Monday, March 2, 2020

Jennifer C. Lane on Ordinances



In the ordinances, we “put on Christ,” and participate in his life and his atoning sacrifice. Through our ritual action, we embody how Christ was in the world. Through our ritual action, we embody how Christ was in the world. We are all familiar with the explanation, clearly elaborated in Paul’s writings, that in baptism by immersion we symbolically die, are buried, and are resurrected with Christ.

In Galatians 3:27, Paul says, “For as many of you have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” Paul explains how we put on Christ in baptism. When we are “baptized into Jesus Christ [we] were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our immersion is a participation in his death. Then after “we are buried with him by baptism into death,” we also participate in his resurrection, “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” (Romans 6:4).

The ordinance of baptism allows us to ritually put on Christ. His way of being is modelled in the ordinance of baptism. It is a submission to the will of the Father and a separation from the worldliness, the death of the man of sin. The ordinance is not the end but the beginning. Paul tells the saints to live out what they have symbolically done in the ordinance of baptism: “put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). We must go forward and walk in newness of life, putting on Christ in our daily life, just as we did in the ordinance.

Another explanation of how ordinances allow us to embody Christ is found in 2 Nephi 31. Nephi explains how the ordinance of baptism is an embodiment of and participation in Christ’s life because Christ’s own baptism was an embodiment of submission. Christ submitted to immersion and “according to the flesh he [humbled] himself before the Father and [witnessed] unto the Father that he would be obedient unto him in keeping his commandments” (2 Nephi 31:7).

The ordinances are the way in the sense that Christ is the Way. Baptism “showeth unto the children of men the straitness of the path, and the narrowness of the gate, by which they should enter, he having set the example before them” (2 Nephi 31:9). The submission embodied in being immersed in water models an entire life of submission—the life of Christ: “And he said unto the children of men: Follow thou me. Wherefore, my beloved brethren can we follow Jesus save we shall be willing to keep the commandments of the Father?” (2 Nephi 31:10).

Our ritual embodiment of Christ in baptism continues in the ordinances of the temple. President Harold B. Lee commented, “the receiving of the endowment requires the assuming of obligations by covenants which in reality are but an embodiment or an unfolding of the covenants each person should have assumed at baptism” (The Teachings of Harold B. Lee: Eleventh President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996], 574) Through the ordinances, we gain a knowledge of God, Through the ordinances, we ritually embody the kind of obedience and submission that we need to develop in our lives through the process of conversion of conversion and becoming. (Jennifer C. Lane, Finding Christ in the Covenant Path: Ancient Insights for Modern Life [Provo and Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2020], 160-62)