When you are fully immersed in water, you cannot escape it. Open your eyes, there’s water. Try not to feel water on any part of your body when you are fully immersed in it. Open your mouth, and it will be filled with water. Breath in your nose and water will enter your lungs. To be immersed in water is to be unable to escape it.

I had a revelation about “in the name” years ago. Language is important. When you read “in the name”, do you think of it as in the authority of the name? In Greek, that would be εν τὸ ὄνομα/en to onoma. But that’s not what the passage says…

It says εις τὸ ὄνομα/eis to onoma. What does that mean? Literally “in” as in “into” – a motion of penetration.

Let that sink in a moment (pardon the pun)…

The writer of Matthew is saying that Jesus asks those listening to make disciples and baptise them (βαπτίζω/baptidzo ie. to sink or submerge them) into the name of God! Benedict XVI refers to this as an interpenetration of our being with God’s being; “…a unique new existence…we are immersed into Godself.”

Jesus here is telling us that we cannot escape God. There is nowhere we are that God is not. Just like being submerged into water, so too we are submerged into God; and belong to God as fully and as much as God belongs to us.

So may you never fear absence from, or of, God. But with every breath in and every breath out; every time air or water passes across your skin or quenches your thirst, may you be reminded that you are always so close and so immersed into God that the ruach, the pneuma (the breath) of God is within and around you. Always. Amen. 🙏🏽🌻