The wages of sin is death, but the free gift
of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.
Holy Trinity 2 November 2003 AJM
Introduction
When
I was 3 years old my cousin asked me to be her bridesmaid. Well, she asked my
parents, to be quite precise. They agreed, so on the
due day I set off by train with my father from
But
have you ever thought why? Well, because we are Christians. But
why the cross? Lots of things remind us of Christ, after all. Some
people like to wear doves. Others wear little medallions. So
why the cross? Why is it Christ’s death that we want to remember? Would
you, for example, wear a tiny electric chair round your neck? Would you suspend
a gold-plated hangman’s noose on the wall? Would you have a picture of a firing
squad as the church logo? Some people like to sign themselves with the sign of
the cross. Would you make the sign of a guillotine, say, as you prayed, like
this perhaps? The cross is a symbol of torture, a gruesome form of execution. Why
on earth did my cousin think that as a three year old, sweet as I was, I wanted
one of these round my neck?
Well,
that’s what this passage is about. The meaning of life, said the philosopher
Kafka, is that it stops. Or as Paul puts it to the Romans, the wages of sin is
death. The solution to both problems, says Paul, is to be found in the death of
Christ on the cross. Well, at first sight that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it. It sounds as if Jesus subscribed to the idea
that if you can’t beat them, you’d better join them. But perhaps there’s more
to it than that – or all these people wouldn’t keep giving me crosses.
The problem of sin
Last
week we looked at chapter 5, and Paul’s explanation that the whole human race
is affected by sin. So let’s take a step back and remind ourselves what exactly
this sin is. It’s not a word our world uses much, is it, not in the sense Paul
intends it to be used in, anyway. Sin has a kind of naughty-but-nice image.
Like those rather tasty Magnum icecreams, named after the 7 deadly sins. When I
was first trying to get my mind round all this life and death stuff, someone
explained to me that to become a Christian I needed to repent of my sins. What
were my sins? The things I needed to repent of. What was repentance? Dealing with my sins. I got rather lost in a tangle of
religious jargon. Like when Edward talks to me about bike components. I listen
hard, but I’m never very sure that I’m any the wiser at the end of it.
What
then is sin? Well, we heard in chapter 5 that sin is something we all share,
and the whole human race has always shared since the time of Adam. This is how
the New York Times summarised the situation in an edition of 1946:
God’s plan
made a hopeful beginning
But man
spoiled his chances by sinning
We trust that
the story
Will end in
God’s glory
But at
present the other side’s winning.
And
the other side always will win. Sin, said Paul in chapter 5, is a condition.
It’s like AIDS, sexually transmitted from parent to unborn child. And if it’s
an inherited condition, it can’t be to do with magnum ice creams after all. In
fact, it can’t be to do with specific things I do at all, can it, however bad
they are. I may do sinful things, but those things are just the symptoms of my
disease, they aren’t the disease itself.
What
then is the disease? Well, maybe the word sin in English doesn’t explain that
to us. It certainly didn’t explain it to me. Let’s look at the Greek word Paul
uses. There are 5 words for sin in the New Testament, but Paul uses just one of
them in this chapter. The word he uses is hamartia.
It means, as Rodney pointed out when we looked at chapter 3, the missing of
a target. There are other ways of thinking about it, but that’s the one Paul
picks here. However hard we try to fire our arrow, we will always miss the
target.
What’s
the target? The target that we miss is God. Chapter 3.23: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Sin is all the
ways we aren’t like God, although we want to be. It’s all our imperfections,
our cockups, our failures; our fears, the things we dislike about ourselves,
the ways we hurt others. It’s everything which keeps us from God. The theologian Tillich explained sin by saying we can best
understand it by thinking about separation. We’ve all experienced separation.
Separation from other people, separation from the person we’d like to be,
separation from God who is out there somewhere and seems to be always out of
reach. The consequences of separation are dire. Separate a child from its
mother and it doesn’t behave very well. Separate us
from God and we don’t either. That’s sin.
So
let’s sum it up. Here’s a definition of sin:
It’s
not an action, or a series of actions. It’s much more serious than that. It’s a
condition, and the condition is one of alienation from God. And as God is the
source of life, that means we are alienated from life. It means we are subject
to death and decay. The wages of sin is death. When your arrow misses the target,
it falls to the ground. And so, one day, will you.
Human solutions to the problem of sin
Well, that’s all a bit depressing, isn’t it. Our arrows are falling short, and soon we will be out of
the competition altogether. What can we do about it? Paul is going to talk
about that a lot in the next couple of chapters. But he makes a start here.
There are two commonly tried solutions.
