Baptism, a sign of the passion of Christ

You were brought to the holy source, to divine baptism, as Christ from the cross was brought to the sepulcher.
And everyone was questioned if he believed in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; you professed the salutary faith and you were immersed three times in the water and as many you emerged, and with this ritual you expressed an image and a symbol. You represented the three-day burial of Christ.
Our Savior spent three days and three nights in the bosom of the earth. In the first emergence you symbolized the first day spent by Christ on earth. Diving in the night. In fact, whoever is in the day is in the light, but he who is immersed in the night sees nothing. So you in the dive, almost enveloped by the night, have not seen anything. In the emergence instead you found yourself as in the day.
In the same instant you died and were born and the same salutary wave became for you and sepulcher and mother.
What Solomon said about other things fully suits you: "There is a time to be born and a time to die" (Qo 3, 2), but for you on the contrary the time to die was the time to be born . The one time caused both things, and your birth coincided with death.
O new and unheard of kind of thing! On the level of physical realities we are not dead, neither buried, nor crucified and not even resurrected. However, we have re-presented these events in the sacramental sphere and thus from them salvation really sprang for us.
Christ, on the other hand, was truly crucified and truly buried and is truly risen, even in the physical sphere, and all this has been a gift of grace for us. Thus, in fact, sharing his passion through sacramental representation, we can truly obtain salvation.
O overflowing love for men! Christ received the nails in his innocent feet and hands and endured the pain, and to me, who have endured neither pain nor effort, he freely gives salvation through the communication of his pains.
Nobody thinks that baptism consists only in the remission of sins and in the grace of adoption, as was the baptism of John that conferred only the remission of sins. We, on the other hand, know that baptism, as it can free from sins and obtain the gift of the Holy Spirit, is also a figure and expression of the Passion of Christ. This is why Paul proclaims: «Do you not know that those who were baptized in Christ Jesus were baptized in his death? Through baptism, therefore, we were buried together with him in death "(Rom 6: 3-4a).