Recounting his conversion in Acts
22:16, Paul recalls the words of Ananias to him, just after he had recovered
his sight: “And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins
washed away, calling on his name.” Here baptism is interpreted essentially as a
cleansing rite. We see a similar perspective in Ephesians 5:25-26, where the
text speaks of how Christ “Loved the church and gave himself up for her, in
order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.”
Here preaching (the word) and baptism are closely connected to each other, but
baptism is again viewed as a “washing.” Hebrews 10:22 reflects the same
understanding of baptism as cleansing, exhorting its listeners to “approach
with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean
from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” Here an explicit
connection is made between the outward washing of the body (i.e., baptism) and
the inner cleansing of the heart from an “evil conscience.”
At first glance, it might appear
as if the notion of baptism as cleansing is completely unrelated to baptism as
union with Christ’s death and resurrection. What does dying and rising have to
do with taking a bath and getting clean? Yet as we shall see, these two images
are, in fact, closely related to each other, and must be interpreted in light
of their relationship to each other.
The linkage in Scripture between
death and cleansing is found in the way blood is used in the Bible. In
numerous passages, the sprinkling of blood has a cleansing function. In the
cleansing ritual for lepers in Leviticus 14:14, blood is sprinkled on the
leprous person in order to achieve ritual purity. In the ritual associated with
the Day of Atonement, blood is sprinkled on the altar in order to cleanse it
(Lev. 16:19). The same linkage between blood and cleansing is found in 1 John
1:7: “But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have
fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from
all sin.” Similarly, 1 Peter 1:2 speaks of how Christians “have been chosen and
destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus
Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood.”
In the logic of the Bible, to be
baptized into Christ’s death is also to be sprinkled with Christ’s blood. This
is both why and how baptism signifies cleansing. Baptism does not cleanse us
because the water, in itself, has some spiritual power. Neither does baptism
cleanse because the church’s rites, in themselves, can cleanse. Rather, baptism
cleanses because it points to our union with Christ, whose life-giving death
cleanses us from sin.
Baptism thus presupposes that
human beings are in need of cleansing, that sin has left us in a defiled condition
that must be remedied if we are to live in God’s presence as members of Christ’s
body. (James V. Brownson, The Promise of Baptism: An Introduction to Baptism
in Scripture and the Reformed Tradition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2007], 54-55)