1. The LAW approach
The first solution we can call the Law
approach. God’s temporary solution to the problem of sin was to give Moses a
law which the people were to try and live by. This didn’t tackle the condition,
the alienation from God that everyone was suffering from, but it did limit the
symptoms, the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour that result from that
alienation. And so we got the 10 commandments – they’re written up here in the
chancel. To make it easier to apply them, the rabbis had expanded these
commandments into a legal system which covered all aspects of human behaviour –
and they’d come up with 248 commands, 365 prohibitions and 1521 amendments. Paul
says the problem with the law is that it actually makes the situation worse –
chapter 5 verse 20. It makes it worse because it just serves to highlight the
problem. Bit like the speed cameras they are putting up everywhere – I got a
fine for doing 47mph on a deserted main road at 7 in the morning, so now I’ve
broken the law. Without the camera, I wouldn’t even have known about it.
There’s a temporary solution:
But the problem remains. Verse 12, do not let sin reign in you, Paul says. I do not come to abolish the law, Jesus said.
Do we live under the law? Well, we aren’t measuring ourselves against 248
commands, 365 prohibitions and 1521 amendments, are we.
But let’s ask ourselves some questions. Does this phrase strike a chord?
Or this one?
Or this one?
Or even worse, this one?
Or this?
Or this?
Because all those thoughts represent attempts
either to force ourselves to live by the rules, or to force other people to
live by the rules. It’s not the rules that are the problem, it’s us. We, and
everyone else, will fail.
2. The GRACE approach
I could talk for a long time about the way we
make ourselves miserable trying to keep the rules. When I first became a
Christian I spent years doing this, striving to be everything I thought I
should be, and wondering why I wasn’t full of the freedom and joy being a
Christian was supposed to bring. The first Christians in
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless
by not committing them?
These people felt that as all their sins
were forgiven, it really didn’t matter what they did. Paul articulates their
position in verse 1 and again in verse 15. Shall
we go on sinning, so that grace may increase? Shall we sin because we are not
under law but under grace? And each time he makes the answer unequivocally clear:
‘By no means!’. Jesus did not die so that we can be
let off our sins. He died so that we can be freed from them. They don’t do us
any good anyway, as Paul points out in verse 21: what benefit did you reap from the things you are now ashamed of?
And so this whole issue is one of
perplexity. On the one hand, we are no longer bound by the law, and we are set
free from the restrictive practices of rule-bound living. But on the other,
being a Christian clearly cannot be a licence for pleasing oneself; Christian
freedom is freedom from sin and death, not freedom to do as you please, and
Paul here is clearly indicating that some kinds of behaviour are appropriate
for the Christian, others not. There must be another way. And that is what Paul
wants to sketch out in the body of this chapter.
God’s solution to the
problem of sin
What then is the solution
to the problem of our disease of sin? It’s the cross. This is how Paul will sum
it up at the end: the wages of sin is
death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. To help us
understand how it works, he’s going to use the picture of baptism. This is what
he says, verses 3-4: don’t you know that
all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We
were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just
as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may
live a new life.
So Paul seems to be saying
that the solution to the problem of sin and death lies firstly in the death of
Jesus, and secondly in the fact that when we are baptised, we die with him.
That means that just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so are we,
symbolically, when we undergo immersion in the waters of baptism. We should
die, but instead we live.
Now it’s possible to
misunderstand this. Two misunderstandings in particular are possible.
1. Baptism frees us from subjection to sin
The first was that made by
the early Christians, perhaps by some of these self-same Romans, because after
all it’s not really very easy to understand how it’s supposed to work in
practice. Many people assumed that once you were baptised, that meant you were
free from sin in the simplest way possible – that is, that you were no longer
affected by it at all. Not just the symptoms of the disease, but the cause
itself, was dealt with. You were completely cured. It was no longer a problem.
Many of the early Christians embraced this
idea and set off to live happy sin-free lives, believing that baptism would
mark a transition point between the old life and the new. But unfortunately
they found it was not so. This caused very great difficulties in the first and
second centuries. Those who had been baptised found that they were still
sinning. People began to put baptism off until the last possible minute, often
calling for the priest on their deathbed so that they didn’t invalidate it by
sinning afterwards. Others reverted to the ‘try harder’ option; hermits
retreated to the desert to do battle with their sinful desires alone, and monasteries
imposed Rules to minimise the recurrence of sin in the lives of monks. Monks
were thought to stand a better chance of getting into heaven than ordinary
people as a result. Whole works were written on how to deal with sin after
baptism, and over the centuries an enormous great edifice of confession and
penance was built up. Manuals were written for the guidance of priests,
detailing scores of possible sins and advising on appropriate penitential
measures. And gradually the emphasis shifted, and eventuallly the message that
I received was born: that the Christian life is one of repeated failure for
which repeated apology is necessary – the law approach all over again.
