The Dominical Sacraments
Holy Baptism & Holy Communion
There is a question lurking beneath the surface of every time the sacraments are celebrated, one that most congregants may never have fully articulated: Why these things? Why bread and wine? Why water? What exactly is supposed to be happening when someone is baptized at the baptismal font or when someone tastes the wafer on their tongue? Are these rituals just old traditions we follow out of habit, or is something genuinely happening?
The Anglican catechism (1662) provides a seemingly simple answer. It states that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Something external occurs — water is poured, bread is broken, wine is poured out — but the real action is internal, not just in a subjective or emotional sense, but in the sense that what God is actually doing happens inside the person receiving the sacrament. The outward sign is not just decoration; it is the designated means through which grace is transmitted. And what God chooses to work through reveals something about his relationship with the world he created.
Why Physical Things?
God could have redeemed the world in any number of ways. Scripture makes clear that no external necessity limited God’s plan of salvation. The way he chose to redeem humanity reveals something about his character. The story of redemption begins not at Bethlehem but at creation itself — and the entire story of the Old Testament, from calling Abraham to the exodus to the Davidic covenant, shows God’s redemptive plans unfolding through tangible, historical, creaturely means. It seems that God has always preferred to work through his creation, especially humans, rather than outside of it. When the Word became flesh, it was not a break from the redemptive pattern, but its culmination — the Word through whom everything was created became one of those created things.
This truth highlights a consistent aspect of God’s character and his relationship with the material world. God does not despise creation. He does not view matter as an obstacle to grace or a prison for the soul (that’s Plato, not the Bible). From the beginning, when he set out to carry out his plans, he worked through creation to accomplish them, and the sacraments continue that logic. Bread, wine, and water are not random props. They are the chosen instruments through which God communicates his grace to his people — because God has always preferred to work through the world he made rather than apart from it.
The sacraments also implicitly reject a theology that sees salvation as escaping the physical. Christianity is not Gnosticism. The hope of the gospel is not that the soul will one day be freed from the body and drift off to some non-physical realm. The hope is resurrection—bodily resurrection, in a new creation that God will remake and fill with his presence. The bread and wine on the altar stand as a protest against any spirituality that wants to leave creation behind. Creation can indeed be filled with God’s glory like waters cover the sea. The Eucharist proclaims this every week.
Baptism
Dying and Rising with Christ
The catechism identifies two sacraments that Christ himself ordained and that every Christian is called to receive: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are sometimes called the dominical sacraments, from the Latin Dominus (“Lord”), because Christ himself instituted them and they carry his explicit mandate. The Anglican tradition, following Article XXV of the Thirty-Nine Articles, differentiates these two from the five “commonly called sacraments” (confirmation, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and unction), which are not to be considered dominical sacraments because they lack a visible sign ordained by Christ in the same manner as baptism and communion.
The outward sign in baptism is water — specifically, a person being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The inward and spiritual grace is death to sin and rebirth to new righteousness.
Paul explains this in Romans 6. He starts with an unusual question: if grace increases wherever sin increases, then why not keep sinning to make grace grow even more? Paul’s clear answer is “By no means!” (μὴ γένοιτο, mē genoito), a strong refusal typical of the diatribal style found in both the Septuagint and Stoic rhetoric. Then he asks a powerful follow-up question that gets to the core of baptismal theology: “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom 6:2).
The question assumes a fact that Paul’s readers might not have consciously recognized: they have already died, not metaphorically but theologically. When a person is baptized into Christ Jesus, Paul argues, they are baptized into his death. They are buried with him. And because Christ was raised from the dead, they too have been raised to walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3–4). Baptism unites us to Christ in such a real way that his death becomes our death and his life becomes our life — it is not just a mere act of obedience but a participation in the dying and rising of Christ himself.
Colossians 3 presses the same logic further:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3:1).
Notice the conditional: if you have been raised with Christ.
Paul is not just urging his readers to try harder. He is reminding them of something already true about them: their true life is hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3). When Christ appears, their true selves will also appear with him in glory. The commands of the Christian life — “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Col 3:5) — are based on a baptismal fact: you have already died.
This truth cannot be overstated: who you truly are is who you are in Christ.
The starting point of Christian sanctification isn’t moral striving but baptismal identity. Who you are is defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Every act of repentance and each pursuit of holiness isn’t about earning something you don’t yet have, but about moving toward the person you already are in Christ.
