Friday, 1/5/17
With Jesus being baptized by
John, I’d like to figure out the different ways baptisms were done by John and
by the early church.
I see John standing waist-deep
thirty feet out into the Jordan. People are pictured as calling out their sans
as their line neared John. Then, he would reach out and dunk each person. It
was a humiliation each accepted to pay for his or her sins.
The accounts we have of
baptisms in the early church tell us that they were only conferred on Holy
Saturday when they thought of Jesus in his tomb. In their imaginations those to
be baptized saw the baptismal pool as representing the tomb of Jesus
Paul, in Chapter Six of his
Letter to the Romans tells us that the
death by which Jesus saves us is not so much his physical death as his death to
sin. In stepping down into the stand-in for the tomb of Jesus, the candidate
was saying, “I amm dying to sin with Jesus.”
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