by Saint John is agape meaning literally selfless or sacrificial love.
[3] Saint Basil, Hexaemeron, Homily 1, 6.
[4] The Eastern Church learning from the Greek Fathers call the first sin, the primal and ancestral sin. The West following the thought of Augustine calls it the “Original Sin.” There are two nuances, emphases, and conclusions for each.
[5] Ex 19:5.
[6] A Greek word that means : having reached its end, completion or perfection, or its purpose/reason for being.
[7] The Passion, Death, Burial, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus the Christ.
[8] The Event that revealed the Third Person of the Holy Trinity: the Holy Spirit.
[9] 2 Pt 1:4; and see also Saint Anthanasius, On the Incarnation 54,3.