By Father Rich Tomkosky
This past weekend, the sacred mysteries of Baptism and of the Blessed Trinity were revealed as the church completed the Christmas season. Our Savior came to be baptized by Saint John the Baptist to pre-figure the reality that through the cleansing waters of the Sacrament of Baptism, we human beings would be reborn as adopted sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father, which is why we can actually see ourselves as children of God.
Jesus came to earth to bring “the old man” to new life in Him, as Saint Paul puts it. Through the Sacrament of Baptism, which is efficacious because of Jesus’s death on the Cross and Glorious Resurrection, not because of our individual merits, the original sin, or that state of alienation which we humans are all born into because the first human beings wounded our human and spiritual nature by their deliberate and free choice to disobey God in some serious way, is wiped away.
We are now called to live the new life of the Spirit. Our moral life is to be in imitation of Jesus from within based on objective truth (realism), which leads to true spiritual freedom, not simply following “the rules,” seemingly imposed from without (nominalism), which leads to resentment and desire to rebel.
The motivation of everything we do in our Catholic faith should come from an interior desire to love God in return, which is shown in obedience and loving service; our motivation should not be to “placate” God (heresy of Jansenism), e.g., by coming to Mass and then doing what we want to do, which is a pagan notion of religion.
Christ wants to heal our sinful nature. This begins in the Sacrament of Baptism and is renewed every time we receive the Sacrament of Confession with the proper dispositions of honesty, sincere repentance, and purpose of amendment. Each Confession is like a “mini-Baptism.” Not only are we forgiven by God, but we are given the grace of spiritual healing increasingly, to carry on in the noble fight against our innate concupiscence or the tendency toward sin: the draw of the human will toward evil, which is innately in us because of the wound of original sin that we are born into as human beings.
Baptism wipes the original sin away, but the effects of it are still with us: pride and wanting to do our own will instead of God’s. This is THE BATTLE of the spiritual life and why it is so hard to be good on a natural level. But remember the grace is there to overcome our tendency toward evil in daily life especially through the Sacraments if we open our hearts more deeply to that reality. Sadly, today many people are not doing this: e.g. skipping Mass/ not going to Confession, etc. The opposite of what Jesus is trying to teach us today through His Baptism: total dependence on God in everything.
Finally, through the mystery of Baptism, Jesus begins the process of forming us in His own unfailing holiness. Again, this is a transformation from within. It’s not simply God covering over our evil and sinfulness like “snow on a pile of dirt,” which Martin Luther erroneously thought. No, the orthodox Catholic understanding of the meaning of Baptism and grace is that God in His love transforms us into His own image and likeness from within. What a gift! This is why we can go through stages of the Catholic spiritual life toward holiness, maturity, and completion in Christ (see the Fr. Reginald Garriogou La-Grange books below).
Our Baptism calls us to love as Jesus loves, to think as He thinks, to choose as He chooses, and to act as He acts. Everything in our life is to be rooted in self-giving love!
Let us thank the most Blessed Trinity today for the gift of Divine Adoption which begins in our Baptism, and for the reality that the Blessed Trinity dwells in our souls ever more deeply and profoundly as we grow in the grace which begins when we are baptized, which is also why we should avoid mortal sin at all costs. I try to address this in my columns, but please do some research if you need to know more which sins are considered mortal by the Church or ask/email/call me and I will try to help you come to this knowledge. It is so important because the Life of Grace is the greatest gift: the beginning of the eternal life of Heaven in seed form on earth! Thank you, Lord. God bless you.
Recommended Reading:
- The 3 Ages of the Interior Life (2 vols). Father Reginald Garrigou La-Grange. TAN books. 1989.
- Jesus of Nazareth. Pope Benedict XVI. Doubleday. 2007. (see especially chapter 1 “On the Baptism of Jesus”).
Father Rich Tomkosky is the Pastor of Saint Thomas the Apostle Parish in Bedford and the Pastor of Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in Beans Cove.
