Last month I wrote about wells, and about tapping "the water of eternal life". I deliberately made only a passing reference to the significance of baptism - one of the ways water plays an essential part in our Christian life.
John's Gospel records Jesus' words to Nicodemus: "No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit." Nicodemus asks: "How can these things be?" And Jesus' reply - or lack of it! - makes it clear that this only makes sense to those who believe, who are prepared to study 'heavenly things.' Elsewhere, the Gospel makes it clear that this watery birth refers to baptism (though we should always bear in mind that we were all once surrounded by water before we were born), and that it is those "who believe and are baptized" (Mark 16:16) who will be saved.
The picture at the head of this article is as misleading as last month's picture of a well. For those who use computers, a font (the British spelling, fount, has all but disappeared) is a group of letters with common characteristics, abcde, abcde or abcde. In church, though, a font (with only the one spelling, and very distantly related) conjures up the picture of a stone basin on a plinth, probably with a wooden cover and a jug beside it.
That is indeed what a font often looks like. It is on a plinth, because for many centuries, only babies (who get carried at arm height) have been baptized. For similar reasons, it is not very big. It has a wooden cover because, if it is used to contain water, the cover keeps the flies, the spiders and the dust out. And the jug is useful for pouring the water over the babies in a mess-free sort of way.
The word font comes from a Latin word meaning a spring, and it is good to remember that in the earliest days of the church, springs and rivers were the commonest source of the water used in baptism. But fonts, and baptism itself, go back to before the days of Jesus, as a moment's thought about John the Baptist will make clear.
The Jewish Law prescribed several occasions when a good Jew needed to wash away some uncleanness, as well as in preparation for the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), and, for converts, for reception into the Jewish community. This cleansing took place in a ritual bath, a miqwah, which, in later Jewish practice, had to be at, or fed from, a spring. In Greek, this cleansing was called baptisma, dipping - a word that was also used when wool was dyed.
John the Baptist took this one stage further, offering a baptism aimed not just at ritual purity, but at confession of sin and forgiveness. When Jesus called his disciples to baptize, "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit", the idea was not only cleansing and forgiveness (for the candidates knew they had been cleansed and forgiven by Jesus' redeeming death), not only absorbing a character (as a cloth absorbs dye) and "becoming Christ's" by being baptized in his name, but sharing in their Saviour's death as the water (in theory at least) submerged them, and in his resurrection (Colossians 2:12).
For water is not only a source of life. It is a source of danger too. "The deep" is a threatening place, almost animate at times, only controlled by God's authority, an authority which Jesus too had over the storm on the lake. Being swept into the deep and drowning is an image that recurs often in the Psalms (18:16, 32:6, 69:2 (and Lamentations 3:54 as well)). Dipping baptismal candidates in the font (the norm, according to the Book of Common Prayer) is a reminder that they come out not only clean, not only exposed to "the water of life", not only soaked in God's threefold being, but safe in the hands of a God who has saved them - and who has raised them and us with Christ to new life. True safety indeed!
HD