A new Exodus! God’s people have been freed from sin and death. We have trekked our baptismal path through Jesus’ death and resurrection and have arrived at newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin (Romans 6:1-14). But Paul isn’t finished yet, and this discussion of freedom from our slavery to sin is about to take a strange turn.
To belong to Christ is to be freed from the enslaving gravity of sin. However, Paul still describes our new, baptized reality as one of slavery. “Thanks be to God that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness.” (6:17-18) Somehow, it’s all slavery. And it’s all freedom. We are good, modern Westerners and Americans. We place the highest premium on self-determination. Being under the control of nothing and no one is among the highest of values to us. We want to believe we are in control of our own lives, our own stories, our own thoughts and actions. But the simple fact is, that’s not how it works. It’s not a question of if something will catch us in its gravity and not let us go. It’s a question of what will catch us in its gravity and not let us go. In the words of Bob Dylan, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Despite the modern, Western-minded story we like to tell ourselves, we are not independent beings that wake up each morning and choose from the infinite buffet of options what we will do and think and say. By the time we wake up each morning, something has been exercising its will upon us; some pattern of being human has caught us in its gravity.
“When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But now you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God.” (6:20, 22) We might not be prepared to hear this. We might be so entrenched in a more modern conception of freedom that what we’re hearing in Romans 6 doesn’t seem right to us. Some of us have experienced a severe lack of control in our lives. We can be controlled by bad habits, employers, parents, spouses. Paul’s proclamation of sin losing its control over us while God gains control over us might not strike us as good news at first. Are we really getting out from under something else’s thumb just to get under God’s thumb? But Romans 6 depicts this new control, this new gravity as something truly good and life-giving. Once God is in control, love is in control, and the result is justice, holiness, and eternal life.
While “slavery” is quite an ugly word to us today, here’s what Romans 6 is getting at: God did not create us to be free from Him. God created us to fall into His gravity and never escape, to surrender completely to oneness with Him. We should want no thoughts in our minds that are separate from the thoughts of Jesus. We should want no words in our mouths that did not originate from listening to Jesus. We should want no behavior in our lives that did not originate from watching Jesus. We don’t want to be free from him. We want to be inseparably bound to him.
And this is exactly what the death and resurrection of Jesus has accomplished – our union with Him. But how can we participate in this new reality? Let’s start with better habits. Habits form us unlike anything else – habits of prayer (if you don’t know where to start, start with the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6), of scripture (again, if you don’t know where to start, start with the Gospels), of confessing sins (find a person you trust and confess what continues to ail your spirit; sin hates the light of exposure), of generosity(don’t keep your time, kindness, and skills to yourself), and of community (none of this meant to be a rigorous solo achievement). These habits are God’s way of re-shaping us in his image, freeing us of sin’s grip on us. This is how we fall into God’s gravity.
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