Through baptism we are ‘freed from sin and reborn as sons of God’

2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 49:3, 5-6
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:1-3
Gospel Reading: Jn 1:29-34

God’s gift of baptism “exceeds all other gifts,” said Pope St. Leo the Great, for after baptism, God calls man “son” and man calls God “Father.”

“Through baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, John distinguishes between his own baptism with water and Jesus’ baptism with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus called John “a prophet,” and “something more than a prophet.” He called him his “messenger,” sent before him to prepare his way. Now John’s message was, “Reform your lives! The reign of God is at hand.”

John’s baptism prepared the way for Jesus. Those who refused it “defeated God’s plan” for them, says St. Luke.

However, Jesus promised more. “John baptized with water,” he told his apostles, “but within a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

When the Ephesians told St. Paul that they had received John’s baptism but had not heard of the Holy Spirit, Paul explained that “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance,” but that John himself had told the people about “the one who would come after him.” Accordingly, the people were baptized with Jesus’ baptism: as Paul laid hands on them, “the Holy Spirit came down on them.”

John’s baptism did not confer divine life. Jesus called John the greatest among those “born of woman” (those possessing natural life), but he added that “the least born into the Kingdom of God” (those possessing divine life) “is greater than he.”

Baptism of repentance frees us from sin, while baptism with the Holy Spirit gives us re-birth into divine life. It is useful to distinguish between them, but it is important to realize that the sacrament of baptism accomplishes both.

When Adam and Eve succumbed to Satan’s temptation to set themselves up against God, they rejected the father-son relationship with God and retained only the master-slave relationship, said Pope St. John Paul II. At our natural birth, we, their descendants, contract their sin (the original sin), like a disease. We must be freed from it (as well as any sins of our own) before we can be reborn as God’s children. Accordingly, before baptism, we are asked to reject Satan and sin.

Once we are free of sin, baptism can achieve its principal purpose: to change us from God’s artifacts – things he has made – into his adopted sons and daughters, re-born with his life, “partakers of the divine nature,” “a new creation,” called to be saints.

“See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God!” St. John the evangelist marvelled. “Yet that is what we are.”

Baptism introduces us into “the intimacy” of the Holy Trinity’s life, for the Holy Spirit in person communicates to us the divine life that originates in the Father and is offered to us in the Son. After that, we may indeed dare to call the Father ”our Father” – Jesus’ and ours.

As Jesus’ adopted brothers and sisters, we share his divine life so fully that St. Paul calls us members of his Mystical Body. That is what it means to be in Christ.

“In baptism we are identified with Christ, baptized in the Trinitarian name of God; we take on his family name, and thus we become sons in the Son,” says Scott Hahn. “We are taken up into the very life of the Trinity, where we may live in love forever.”

Baptism is not an act of “mental adhesion” to Christ’s thought or agreement with his “code of conduct,” said Pope Francis in his apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi, dated June 29, 2022.

Rather, it is being “inserted into the Body of Christ”; being given “the possibility of dying and rising” in him by “being plunged into his passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and on Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “Grace and the Sacraments.”

Click here to send us a letter to the editor about this or any other article.