2. Baptism frees us from the consequences of
sin
And then there was a second
error. To many it was painfully obvious that even after baptism they still
found themselves suffering from sin. Their struggles and desires remained
unchanged. And so a second doctrine grew up. Baptism doesn’t free you from sin,
but it does free you from the consequence of sin. Baptism was a kind of
passport to heaven. But just as the idea that baptism frees us from subjection
to sin really ends up taking us back to trying harder, so the idea that it is a
kind of passport which once you’ve got it will see you through takes us back to
the idea that you might as well keep sinning and rely on grace. It reduces the
death of Jesus on the cross to a kind of formula. Common sense shows this can’t
be right:
So what exactly did Paul
mean? Well, he will explain it fully and much more practically when we get to
chapter 8. Here it’s all very abstract. Essentially there are two things to
grasp. The first he explains in verses 1-14.
Dealing with
death
Jesus died and rose again.
Baptism is a picture of that for us. Here you have to remember that baptism was
done by full immersion in a river. You’d have walked into the water perhaps up
to waist height, and then they’d have dunked you under the surface. It was a
symbolic acting out of your death and resurrection. The symbolism of baptism is
not cleansing, as we often assume, but dying. You aren’t washed in the waters
as they close over your head, you’re drowned in them. Then you rise again. You die,
and then you receive new life. And you do that because you are joining yourself
to Christ who has already done it on your behalf. You are filling in the
application form, and getting it stamped. One day it will happen to you in
actual fact: your body will die, but your spirit will live on. From the moment
of your baptism into Christ, your body has died only symbolically. That much is
obvious, because you are still walking around in it. But your spirit has
received new life not just symbolically but in a real transaction. You are now
alive in a new way: spiritually alive. Like Christ himself, you will never die
again – verse 9. That’s why you wear that little cross round your neck. It
represents the fact that Christ’s death is also yours.
Dealing with
sin
So far, so good. That deals
with death. But what about sin? This is where the real confusion lies, and this
is the subject of the second half of the chapter, verses 15-23. The key word is
another rather technical word, and it’s in verse 19. It’s sanctification. Sanctification means ‘making holy’. ‘Holy’ means
‘separate’. In other words, sanctification is about removing the alienation
between you and God by transporting you to where he is. It’s a gradual process,
and it involves you becoming like him. The separation ends in theory when you
turn to Christ. But it ends in practice more gradually, as you grow to become
like Christ. So in legal terms you are freed from sin, or justified as the word
in verse 7 is in the Greek, as soon as you turn to Christ. But in practical
terms you are freed from sin gradually and daily, as you determine to submit
your mind, desires and feelings to God.
Paul explains this not just
here but in other letters too, and he puts it in different ways on different
occasions. To the Corinthians he talked about being made new, a new creation.
To the Colossians he talked about taking off the old nature and putting on the
new, like taking off an old jacket and putting on a new one. This too comes
from the early practice of baptism, because when you were baptised you would go
under the water wearing old clothes, and put new ones on when you came out.
So Paul is saying that the Christian is not
a person who abandons those rules and lives according to these rules, or who
moves from living according to no rules at all to living according to a new set
of Christian ones, or who changes from a rule-bound existence to a rule-free
existence. It isn’t about rules at all. The Christian is a person who changes
orientation, a person who is learning to listen not to their old compulsions
but to the Spirit of God himself, for the power which kept them apart is now
gone. If you want it in human terms, says Paul, look at it like this: you used
to be slaves of sin, now you are slaves of righteousness. It’s like a tug of
war, verse 19. you used to get pulled one way, towards
sin and death; but now you can allow yourself to be pulled the other way,
towards freedom and life. You have changed your orientation. Which, after all,
is what the word repent actually means: it means ‘think again’.
death
life
So. You are a
Christian. You have been baptised into Christ. You have died and been raised
again. You have put on a new set of clothes. You are a new creation. What does
that mean? Well, for the moment you are still here, in the body which
symbolically died but in which actually you still live. It’s still subject to
the same temptations and struggles as ever it was. But, in that body you have a
renewed spirit. You are in touch with God. You have a new power within you, the
power of life itself. So whereas before you gave in to the forces of sin, now
you have the power to resist them. You’re still in a tug of war, but whereas
you used to lose it, now you can win it. How, you want to know? Well, you’ll
have to wait till the week after next to find that out. Unless
of course, you want to read chapter 8 for yourselves. Meanwhile, keep
wearing the cross.
The
wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus.