Baptism utterly changes us in ways many people don’t realize.
We know it makes us Christian, and we know it forgives sins — but for many of us, that was far in the past and doesn’t affect our current state of sin one way or the other.
But baptism is much more than that. The Church teaches, in fact, that baptism makes us a “new creature.” What kind of creature? “An adopted son of God,” it says. And it means that literally. We become a “partaker of the divine nature,” by being a “co-heir” with God the Son and a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”
But how does that work, practically? The family is usually the best analogy for a question like that.
Imagine being the father of a large family.
To begin to understand how God the Father responded to the rebellion of mankind, imagine being the father of a large family and entrusting your children with everything you own. Now imagine they betray that trust. They don’t respect your common home. They fight with each other, dodge their responsibilities, break their curfew, and commit all manner of sins. They are disrespecting you, but, worse, they are leading unhappy lives and ruining their futures.
This is really easy for me to imagine because I actually am the father of nine children and every one of them is a sinner.
So, how do I fix their situation? I can make certain demands and provide various rewards and punishments. And my wife and I, in fact, have done that. We have a whole system of rewards, the SCORE system, which we implement at various times to restore order, and when we do, it does a great deal of good. But it only works to a degree. It makes things better, but doesn’t solve all the problems.
God had an even greater SCORE system, the Law, and it has a huge, positive effect.
But there is an answer even greater than the Law.
I’ve seen it over and over again. The more one of the children starts doing the right thing, and calls out the others, the more all the children start to put their lives in order. Once a big sister or big brother starts to place a high priority on obedience and service, all the others take it more seriously, too.
The SCORE system, the Law, is necessary; but a peer leader, a model citizen, helps everyone follow the law better. In salvation history, that is what the great figures of the Old Testament did, up to and including John the Baptist.
But then, God sent the Ultimate Model, Jesus Christ himself, to show us how life should be done. He became a healer, a helper, a friend to the poor, a teacher, and a savior. He showed us how to live as sons of the Father. And Jesus the Role Model is unmatched.
But ultimately we need more than a model; we need the power to change.
Imagine that a stable family was the best it could be, with model children and a great disciplinary system, and then imagine that family adopted a new child. I haven’t seen this in my family, but I have in others.
Maybe that child had hard circumstances before: an absent parent, an addicted parent, an abusive home life. Someone in that circumstance statistically suffers a greatly reduced prospect of having an adequate home life, getting a good job, and starting a stable family.
A good family’s adoption can change that child’s life in significant ways. Suddenly, this new sister or brother will benefit not just from a system of discipline and good role models, but from a total change in identity and circumstances. Totally new opportunities and resources will be available.
Good parents will intervene directly in the life of that child, providing the tools and time to study, discipline and companionship, and just as importantly, the loving acceptance, admiration and personal dedication of a parent, which turns out to be the only way that child will learn self-worth in a meaningful way.
If this happens in human families, imagine what adoption by the Trinity can do.
Each of us is adopted at baptism in a real way. Just like Caesar Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, but considered a true son in every way, each baptized Christian is considered a true child of God.
For each adopted child, plenty of obstacles will remain, but the rights and privileges of being in the family of God will transform us.
We get the personal love of the Father, who says to us what he said to Jesus: “This is my beloved one, in whom I am well pleased.” We become co-heirs with the Son, royal siblings helping to establish his kingdom on earth. And we become temples of the Holy Spirit, filled with the powerful gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.
That is what Jesus came to do, and that is the baptized life we now live.
