Death by Water

Extract

Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus in his historical existence, the man whom God lived and who lived God for us, was God’s way of reading the world, God’s way of making sense of the world. His life amongst us was a hermeneutic of man in the world before God, an interpretation of the human condition which (in historical fact and not a fortiori) was and is a radical criticism of all other ways of reading the world; his life, and more particularly his death, which was the meaning of that life, shows that all other attempts to discover and express the significance of what it is to be human have been mistaken or deficient. The only true understanding of our living and dying is his living and dying; any other form of living and dying is to some degree perverted. Any living and dying that we might be able to manage ourselves is going to be less than true. Only his biography, his ‘name’, is able to make our biographies, our ‘names’, ultimately true readings of what it is to be human, to stand before God in the world. There is salvation in no other name. If we are to be whole, we have in some way to learn to abandon what we have received.

Baptism according to the tradition of the Church is ‘necessary to salvation’. That has come to be understood to mean that, at least so far as baptism in the straightforward sense of the sacrament of water-baptism is concerned, it is necessary to salvation for those who have been brought to see that it is so necessary. Baptism is the answer to a question, ‘What must (dei) I do to be saved?’ What shall we do?—The question asked by people who have heard the story of Jesus of Nazareth and felt themselves threatened by it, found themselves interpreted to themselves by it as out of true, as sinners.