Romans 6:12-23 (NRSV)
12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in
your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13 No longer
present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves
to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your
members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have
no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Should we sin because we are not
under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if
you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one
whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads
to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been
slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to
which you were entrusted, 18 and that you, having been set free from
sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human
terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your
members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now
present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in
regard to righteousness. 21 So what advantage did you then get from
the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22
But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the
advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. 23 For
the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:12-23 has the theme
of the Christian life as putting into effect our baptism. In doing so, Paul
continues to wrestle with the significance of the coming of Christ. He will
raise the question of what freedom is. He would agree with the many thinkers
who suggest that freedom is not simply a matter of the freedom to do whatever
you want. As a political matter, of course, one could make a strong libertarian
case that the best society is the one in which people have the freedom to
pursue happiness as they conceive it. Yet, that is a minor freedom when it
comes to morality, human flourishing, and becoming the person God wants us to
be. Doing what we want can be its form of slavery. We discover true freedom in
learning how we ought to live so that we can reach our fullest potential. This suggests
to Paul the idea that we will serve somebody. N. T. Wright calls this a new
kind of “liberated slavery.” Freedom is coming to a place in our lives where we
want to live in obedience to God. God loves and seeks our true freedom and
happiness. Paul reminds me of the Bob Dylan song
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side,
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair,
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,
yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Paul is also going to suggest that
the transition from serving one master to serving another is not an easy one. The
pattern established by Adam is one we keep repeating. His turn from God and
toward himself leads to death. We need to face our mortality. Those who must do
so often have regrets. It will take courage to live life true to ourselves
rather than focus too much on what others expect of us. Of course, we want to
work hard, but not to the point of obsession. We need the courage to take the
time it takes to identify our feelings and share them. Friends are precious, so
we need to stay in touch with the old and have an open heart for new friends. We
need not be afraid of what makes us genuinely happy.[1] Facing
our mortality before we have to do so will help us move toward what God wants,
which we can broadly say is righteousness and life. I find how Paul offers this
challenge in the passage before us to be enlightening. He has compared Adam,
who represents the pattern of sin and death, with Christ, who represents the
pattern of righteousness and life. He continues to draw out the implication of
this analysis of the human situation to the life of the believer. Paul says to
the baptized that they have identified with Christ in his death and
resurrection; now become the Christian so united with him that you can
become. Manifest in your lives the
lordship of Christ who has justified you and freed you from the power of sin.
He draws a contrast between slavery and freedom, an image drawn from the
Greco-Roman world, in which freedom denoted the privileged condition or social
status of citizens in a city government.
By referring to sin, death, body, and Law, Paul will clarify their
continuing roles as they threaten the lives of believers. For example, sin and
death continue in human life as we do what Adam did and turn away from God as
the source of our lives. Sin is bondage. It shows itself in our self-asserting
rejection of God. The Law comes from God and is therefore good, but it reveals
the sinful state of humanity. His account of sin and death makes it clear that
we bear responsibility for the prison or slavery in which we find ourselves. We
even use the good intent of the Law in such a way that its effect is to
increase the power of sin and death at work in us. At the same time, the Law is
weak, something against which Judaism would argue. For Paul, the Law does not
provide a remedy to the predicament humanity faces. Through his death and
resurrection, Christ offers humanity a new possibility of living with God. Such a new possibility will lead to righteousness
and life. The promised redemption that is the future of humanity finds
anticipatory presence in the baptized as faith and sanctifying grace begin
their work of healing and liberating from sin and death. Fellowship or union
with Christ will mean such liberation and healing. This redemption includes the
body, to the point that the body participates now in resurrection life. This body
is already experiencing the transformation that will come in the final
redemption of creation. We see the already/not yet feature of Christian life in
that the transition
from death to life is incomplete. The historical event of the death and
resurrection of Christ finds its answer in us, who respond in the event of
baptism, faith, justification, and sanctification. In our eschatological
moment, so to speak, we present ourselves to the God who brings us from death
to life, from sin to righteousness. Such a moment in our lives puts us under
the leadership of grace rather than sin. Such grace will lead us to righteousness,
which we find in the “form of teaching” we have received, which today we might
think of as the teaching of the apostles. He is thinking of the basic kerygma
of apostolic teaching. I suspect he is also thinking of the basic virtues and
vices we find in this writings. Christian life in every culture and in every
historical age is not a matter of making it up as we go along. The “form of
teaching” is there, in the Bible. We turn from what we think is right to what
we have learned from the apostles. The process of which Paul writes is sanctification.
Justification and sanctification do not follow each other in temporal sequence.
They occur together in the event of our faith response. However, they address
two separate aspects of Christian life. Justification focuses upon the pardon
of our sin that we received in the death of Christ. We need that pardon every
day. Sanctification focuses upon the separation of the people of God from the
ways of this world that Adam signifies. Baptism consecrates the person of faith
to Christ. Union with Christ in his death and resurrection is the source of our
sanctification. The pressure of the eschatological moment for us keeps placing
this world of sin and death into question. Sanctification is an implication of
belonging to Christ. It suggests the separation of the people of God from this
world.[2] The baptized await the
fullness of resurrection and eternal life. The concept is eschatological in
that God will make all of this reality in the future, but that there is also a
present realization in the life of the believer. The self we once were is the self that
belongs to the old age, the self dominated by sin and exposed to wrath. We can
see here the eschatological tension that exists for the believer. Believers are
still persons under the influence of Adam. The inner logic of the link
between sin and death arises on the presupposition that all life comes from
God. Since sin is turning from God, sinners separate themselves not only from
the commanding will of God, but also from the source of their lives. Death is
not just a penalty that an external authority imposes on them, but lies in the
nature of sin as its consequence. We receive such “wages” due to our choice to
serve sin. In contrast to the wages of sin that are due, making death the
consequence of sin, God graciously bestows eternal life on people who respond
with faith. Paul insists that the gift
of eternal life is something that comes to Christians through the mediating
death and resurrection of Christ Jesus; it is a gift tied up with the work of
Christ.[3] In a sense, the message of
6:12-23 is something like “that was then” when you were slaves of sin, but
“this is now” when you are enslaved to God. To put it another way, Christian
life is a matter of working out of what baptism signifies. Paul wants believers
to look seriously at their baptism. The indicative fact of baptism stands over
against their lives as they work out its implications in the course of their
Christian lives. The new identity of the baptized is an anticipation of the
death that awaits us all, but also finds itself absorbed in the new life found
in Christ. This struggle will not end until the last day.[4]
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