August 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
This may seem too obvious, but hear me out: when you do your laundry, you’re washing your clothes. Notice what’s not happening. Your clothes are not washing you. And your clothes are not washing themselves. You’re doing all the work. Your clothes are doing nothing at all. They’re contributing nothing except the dirt that needs to be washed away. If you didn’t pick up your clothes and wash them, they’d remain dirty until the end of time.
And that’s how it is for baptism. Baptism is a washing. It’s not washing away dirt – it’s washing away sin. Baptism, St. Peter says, is a lot like the flood, which washed away the wickedness of the world and saved Noah and his family. Baptism “now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:22).
Notice what is not happening. You’re not washing God. And you’re not washing yourself. God’s doing all the work. You’re doing nothing at all. You’re contributing nothing except the sin that needs to be washed away. If God did not wash away your sins, you’d remain sinful until the end of time.
And that’s roughly the answer to the next question I posed about Baptism: “What role do you play in your Baptism?” Well, you play about the same role as dirty laundry in the wash or as a dead man in his resurrection.
This also answers one of the main objections to the baptism of infants. The objection goes like this: “Infants can’t repent or believe, and so they shouldn’t be baptized.”
But the fact is, none of us can repent or believe, young or old, unless God works it in us. And that’s precisely what Baptism does. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).
When it comes to contributing anything to Baptism, infants are no less capable than anyone else. In fact, if all that you contribute is your sin, then infants are great candidates because they’re sinful just like everyone else.
Now, there is something perplexing here that needs some attention: it’s easy to imagine what repentance and faith would look like for an adult. But what do they look like for an infant? That’ll be the question for next time!
Stay tuned for more!
God bless and keep you,
Pr. Buchs
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