Our Father Among the Saints Athanasius the Great (373)
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Acts 4:23-31; John 5:24-30
Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!
If baptism is a theme in the period between Easter and Pentecost, you could reasonably ask whether it is mentioned at all in today’s gospel. To answer this question, we have to appreciate one key thing about baptism: no Christian ever baptizes himself or herself. The point of this is that the life God gives us in baptism is precisely that: a gift. It’s not something we can ever take for ourselves, or gain on our own, apart from God’s love and the free gift of grace.
Today’s gospel, while never directly mentioning baptism, is all about God’s free gift of grace. The only person who has life “in himself” is God the Father. The Father grants the Son to share in this essential life, and the Son, in turn, extends this life to all the dead, those in the tombs, who will hear his voice and come forth to eternal life (or not). This life of the Father is given to us through his Son, and the relationship of the Son to the Father is one of perfect obedience – after all, Jesus himself says “I seek not my own will, but that of him who sent me.” This is what our baptism is all about. Whether we are baptized as children or adults, it is something done to us, not something we do ourselves: we go into the water, and then we are brought up again by God’s grace so that we can seek the will of the one who raised us from the dead.
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