By Joel Padgett, Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).
“He suffered death and was buried” (cf. CCC 613-630)
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church journeys through the Creed and reflects upon Christ’s death on the cross and burial in the tomb, it ends on what might at first seem like a strange note: Baptism. Wouldn’t it make more sense for it to end in expectant hope in the Resurrection? Or even with St. Paul’s defiant exclamation: “Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:54-55). The answer, like so many things Catholic, is a “both…and.” Christ’s burial and our baptism point to both death and life.
Although baptism is currently most often conferred in our parishes by pouring water over one’s head, it was originally conferred through immersion. In fact, even though immersion is less common in our local Church, it remains very common in other parts of the world. Both pouring and immersion are valid ways of baptizing in the Catholic Church.
In drawing the connection between Christ’s burial and our baptism, there is an important symbolism that immersion makes quite explicit. By being immersed—by going down into the waters—, it “efficaciously signifies the descent into the tomb by the Christian who dies to sin with Christ in order to live a new life” (CCC 628). In other words, as Jesus died, was buried and rose to new life, we Christians “die to sin with Christ,” are “buried” in the waters of baptism, and “rise” from the water’s “entombment” to new life with Christ. St Paul puts it this way: “We were buried with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).
Maybe you haven’t really thought about baptism in this way. Apparently the Romans hadn’t either, because in the verse the immediately preceding the one quoted above, St. Paul writes, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom 6:3). But why such an emphasis on death? Can’t we just jump ahead to the joy of the Resurrection and the promise of eternal life? As a cure for a deadly disease is more fully appreciated the more fully we are aware of the seriousness of the situation, the greatness of God’s gift of allowing us a share in his divine life is savored all the more intensely when we have a keener awareness of sin’s deadliness.
In fact, the reason for indicating the need to die with Christ is in order to highlight what is obtained through it: namely, life in Christ. Sin enslaves and destroys us. It is the ultimate source of death. Christ destroys sin and reconciles ourselves to God.
Returning to the Letter to the Romans, St Paul writes, “Our old self was crucified with him, so that… we might no longer be in slavery to sin… If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him… Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as being dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:6-11).
Striving to remain “dead to sin” and to “live for God” is a powerful baptismal calling that ought to resound incessantly throughout the entire trajectory of our lives. It is the work of continual conversion—our daily efforts to correspond with God’s grace in order to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (cf. Mk 12:30) and to love others, and ourselves, as Christ does (cf. Jn 13:34; Mk 12:31). Let us pray for each other that God grant us the grace of final perseverance and that we may truly help each other by “bearing one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2) until that time when death will indeed be “swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor 15:54) and life shall reign uninterruptedly for all eternity!