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Theology - Liturgical: Baptismal meditation

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Colossians 3:3: You have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

For ancient people, wisdom was the wisdom of death. A wise man knows he is going to die, that his life is lived toward death, and that death is an absolute end. A wise man resigns himself to death, courageously facing the hopelessness of the grave, or rushes toward death, embracing it on the battlefield or in a noble suicide.

When the letter to the Hebrews talks about men living in the old world, it says that they lived as slaves to the fear of death. Ancient philosophers and heroes would not have put it like that, but that’s what it is. Fear of death enslaved everyone.

The gospel announces Jesus’ victory over death, which is the Father’s victory over death in the resurrection. But we’re often too facile in passing over the continuing reality of death. It is still a fact that every last one of us is going to end up in the ground, or in a tomb, or with ashes scattered to the winds. For us too, wisdom is the wisdom of death: “So teach us to number our days,” Moses wrote, “that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”

But the Christian wisdom of death is different. The world is constantly telling us that we are not in charge. The flat tire, the business plan that doesn’t work out, the degree we never finished – life frustrates us, and drives home our limitations. Death is the ultimate limit. Our time here is short. Someday, this world will not be graced with your presence. Meditation on death is meditation on creaturehood.

That’s what made this world so hateful for the ancients. They wanted to be like gods, but death showed them how human, all too human, they were. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament observes the same thing – that death reveals our limits – but draws the opposite conclusion. For Solomon, death is not only a continuous reminder of our limits, a reminder that we are not God; it is also a pointer to the deathless God in heaven. Even before the resurrection, the Bible was urging Israel to remember death, and rejoice.

Baptism is a death. Paul says that we are baptized into the death of Jesus, and therefore die to one world so that we can begin to live, eternally, in another. Baptism is the effective sign that we have died, and that our lives are now hid with Christ in God. Baptism kills us, and calls us to rejoice.

As a death near the beginning of life, baptism reminds us that we live out our lives under the shadow of the death that will come at the end. We baptized are given the wisdom of death, the wisdom to know that we are creatures and that our time will end. But in reminding us of our death, baptism is also reminding us to rejoice in the God of life, the God who raises the dead.

Your child dies today, and begins a life of dying, a live lived toward death. Because of that, today is not a day of sorrow, but a day of joy.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 6:23 am

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Theology - Liturgical: Baptismal meditation

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