Water and the Story of Israel
This baptismal identification — being sacramentally united to Christ so that his life, death, and resurrection become your life, death, and resurrection — explains why Paul says there is only one baptism (Eph 4:5). That one baptism is the baptism of Christ. Every individual baptism is a participation in that one baptism, just as every celebration of the Eucharist commemorates and proclaims the one sacrifice of Christ. When we view his baptism through the lens of Israel’s story, we can begin to understand why baptism carries such significance.
Throughout Israel’s history, water marks the boundary between chaos and safety, between death and life. At creation, the waters are separated so humanity can live on dry land (Gen 1:6–9). At the Red Sea, God parts the waters, and his people walk through on dry ground (Exod 14). At the Jordan River, the waters form a heap, and Israel crosses into the promised land on dry land (Josh 3:13–16). Each of these instances follows the same pattern: God controls the threatening waters and creates a path for his people to pass safely.
Then, Jesus’s baptism breaks the pattern. John the Baptist stands in the wilderness, calling the people back to the Jordan and urging them to pass through the waters again. But this time, the waters don’t part. When Jesus is baptized, he symbolically shows that this time, salvation will be different. He will go into the water, let the waters close over him and do their worst, and then he will come back out alive.
Every baptism is a reenactment of that moment. Baptism does not save by simply getting you over the water — it saves by taking you through it, through death and into resurrection. The waters of chaos become the waters of new creation. When Paul says believers have been “baptized into his death” (Rom 6:3), he means that what Jesus enacted at the Jordan and accomplished at Calvary now defines your life too. You are someone who can enter the water and let it do its worst because you believe in a God who raises the dead.
Infant Baptism
The practice of infant baptism makes more obvious sense within a covenantal framework than within the framework of modern Western individualism. In Acts, when a household is converted, the entire household is baptized — without reported questioning of each member’s personal faith. In Judaism, a male child born into the covenant was circumcised on the eighth day; no one asked him whether he consented to membership in the family of Abraham. The sign was given to him because he had been born into a covenant people. Baptism functions similarly as the mark of belonging to the new covenant people of God. The promises made over an infant at baptism are taken up by that child when they reach maturity, which is precisely the theological purpose of confirmation.
Infant baptism confirms two key truths. (1) Baptism is the entry point for the visible people of God, and we raise our children as members of this community, so they should enter through that same gateway. (2) Infant baptism is an act of hope and faith. We believe it is a gift from God to be born into a Christian household, and we raise our children as people of God, in whom God is already at work and active. However, this does not lessen the importance of their reaching a mature expression of faith on their own and expressing that faith publicly through Confirmation.
The Lord’s Supper: Remembering and Receiving
The catechism asks why the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was established and answers in two parts: that we might remember the sacrificial death of Christ and receive the benefits of that sacrifice. These two actions — remembering and receiving — are inseparable. The Eucharist is not just a memorial, nor is it only a source of nourishment. It is both at the same time.
The outward visible sign is bread and wine. The inward spiritual grace is the body and blood of Christ.
The question of how these two things relate has caused centuries of religious debate. Both the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions confirm that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist — the disagreement isn’t about that presence itself but about how to explain it metaphysically. The Roman Catholic explanation, based on Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident, is transubstantiation: the accidents (the sensory qualities that make bread taste, smell, and feel like bread) stay the same, but the substance — what the thing essentially is — becomes the body and blood of Christ during the words of consecration. In Aristotelian terms, substance is not a hidden core inside the object; it is the very being of the thing, what makes it what it is. Transubstantiation asserts that this essential being is completely replaced, while the sensory properties stay the same.
The Anglican tradition affirms the real presence but chooses not to impose a specific metaphysical explanation on its followers. The bread remains bread, and the wine remains wine. The physical, outward, visible sign stays itself. However, the grace conveyed through that sign is the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, truly received by the faithful. Anglicanism gently emphasizes the reality while remaining flexible about the mechanism, which is an intentional theological stance, not a weakness.
The catechism explains this carefully: the body and blood are “truly taken and received by the faithful.” This wording does not suggest that what is received depends only on the recipient’s subjective state, as if an unbeliever could not be in some way touching something holy. It means that the benefit of the sacrament—the communion with Christ it offers—is received by those who come in faith.
