#behold i make all things new
The Holy Spirit renews us in baptism through His godhead, which He shares with the Father and the Son. Finding us in a state of deformity, the Spirit restores our original beauty and fills us with His grace, leaving no room for anything unworthy of our love. The Spirit frees us from sin and death, and changes us from the earthly men we were, men of dust and ashes, into spiritual men, sharers in the Divine Glory, sons and heirs of God the Father– who bear a likeness to the Son and are His co-heirs and brothers, destined to reign with Him and to share His glory. In place of earth, the Spirit reopens heaven to us and gladly admits us into paradise, giving us even now greater honour than the angels, and by the holy waters of baptism extinguishing the unquenchable fires of hell.
We men are conceived twice: to the human body we owe our first conception, to the divine Spirit, our second. John says: “To all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God. These were born not by human generation, not by the desire of the flesh, not by the will of man, but of God.” All who believed in Christ, he says, received power to become children of God– that is, of the Holy Spirit, and to gain kinship with God. To show that their parent was God the Holy Spirit, he adds these words of Christ: “I give you this solemn warning, that without being born of water and the Spirit, no one can enter the kingdom of God.” [But through that same Spirit, He has given us both the power and means to accomplish this.]
Visibly, through the ministry of priests, the [water of the baptismal] font gives symbolic birth to our visible bodies. Invisibly, through the ministry of angels, the Spirit of God, whom even the mind’s eye cannot see, baptizes into Himself both our souls and bodies, giving them a new birth. Speaking quite literally, and also in harmony with the words of water and the Spirit, John the Baptist says of Christ: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Since we are only vessels of clay, we must first be cleansed in water and then hardened by spiritual fire – for God is a consuming fire. We need the Holy Spirit to perfect and renew us, for spiritual fire can cleanse us, and spiritual water can recast us as in a furnace, and make us into new men.
Saint Didymus of Alexandria
‘If you ask for bread, your heavenly Father will not give you a stone.’ The sages call this a kal va'chomer inference (i.e., קַל וְחמר, “light and weighty”), namely, that if a light condition is true, then a heavier one is certainly true. Jesus used this kind of reasoning all the time: If God cares for the needs of the birds of the air, how much more (kal va'chomer) will He care for your needs? (Matt. 6:26). If God so clothes the grass of the field, how much more (kal va'chomer) will He clothe you (Matt. 6:30)? If your heavenly Father knows the number of hairs on your head, surely He knows the state of your soul. And if God wants us to walk in righteousness, kal va'chomer does He want us to know His love. Only God can give to us the love for Him that He fully knows we so desperately need; only God can deliver us from our “disordered loves” to take hold of what is truly essential. All we can do is ask, and keep on asking- even as we struggle on, despite ourselves- until we begin to understand what we really need.It’s as if we are constantly being asked, “Is this what you want?” and our choices confess the truthof what we believe. Only God does the miracle of real change within the human heart- only God can give life from the dead!
John J. Parsons
