Pacian of Barcelona, Sermon on Baptism

SAINT PACIAN'S SERMON ON BAPTISM.

I. I desire to lay open how we are born in baptism, and how we are renewed. I shall speak, indeed, in its own words, brethren, lest perhaps you think that I have exulted in style for the brilliance of my sentences; and so that you may be able to understand the mystical matter: and would that I could drive it home; I do not seek glory, for the glory is God's alone. Only the care of you troubles me, and most of all of these competentes, if in some way I may be able to understand the testing of so great a happiness. I shall lay open, then, what heathenism was before, what faith bestows, what baptism grants. And if this has pierced your hearts as I feel it will, you will judge, brethren, that no preaching has yet done more for us. Hear, then, most dear ones, in what death a man is placed before baptism. You surely know that ancient [account], how Adam was appointed to an earthly origin: which condemnation assuredly imposed on him the law of eternal death; and over all

the descendants from him, whom one law held fast, this death held sway over the whole race, from Adam until Moses (Rom. 5:14). Through Moses, however, one people only was chosen, namely the seed of Abraham, if it had been able to keep the commandments of righteousness. Meanwhile we were all held under sin, so as to be the fruit of death: appointed to the food of husks and the keeping of cattle, that is, to unclean works, through the evil angels; under whose dominion it was permitted neither to do nor to know righteousness: for the very state of things compelled us to obey such masters. Attend, [now,] to how we have been set free from these powers and from this death.

II. Adam, after he sinned, as I have related, the Lord then saying, Earth you are, and into earth you shall go (Gen. 3:19), was made over to death. This making-over flowed down into the whole race. For all sinned, nature itself now pressing them, as the Apostle says: Because through one

man sin entered, and through the offence death, and so it came down upon all men, in whom all sinned (Rom. 5:12). Sin, then, held dominion, and by its chains we were dragged like captives to death; to death, that is, everlasting. This sin, however, before the times of the Law was not even perceived, as the Apostle says: For until the Law was laid down, sin was not held to be in the world, that is, it was not seen; at the coming of the Law it revived (Rom. 5:13). For it was laid open so that it might be seen: but in vain, because almost no one kept it. For the Law said: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not covet; yet covetousness remained, with all the vices: so this sin, before the Law, slew man with a hidden sword; under the Law, with [the sword] drawn. What hope, then, for man? Without the Law he perished for this reason, that he could not see sin; and in the Law for this reason, that he ran into the very thing he saw. Who could free him from destruction? Hear the Apostle: Most wretched man, then! Who will free me from the body of this death? The grace, he says, through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 7:24, 25).

III. What is grace? The remission of sin, that is, a gift. For grace is a gift. So Christ, coming and taking up man, was the first to present that very man to God, pure and innocent of the power of sin. Isaiah says: Behold, he says, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son, and you shall call His name Emmanuel. Butter and honey He shall eat, before He knows either to bring forth evil or to choose good (Isa. 14:15). And again of Him: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth (Isa. 43:9). Under this patronage of innocence, as soon as Christ took up the defence of the name in the very flesh of sin, at once that parent of the disobedience of sin, who had once deceived the first men, began to hurry, to seethe, to tremble. For he was to be conquered once the law of sin was dissolved, by which alone he had held man, or could hold him. So he arms himself for spiritual battle against the Immaculate One; and first, with the same artifice by which he had conquered Adam in paradise, he attacks with a show of dignity; and as though concerned for His heavenly power: If Thou art the Son of God, he says, say that these stones become bread (Matt. 4:5): so that, while He blushed, or would not hide that He was the Son of God, He might carry out the tempter's commands. See, still he is not silent, suggesting that if He cast Himself down from on high, He would be caught by the hands of the Angels, whom the Father had commanded to bear Him on their shoulders, lest perhaps He strike His foot against a stone; so that, while the Lord wishes to prove that He is the one concerning Whom the Father had commanded this, He might do what the tempter urges. Crushed at last, the serpent, as though now yielding, promises the very kingdoms of the world which he had snatched from the first man; so that, while he believes he has conquered man's Advocate, [the Lord], on receiving the empire (which he was †defending†), might bend towards the dignity named by the impious one, and so at some point sin. But in all these things the enemy is overcome, and is undone by heavenly power, as the Prophet [says] to the Lord: That Thou mayest †undo†, he says, the enemy and the

avenger, for I shall see the heavens, the work of Thy fingers (Ps. 8:3, 4).

IV. The devil ought to have yielded; yet he does not leave off even now. The scribes and Pharisees and all that crowd of the impious he suborns with his well-known snares and drives on with furies. So they, after the various arts and lying hearts by which they thought to deceive the Lord with a serpent's obsequiousness, when they made no headway, at last attacked Him with open brigandage and the cruellest kind of suffering: so that, either through the indignity of His treatment or through the pain of His punishments, He might either do or say something unjust, and so lose the man whom He bore, and His soul be left in the underworld; whose one law was to hold fast the sinner: For the sting of death is sin (1 Cor. 15:56). Christ, then, stood firm, and did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth (1 Pet. 2:22), as we have said; not even when He was led to be a victim. This was conquering: to be condemned without sin, for the devil had received power over sinners, and he claimed it for himself over the Immaculate One; and so he himself was overcome, decreeing against the Just One what was not permitted him by the law which he had received. Hence the prophet to the Lord: That Thou mayest be justified, he says, in Thy words, and mayest conquer when Thou art judged (Ps. 50:6). And so, as the Apostle says, the powers being led away [in triumph], Christ condemned sin in the flesh, fastening it to the cross, and cancelling the bond of death (Col. 2:14, 15). Hence it is that God did not leave His soul in the underworld, nor give His Holy One to see destruction (Ps. 15:10). Hence it is that, the stings of death being trampled down, on the third day He sprang up again in the flesh, reconciling it to God and restoring it to eternity, sin being conquered and erased.

