You were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.  If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

 

 

The providence of our God and Saviour in regard to man consists of his recall from the fall and his return to close communion with God from the estrangement caused by his disobedience. This was the purpose of Christ’s dwell­ing in the flesh, the pattern of his life described in the Gospels, his sufferings, the Cross, the burial, the resurrec­tion; so that man could be saved, and could recover, through imitating Christ, the adoption of former times.

So, for perfection of life it is necessary not only to imitate Christ, in the examples of gentleness, and humility, and patience which he gave us in his life, but also to imitate him in his death, as Paul the imitator of Christ,­ says: Becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

How then do we become like him in his death? By having been buried with him through baptism. But how does this burial take place? What benefit has this imita­tion? First of all one must break with one’s life of the past. This is impossible, unless one is born again, as the Lord said. For regeneration, as is evident from the word itself is the beginning of a second life. Consequently, before beginning this second life, we must bring the first to an end. As in the race called the double course (where the competitors must run to the turning point and back to the start again) a halt, a brief respite separates the outward run and the return, so also for a change of life it seemed necessary that death intervene between the two lives, to make an end of all that went before and a beginning of all that follows.

How do we accomplish the descent into hell? By imitating through baptism the burial of Christ. For the bodies of the baptized are buried as it were in the water. Baptism then indicates symbolically the laying aside of the works of the flesh, as the Apostle says: You were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism. Baptism, as it were, cleanses the soul of the pollution which comes from the mind set on the flesh, as it is written, You will wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Consequently, we know only one baptism which saves, since there is one death on behalf of the world and one resurrection from the dead, and baptism is the figure of these.