This double reality in the Eucharist reflects the broader double reality of creation that the sacraments affirm. Bread is made from crushed wheat. Wine is made from crushed grapes. They are, by their very nature, things that have been broken to give life. They serve as fitting symbols for a gospel of broken bread and poured-out blood, representing the body of a Lord who was himself broken for the life of the world. When the catechism states that our spirits are “strengthened and refreshed” by the body and blood of Christ just as our bodies are strengthened by bread and wine, it emphasizes the wholeness of salvation—that it encompasses the entire person, body and spirit because the God who saves is the Creator of both.
The logic of the Eucharist is also the logic of Passover, and Jesus himself draws the connection. Mark is clear that the meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the night he was betrayed was Passover (Mark 14:12–16). Judgment had come upon Egypt, and the only protection was the blood of a lamb applied to the doorframe — judgment is coming on the world, and the only protection is the blood of Christ. When Jesus takes the cup and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24), he is presenting himself as the Passover lamb — the one whose blood marks out a people for deliverance. What the Passover lamb achieved in type, Christ accomplishes in reality. And in John 6:54, Jesus makes the resurrection aspect clear: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” The Eucharist is participated in continually — the meal of the redeemed people, eaten in hope of the resurrection that is still to come.
The Sacraments and the Shape of Christian Life
There is a passage near the end of what is sometimes called the “Way Section” of Mark’s Gospel — chapters 8–10, where Jesus is traveling toward Jerusalem, repeatedly announcing his upcoming death and resurrection, while his disciples continually fail to understand him. In Mark 10:33–34, he makes the announcement for the third time, this time in its most detailed form. He will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes. He will be condemned to death. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. He will be mocked, spit upon, flogged, and killed. After three days, he will rise.
The disciples’ response is James and John asking for the seats of honor at his right and left when he comes into his glory (Mark 10:37).
Jesus’s reply embodies the core theology of the sacraments. He asks whether they can “drink the cup that I drink” or be “baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized” (Mark 10:38). Both images — the cup and the baptism — symbolize his death. The cup recalls the Upper Room and Gethsemane. The baptism echoes the Jordan, where Jesus entered the waters of death and emerged alive. This passage spans the entire gospel, from the Jordan to the Upper Room to the Garden, and declares: this is what I mean by glory.
When the ten other disciples hear James and John’s request, they become indignant—presumably because they wanted those seats for themselves. Jesus gathers them all and upsets the entire political theology of the ancient world.
“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you” (Mark 10:42–43).
In the kingdom of God, greatness is measured by service, and the first place belongs to the slave of all.
He grounds this not in moral aspiration but in his own mission:
“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Daniel 7 is important here, and what Jesus does with that text is exegetically stunning. In Daniel 7:13–14, the “one like a Son of Man” comes before the Ancient of Days and receives dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.” The Son of Man, in Daniel’s vision, comes to be served. Jesus says the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. Jesus isn’t misquoting Daniel 7. He’s reading it through the lens of Isaiah 53.
The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 “poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors,” bearing the sin of many and making intercession for transgressors (Isa 53:12). The ransom saying of Mark 10:45 — “to give his life as a ransom for many” — is filled with that imagery. Jesus is linking the Son of Man with the Suffering Servant: the figure who gains universal dominion in Daniel 7 is the same figure who attains it through vicarious suffering in Isaiah 53. The path to the throne goes through the cross. This interpretation isn’t a revision of Daniel’s vision but its fulfillment. The Son of Man and the Suffering Servant are indeed the same person.
James and John want to sit at his right and left when he comes into his power. When he does come into his power — when he is lifted up on the cross — there are two men at his right and left. They are criminals (Mark 15:27). The one who is “numbered with the transgressors” (Isa 53:12) is enthroned between two of them.
The sacraments represent the church’s ongoing participation in this process. The baptismal font and the Eucharistic table jointly define what it means to be truly Christian. To be baptized is to enter the waters of death and emerge on the other side, to die with Christ and be raised with him. To receive communion is to take into yourself the body and blood of the one who was raised from the dead as a pledge of your own future resurrection. Together, the sacraments reveal who you are and what you are called to live out.
You are called to give your life for the sake of others — to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus. This call is certainly demanding, but it is not irrational. It is rooted in the most fundamental claim of the gospel: that God raises the dead. There is nothing this world can take from you that God cannot restore in the world to come. The empire can take your life, but the grave is not the final word. The one who gave his life away in the most literal sense was raised by the Father, seated at the right hand of God, and is now at work through his Spirit and his sacraments—uniting his people to his death and resurrection, gradually transforming them into the likeness of the one who came not to be served but to serve.
The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation for all of this making sense — and the sacraments are the way his followers stay connected to that reality until he brings it to completion.