The Sacrament of Baptism
Canon Law No: 849:
Baptism, the gateway to the sacraments, is necessary for salvation, either by actual reception or at least by desire. By it people are freed from sins, are born again as children of God and, made like to Christ by an indelible character, are incorporated into the Church. It is validly conferred only by a washing in real water with the proper form of words.
Life begins at baptism. Baptism is quintessential “sign of life”. Jesus himself spoke of baptism in terms of strict obligation: “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:5). Baptism was the substance of his final earthly command: “Go therefore and make disciple of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28: 19).
When new believers asked St. Peter, the first pope, what they should do, he infallibly declared: “Repent and be baptized every one of you” (Act 2:38).
Just as our natural living cannot proceed without a birth, so our supernatural life cannot proceed without our baptism.
Until we are baptized, we don’t have the kind of life Jesus talked about when he said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (Jn 14:6).
What is the essence of Christianity?
The statement is curious, because people can indeed go to God without going by way of Jesus. Even pagans can. St. Paul said so in his letter to the Romans; “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rm 1: 19-20). But here’s the difference: they cannot know him as Father. And that is the essence of Christianity.
Theologians since ancient times have described our salvation as a “Marvelous exchange.” In Jesus, God became what we are, so that we might become what he is.
The Son of God became the Son of Man, so that the children of men might become children of God.
Through baptism we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1: 4). We are baptized into Christ, so that we can live in him. We become by grace what God is by nature. That is why God became a man, and that is why he gave us baptism.
St. Paul, however’ saw baptism also as a fulfillment of the ancient Hebrews practice of circumcising all newborn males: “you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism” ( Col 2: 11-12).
The circumcision of infants, then, prefigured the baptism of those who would be “newborn” in Christ.
The old rite marked a child’s “birth” as a son of Abraham, the new rite marks the still greater birth of a child of God.
With circumcision, a boy entered into God’s covenant with the family of Abraham. A covenant is a legal action based upon an oath; its purpose is to create a family bond between formerly unrelated persons. God made a covenant with Abraham, so that Abraham’s descendants through Isaac would be God’s family on earth.
Circumcision was the preeminent sign of the Old Covenant. God welcomed newborns into Israel by means of ritual circumcision…through adult males, too, would undergo the painful rite if they chose to covert to Judaism.
From the beginning the church, in turn, received infants and adults… and all ages in between… into the family of God by means of baptism, the “circumcision made without hands.”
Circumcision was painful. It was costly. It was a down payment in blood that served as a pledge of one’s entire life. Yet membership in God’s family was well worth the price.
With baptism the rewards are even greater, but the cost is greater, too. St. Ambrose of Milan, writing in the fourth century, put it this way.
A man who underwent circumcision endured pain in one part of the body, for a brief time. Yet baptism, he said, is “the sacrament of the cross”.
Whether an infant or an adult, the Christian who has been “baptism into Christ Jesus” has been “baptized into his death. That death means a new life for us, a new creation”.
Baptism is not merely a ceremony, not merely a rite of passage. It is our entry into a New Covenant bond, a new family, a new life, a new birth, a new creation.
We are Christians because of a covenant, with baptism we become children of God in his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
All the baptized are invited to hear once again the words of St. Augustine: “let us rejoice and give thanks; we have not only become Christian but Christ himself.
According the words of Council of Florence, by baptism we are reborn spiritually. Baptism is a sign of birth and also a sign of washing. It cleanses the soul of all sins, sins actually committed, as well as original sin inherited from our first parents Adam and Eve.
Once we are baptized it has an indelible character on the soul, a kind of stamp. Once we received a validly sacrament of baptism it may never be repeated by the same person.
