I don’t know about you, but I experience a bit of whiplash when reading Romans, especially chapters 5-6. Paul is doing such a masterful job of defining for us reality as it really is. Reality according to Romans 5-6 is this: God is perfectly at peace with us and perfectly reconciled to us. Grace has defeated (humiliated!) sin and death. Baptism has immersed us into the death and new life of Jesus. What it means for us to be human is fundamentally different than it was before we were baptized into Christ. That’s real. All of it. But the world around us has a way of making us forget this, insisting that reality is business as usual, convincing us that there is nothing new about us, that we still belong to all the old, self-serving, divisive, consumeristic ways of being human. And that’s when Paul suddenly pulls us back into what is real. You are at peace, church. You are reconciled. You are new. Romans will yank us back to reality as it really is as many times as it needs to. Hence, the whiplash.
The old self was crucified with Christ, Paul tells us (Romans 6:6). The old self, the false self, the “me” as which we typically think of ourselves, is not even a thing that exists anymore. It got nailed to the cross with Jesus. And Paul goes on. The old self was crucified so that “the body of sin would be destroyed, that we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” And with the word, “enslaved,” we see our baptized situation for what it is. What is the quintessential Bible story about slaves? The Exodus. That’s why Jesus chose Passover (the Exodus-centric festival) as the time he would give himself to the cross, because he is the new and final Passover lamb by which the people of God are freed from that which enslaves. And for Paul, the vocabulary of slavery is his not-so-subtle hint that we are experiencing a new, baptized freedom from sin and death.
When we talk about sin, we’re not just talking about what mistakes we’ve made and what rules we’ve broken. We’re talking about what is trying to exercise the greatest authority over our minds and feelings and actions. We’re talking about what desire (6:12), what self-serving point of view wants to catch us in its gravity and not let us go. Paul speaks of sin in Romans as if it is its own proper character in the story, like we should be capitalizing the S in Sin. According to Romans, Sin has a will and a plan. Sin does not want to be a nuisance. It does not simply want to trip us up. Sin wants to enslave us, to solely be in charge in the cosmos, to rule over us so viciously that we belong to nothing else, especially God.
The death and resurrection of Jesus was an outpouring of divine love, but that’s not all we can say about it. The death and resurrection of Jesus was the ultimate act of forgiving our sins, but that’s not all we can say about it, either. The death and resurrection of Jesus is nothing short of our Exodus, the complete toppling and reversal of who is in charge in the cosmos. Just as Pharaoh lost his grip on the Israelites, Sin no longer has dominion over us, because the death and resurrection of Jesus has other plans. And where Sin tries to exercise its own pull on us, allure us into empty desires, the baptismal newness in which we walk will open our eyes to its powerlessness and emptiness and then open our eyes to what is really real.
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