Thanks to the restoration of Easter Vigil baptism in many of our churches, our dominant understanding of baptism in our catechesis and liturgical celebrations is that of death and burial in Christ (Romans chapter 6).
Today’s Gospel, however, puts before us another primary image of baptism as being born anew, literally born “from above” through water and the Holy Spirit. While not incompatible with baptism as death and burial from which we “walk in newness of life,” baptism as new birth in Christ is an image that invites our attention and suggests an alternative focus. Rooted not in Easter but in Pentecost and the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, this understanding of baptism as being born from above suggests a whole cluster of images, including seeing the baptismal font as womb, rather than tomb, and interpreting baptism, in the words of the late Mark Searle, using the metaphors of “adoption, divinization, sanctification, gift of the Spirit, indwelling, glory, power, wisdom, rebirth, restoration, [and] mission.”
Baptism as being born from above through water and the Holy Spirit is all about becoming sons and daughters in the Son himself, who was proclaimed precisely as Son of God at his baptism by John. In the words of the inscription on the Lateran baptistery: “Here a people of godly race are born for heaven; the Spirit gives them life in the fertile waters. The Church-Mother, in these waves, bears her children like virginal fruit she has conceived by the Holy Spirit. Hope for the kingdom of heaven, you who are reborn in this spring, for those who are born but once have no share in the life of blessedness.” What a rich and inviting image of baptism John chapter 3 provides for us.

Maxwell E. Johnson

Maxwell E. Johnson is emeritus professor of theology (liturgy) at the University of Notre Dame, a retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a canon of the Episcopal Catherdral of St. James in South Bend, Indiana. An oblate of Saint John’s Abbey, he is the author of several books on the liturgy and edited the breviary Benedictine Daily Prayer.