Transcript
Edmund: You know, one thing that’s interesting, if you’re not Christian and you saw Christian churches on social media, one thing you’d see a lot is people getting washed or dunked. You know, you might see people getting dunked in big pools. You might see cute little babies getting the tops of their heads washed. And so this is baptism, but one of the things that would be a valid question is like, why that sign? I mean, there’s this obvious idea that, okay, it’s some type of washing and cleansing, but like, why did God choose that sign in particular? And, you know, baptism is pretty dramatic because the sacrament of baptism is a big deal. And you might have heard that a lot of people make pilgrimages to the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized. I mean, the obvious meaning of baptism is that it cleanses us. It cleanses us of sin.
God gives us birth into new life through the sacrament of baptism. So maybe if you’ve been around Christianity a little bit, you might understand, okay, there’s this washing and there’s this idea of John the Baptist. And so John would wash people in the Jordan River. But there’s also this idea in the Old Testament of the Mikva. There was what was called the mikva. And the mikva was involved in ritual cleansing. So in the Old Testament, ritual cleansing was really important. There were lots of different rules and regulations around being ritually clean. And the mikva would be these, um, these big baths that people could go into to wash themselves and make themselves ritually clean. But John the Baptist comes and starts preaching this type, this idea of baptizing and washing just for your own personal sins, not for a ritual cleansing, but this idea that we need a washing and a doing away of an old life.
And then Jesus institutes the sacrament of baptism and combines all of these things together and elevates them. And so we have the washing of the mikvah, the idea of going down in and becoming ritually clean in order to enter the temple and worship, but also have the idea of John the Baptist and the doing away of sin and turning away from sin and beginning a new life in the sacrament of baptism. We have this fullness of all of these things that you might not have otherwise known about had you just kind of come across baptism on social media.
Okay, so what is baptism? So the Catechism tells us this sacrament is called baptism after the central rite by which it is carried out to baptize means to plunge or immerse. The plunge into the water, symbolizes the catechumen’s burial into Christ’s death from which he rises up by resurrection with him as a new creature. So baptism is about being washed, and it’s in a similar but more profound way than the mikvah of the Old Testament. The Catechism says in paragraph 1227 “That the baptized have put on Christ through the Holy Spirit. Baptism is a bath that purifies, justifies and sanctifies.” And so this is why at the doors of the church, we have these small baptismal fonts to remind us that baptism is what allows us to enter Church, the family of God. And in this way, God gives us birth into new life through the sacrament of baptism.
