BRETHREN: So many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection…
What does it mean to be baptized into the death of Jesus Christ? First we need to examine what our death is and what His death was. Death entered into our human experience immediately upon sin, upon our choice of exchanging the life of Paradise for the irrational and lower realm of the earth.
Sin introduced death, for sin was the separation of the soul from God, of spirit from Life, and even though it took 900 years or so, Adam’s body also died, his soul separated from his body, that he might not remain in such a state forever, for God knew that the day would come when physical death would be conquered, destroyed; when the Conqueror would take the souls of Adam and Eve from the realm of Hades and bring them back into the realm of Life and Light.
Death came into the world after the devil and the transgression, and it will also disappear after they are gone. The sacrifice on the Cross and the Resurrection of the Lord has destroyed death potentially, but then, death will be annihilated in fact. Until such time, it will reign over the race of mortal humanity, but not eternally. Its rule will not last forever.
For Christ, death was different. It was an entry into a realm which He did not by necessity have to enter at all. He died to bequeath the fullness of life to mankind, out of the sole impetus of divine love. Salvation had to be a victory over death, over the mortality of man. Death could be abolished by no other means than the death of the Lord on the Cross.
The Lord offered Himself as a representative of all humanity, of all generations. He died for all, sacrificed for all time, and remitted the sins of all who repent, from the beginning of the world until the end of time. Death was not a necessity for Christ, as it was for us, for he was not polluted by sin. He died freely, by virtue of His infinite love for us His creatures. Death had no authority at all over Him. He gave up His spirit upon the Cross with His own will. And thus, eternal life entered into the realm of death, which could in no way hold it. He died a human death, in accordance with human nature, but a death within the hypostasis of the Incarnate Logos of God. This means it was a resurrectional death, the baptism with which He was baptized, as He said in Luke 12. The death of the Savior was a fatal stroke against sin and death, and the establishment of Resurrection as the reality for those who trust and live in Him. By His mercy, He established two great Mysteries to allow us to participate in this. First, Holy Baptism, by which we enter into both His death and His Resurrection.
In the blessing of the water, the Holy Spirit Who hovered over the waters at creation, enters into the water in the font, and makes the blessed water the agency of the grace of our voluntary entry into death, not any death, but the life-creating death of Christ, which can only issue in Resurrection, as He is Life itself. We rise to a new life in Him.
And this life is nourished by the other great Mystery of the Holy Eucharist. In this, we enter into the reality of His sacrifice for sin, we participate in the blood in which is life, as God told Moses. The blood of bulls and goats which could never atone for the sins of humanity, is replaced by the Blood of God, the blood of the everlasting Covenant of Life. The Body of Christ is our food of immortality, the sustenance of this new resurrected life. In the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is made present to and for us, each of us, for whom He offered Himself.
We have already died, says St. Paul, in the only sense that really matters: died to the old Adam and to sin, by virtue of being incorporated into Christ in baptism. We do not mourn as the unbelievers who are only being true to their own belief when they weep and wail as if death were the final word. Death has become a rest for us, a rest from the world of sin, a rest in which we are never parted from those who have gone before us in the communion of saints.
When we behold our loved ones in the sleep of death, we should behold them just as we did then we beheld them in sleep in life, knowing that they will awaken. For if death is a sleep, it is also an awakening to the blessedness and the eternal kingdom where the love of God reigns and is illumined by His unfailing Light.
The Lord has given us a choice. Repent and die now, voluntarily, in Him, that we might live forever, or refuse to repent and die to the old man, and instead face a death which is deathless. Because of Christ shall all be raised, some to everlasting blessedness and some to the agony of separation forever.