Forgiveness of the Cylon God

I was watching an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series yesterday. In the episode, a group of people find themselves in desperate need of forgiveness. Many of them are guilty of acts that saved their own lives at the expense of others. Their leader, in fact, through an act of self-centered carelessness, allowed the Cylons to discover defense secrets that led to the deaths of billions of people, effectively the entire human race. Now try living with that on your conscience!

This man, whose name is Gaius Baltar, has come to believe in the one true God, the God of the Cylons, and believes he has figured out the formula by which God will grant him forgiveness. It goes like this: "God loves us all. God is perfect, and God only loves that which is perfect. Therefore we are all perfect, just as we are." Baltar says this with conviction, as one receiving a great epiphany, to a round of weepy applause by all present. The actors are all excellent, and they try very hard to give the scene authenticity, but it doesn't work.

Why doesn't it work? Because people who have committed great sins, and people who have committed small sins who are attentive to their spiritual state, know that they are not perfect. "If we say, 'We have no sin,' we are deceiving ourselves, and truth has no place in us." 1 John 1:8. They will not be satisfied with being told that they're already perfect. They crave forgiveness, a fresh start, a chance to start over. And what's more, they want it to come in a tangible act, clear and visible. What they want, in short, is Baptism.

I am surprised about this. I've been versed in the symbolism of Baptism for some time, but it has remained for me a "not what I would have expected" sacrament: one of the many gifts of God that I would not have thought up myself, if I were designing a world. A rite that John the Baptist came up with many thousands of years ago that, inexplicably, captivated the nation of Israel for a brief time, before being adopted by Christ as the main rite of Christian initiation. But now that I've seen an artist's rendition of a God of Redemption without Baptism, it seems to me to be a much more natural and explicable rite; in fact, it seems to be the perfect response to a people suffering with their own sinfulness.

The symbolism of Baptism includes washing away ones sins; everyone knows that. What is probably less well known is that it also involves rebirth. The ancient Semites thought of water as a symbol of the Abyss, the nothingness that precedes existence. "In the beginning ... the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters," Genesis 1:1-2. In pushing the repentant sinner into the water, all the way in as it was done in the early days, he or she is symbolically being pushed back into pre-existence, only to rise from the waters anew, reborn into a new existence. The ultimate fresh start.

The Apostle Paul likened the descent into the water to a descent into the tomb with Christ, and the rising out of the water to being resurrected with Christ into a new life. "For we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life." Romans 6:4. The early Christians referred to Baptism as being "born again."

Thus Baptism gives the sinner exactly what they desire. A repentant sinner has come to a clear-eyed assessment of their own sinfulness, and they do not like what they see. Baptism does not try to sweet talk them out of that assessment. It doesn't tell them that, "If only they could see the big picture, they'd see that their sins are not really sinful." They are in a serious mood, and it treats their sins seriously. It gives them the concreteness of a tangible act, a moment of truth, a metanoia, which Father Nigro, my old Scripture teacher, described as an "I was walking this way, and then I turned, and now I'm walking that way" moment. And it provides the symbolism of death to the old way of life, and rebirth into a new life as a child of the Resurrection, as a child of God.