Read: Romans 6:1-11 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
St Paul’s thought is never static. It’s like a corkscrew – he makes opposite-sounding points one after the other, and only after quite a lot of it do you realize that he’s burrowed his way into a very complicated subject in an incredibly rich way.
One of the corkscrew turns in Romans is the way he seems to deal with the Jewish Law. Just when you think you’ve grasped that he thinks the Law was a good thing, he seems to make precisely the opposite point and assert that the Law doesn’t help Jewish Christians that much. And then, just when you think he’s finally concluded that the Law is an ugly concession to misbehaving Jews that the world would have been better off without, he suddenly starts to suggest that the Law is a profoundly beautiful thing.
That’s where Paul has gotten to at the end of chapter 5 and the beginning of chapter 6. At the end of chapter 5, St Paul has proposed that the reason the Law is so beautiful is that it shows how gracious God is. Why? Because God must be unthinkably gracious to put up with people who disobey the Law as much as the Israelites do! So the Law, which demonstrates how badly behaved the Jews have been through history, actually ends up making God look even better. And that means the Law is a good thing after all!
If human misbehaviour makes God look good, and human faithlessness draws God’s gracious faithfulness into sharper relief, then doesn’t that mean sin is actually (perversely) something we should continue to do? Because it brings glory to God? Not for a second, says Paul! (That’s how he starts chapter 6.)
His reasoning is pretty straightforward, but, as usual, it’s incredibly important. First, he says: Jesus died, and Jesus rose again. What did Jesus kill off in his own death? The problem of sin. What did he bring to life when he rose again? Righteousness in God’s sight. We who follow him have, in our baptism, similarly ‘killed off’ our old lives of sin by drowning them in the water. And, in being united to Jesus’ resurrection by faith, we have started new sin-free lives that imitate his.
That’s what happened at our baptisms – whether we were christened as infants or came to faith in Christ later in life. We died to our old selves – our sin – and rose to new life in the righteousness of Christ. This Lent, let us hold that challenge before us. We sin no more because Christ rose again from the dead and has put sin to death. For us to continue sinning is to pretend to all the world that Christ never rose from the tomb.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.