When most of us think of baptism, we have happy memories of babies (typically our children or grand children) receiving their initiation into the Christian faith. We remember family and friends close by, great joy that we have welcomed a precious new life into our faith. But Pope Benedict’s first chapter, and our first class, calls us to look deeper into the true meaning of Christian Baptism as defined by Christ’s experience at the Jordan River.
In the first four or five pages of Chapter 1, Pope Benedict sets the context for us, showing how John the Baptist fulfilled the words of the Old Testament prophets who foretold of one who would cry out in the wilderness, calling God’s children to repent, to make straight a highway in the desert. Benedict describes for us how Israel hadn’t seen a prophet for hundreds of years, and how John’s words and baptism by water were drawing people to examine their conscience.
But Benedict asks us to see the greater meaning of this scene. He points out that “Jesus’ Baptism anticipated his death on the Cross,” and was “an acceptance” of his future death “for the sins of humanity.” Baptism, he vigorously asserts, is a symbol of both death and life. You cannot delink them.
Benedict’s view is far from new. St. Paul drew a similar connection to baptism in his letter to the Romans, at 6:4: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”
Most of us were baptized when we were babies. We knew nothing about what our parents had chosen for us. Even when we were confirmed, how many of us chose that path? More than likely, it was the thing to do, the obligation we had to our parents to complete our journey as young Catholic adults.
But today, when we choose to renew our vows every Easter, we should think about what Pope Benedict is telling us here.
“To accept the invitation to be baptized now means to go to the place of Jesus’ Baptism. It is to go where he identifies himself with us and to receive there our identification with him.”
That means that we have to tangibly see and feel Jesus’ death for humanity, as well as his annointing at that moment as the “beloved son.” We need to ask ourselves: Are we truly engaged in repentance, in “turning away from” the old us, the one wedded to the material world and all it’s trapping? Or do we form a covenant with God through Christ to be something new, to live an intimate connection to the life Christ lived, and have his life live through us?
I have often been asked by my evangelical friends “Where are you in your walk with Jesus?” I never understood that question until I read Pope Benedict’s book. Chapter 1 launched me on my way, understanding that if we truly do commit to an intimate connection with Christ, we will find ourselves in a relationship unlike any other we can experience. Indeed, Benedict wraps up the chapter by quoting St. Augustine from his classic memoir, Confessions,
Jesus “can also become a contemporary of us all, ‘more interior” to each one of us “than we are to ourselves.’ “
Richard D'Ambrosio
Pathways 
In the forward, Pope Benedict explains that reading New Testament text positing faith as a matrix for historical exegesis will uncover a historical Jesus in communion with his Father, and is really the only stance from which the New Testament, the contemporary response to Jesus, the so very early developed Christology in Philippians (2:6-11) makes sense. I think he’s right. Historically, this Jesus was something awesomely new.
“awesomely new” I love that!
Paul Tillich, Protestant theologian and homilist, defines sin as separation, from God, from self, from others. I think I make that association at every Mass: Lamb of God, who takes away the sin (or sins) of the world. Jesus, without sin, takes upon himself all sin, to fulfill righteousness, the will of God, on earth, as it is in heaven. What an extraordinary meditation: Jesus’ baptism as taking onto himself, and away from us, our sin, our separation, into unity with his communion with God. Death, rebirth.
“Separation” is also how I make sense of original sin.