I prayed a blessing over the waters and Nicole Thomas-Doris brought Theresa to the baptismal tank. Theresa’s family was there, and friends as well, to witness her baptism. Her sister brought forth her 19 month old niece, who dearly loves her aunt. She watched as I submerged Theresa with concern, finger at the side of her mouth. As I submerged Theresa, she started crying. By the time she came up the second and third time, she was crying hard. Laughter dissipated the resultant tension, but the little girl’s response was correct. She had not learned to sentimentalize baptism; she saw the burial, the danger, in having her auntie pushed underwater; she enjoyed her risen to new life, a rising that calmed her. She reminded us that baptism is the participation of the person into the form of Christ.

Von Balthasar speaks of Christ as the Centre of the Form of Revelation in The Glory of the Lord (pp. 463-525). He explicates, “The expression the ‘centre of the form of revelation’ does not refer to a particular section of this form however central which, in order to be read as form, would then essentially need to be filled out by other more peripheral aspects. What the phrase is intended to denote is, rather, the reality which lends the form its total coherence and comprehensibility. . . . Christ . . . is the form because he is the content. This holds absolutely, for he is the only Son of the Father, and whatever he establishes and institutes has its meaning only through him, is dependent only on him and is kept vital only by him. If for a single moment we were to look away from him and attempt to consider and understand the Church as an autonomous form, the Church would not have the slightest plausibility. It would be plausible neither as a religious institution (for its sacraments and the diakonia belonging to them are ‘bearable’ only as modes by which the living Kyrios is present) nor as an historical power for order and culture in the sense of the Action Francaise and of the German Catholic Nazis. On the contrary, seen in this way it loses all credibility, and for this reason the Church Fathers often compared the Church’s light with the light of the moon, borrowed from the sun and showing its relativity most clearly in its phases. The plausibility of Christianity stands and falls with Christ’s, something which has in essence always been acknowledged” (p. 463).

The resurrection of Jesus, of course, witnesses to the plausibility of Christ as the centre of the form of revelation. Von Balthasar notes that “The Gospel presents Christ’s form in such a way that ‘flesh’ and spirit’, Incarnation to the point of suffering and death, and resurrected life are all interrelated down to the smallest details. If the Resurrection is excised, then not only certain things but simply everythning about Jesus’ earthly life becomes incomprehensible. Of if we understand the Risen Lord as merely the ‘Christ of faith’, without an interior identity with the Jesus of history, then once again the whole form becomes incomprehensible. The first, early form is legible only if we see that it is to be wholly ‘used up’ in death and resurrection. But death and resurrection (which constitute a strict ideal unity) are comprehensible only if they are understood as the transformation of this early form by God’s power, and not as the form’s spiritualization and apotheosis” (p. 467).

This is why the church over the centuries has connected baptism with Easter -- united with the form of Christ where it is most luminous -- on Easter. The form of the revelation of God in Jesus becomes fully manifest in the resurrected body of Jesus, without which any other aspect of his life seen in his effect in his followers, becomes utterly unintelligible. Faith opens into reason, so that in seeing the hidden but manifest form of revelation in Jesus, we might see the glory of the Lord.