V. But if He alone conquered, what did He confer on the rest? Hear briefly. The sin of Adam had passed over into the whole race: For by one man, as the Apostle says, sin entered in; and by sin, death: so also it came down upon all men (Rom. 5:12). Therefore the justice of Christ also must pass over into the race: And as he by sin ruined his stock, so Christ by justice gives life to all His race. This the Apostle presses, saying: That as by the disobedience of one many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one many may be made just; and as sin reigned unto death, likewise grace also may reign through justice unto life eternal (ibid. 19, 21).

VI. Someone will say to me: But the sin of Adam deservedly passed over to his descendants, because they were begotten of him; and are we then begotten of Christ, that we can be saved on His account? Do not think carnal things: you will presently see how we are begotten with Christ as parent. In the last times Christ received from Mary a soul, together indeed with flesh: this He came to save, this He did not leave in hell, this He joined to His spirit and made His own. And these are the nuptials of the Lord, joined to one flesh, so that, according to that great

mystery the two might become one flesh, Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:32). From these nuptials the Christian people is born, the Spirit of the Lord coming from above; and, the heavenly seed being at once poured over and mingled with the substance of our souls, we grow in the womb of our mother, and, brought forth from her womb, we are given life in Christ. Whence the Apostle: The first Adam [was made] into a living soul; the last Adam into a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:47). Thus Christ begets in the Church through His priests, as the same Apostle [says]: But in Christ I have begotten you (1 Cor. 4:15). And thus the seed of Christ, that is, the spirit of God, brings forth by the hands of the priest the new man, conceived in the womb of his mother and received at the birth of the font, faith, however, being the bridesmaid. For neither will he be seen to be grafted into the Church who has not believed, nor to be begotten of Christ who has not himself received the spirit. We must believe, therefore, that we can be born. For so Philip says: If you believe, you may (Acts 8:37). Christ must be received, that He may beget, for so John the apostle says: As many as received Him, He gave them power to become sons of God (John 1:12). But these things cannot be fulfilled otherwise than by the sacrament of the laver and of the chrism and of the bishop. For by the laver sins are cleansed; by the chrism the Holy Spirit is poured upon us; and both of these we obtain by the hand and mouth of the bishop: and thus the whole man is reborn and renewed in Christ; that as Christ rose from the dead, so we also may walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4); that is, that, having put away the errors of the old life, the slavery of idols, cruelty, fornication, luxury and the other vices of flesh and blood, we may follow through the Spirit new ways in Christ: faith, modesty, innocence, chastity. And: as we have borne the image of the earthly man, let us bear also [the image] of Him who is from heaven; for the first man was from the earth, earthly; the second from heaven, heavenly (1 Cor. 15:49, 47). Doing this, most beloved, we shall now die no more. Even if we be dissolved in this body, we shall live in Christ, as He Himself says: He who believes in me, although he die, shall live (John 11:25). We are certain, in short, on the testimony of the Lord Himself, that both Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the saints of God live. Indeed of these very ones the Lord says: But all these live; for God is [God] of the living, not of the dead (Luke 20:38). And the Apostle says of himself: For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain; I would wish to be dissolved and to be with Christ (Phil. 1:21). And again: But while we are in this body, we are sojourning away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:6, 7).

VII. This is what we believe, most beloved brothers. For the rest: If in this world [only] we are hoping, we are more miserable than all men (1 Cor. 15:19). The life of the world, as you yourselves see, is either common to us with cattle and wild beasts and birds, or is longer [in them]. And that [life] is proper to man which Christ gave through His Spirit, that is, life everlasting; but [only] if we now sin no more. For as death is acquired by crime [and] avoided by virtue, so life is lost by crimes [and] kept by virtue. The wages, then, of sin is death; the gift of God, life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 6:23). Above all, keep hold of yourselves, little ones: you who were once all Gentiles (as we said above), handed over to the princes and powers of darkness, are now set free through the victory of Jesus Christ our Lord. He it is, He who [redeemed us], forgiving us all sins, as the Apostle says, and blotting out the handwriting of disobedience which was against us; for He also took it out of the way, fastening it to the cross; stripping Himself of the flesh, He led away the powers, triumphing over them freely in Himself (Col. 2:13–15). He loosed those in fetters, and burst our bonds, as David had said: The Lord raises up those who are crushed, the Lord looses those in fetters, the Lord enlightens the blind (Ps. 145:7, 8). And again: Thou hast burst my bonds: to Thee I will sacrifice the sacrifice of praise (Ps. 115:[...], 17). Loosed therefore from our bonds, when through the sacrament of baptism we come together to the standard of the Lord, we renounce the devil and all his angels, whom we served before, that we may no longer serve them, set free by the blood and the name of Christ. But if anyone hereafter, forgetful of himself and unmindful of his redemption, passes over again (Col. 2:18) to the servitude of angels and (Gal. 4:9) to those weak and needy elements of the world, he will be bound with those old fetters and chains, that is, with the bonds of sin; and his last [state] shall become worse than the first (Luke 11:26): because the devil too will bind him the more vehemently, as one conquered as it were in flight; and Christ will no longer be able to suffer for him, because He who rose from the dead dies now no more (Rom. 6:9). Therefore, most beloved, once we are washed, once we are set free, once we are received into the immortal kingdom; once are they blessed whose misdeeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered (Ps. 31:1). Hold fast bravely what you have received, keep it happily, sin no more. Keep yourselves pure and spotless from this [time] unto the day of the Lord. Great and boundless are the rewards appointed for the faithful; which eye has not seen, he says, nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man (1 Cor. 2:9). That you may receive these things, obtain them by labours of justice and spiritual prayers. Amen.