Paul on Grace and Sin: A Reflection on Romans 6.1-11

The other week, we looked once again at the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in, and faithfulness to, Jesus. It’s an idea that’s at the heart of Paul’s thinking and has inspired Christians for two thousand years. It has also, for two thousand years, been misunderstood as a license to do whatever we want, a kind of spiritual blank cheque that will never bounce. In today’s Epistle reading, we have Paul giving his answer to this conundrum: If we are saved by God’s grace, does that mean we can do whatever we want? If not, does that mean we are really saved by grace? Let’s see what he has to say.

First, let’s remind ourselves that Paul’s goal in Romans is to demonstrate that Christians coming from both Jewish and Gentile backgrounds have common cause with each other. In Romans 5, he showed how both groups are in God’s family because of God’s gratuitous grace. Now he’s addressing the age-old ‘next question’ that comes from first hearing that doctrine. He begins: “What then shall we say? Do we continue in sin so that grace might increase? Perish the thought! If have died to sin, how then will live in it?” (Romans 6.1-2). As we saw last Summer in the series on Ephesians, Paul loves contrasts like these: He sees Christianity as not a new belief system or a set of practices, but as a whole new life. As far as he is concerned, when we profess faith in Jesus, we die to ‘the old human’ and are reborn an entirely different person. This shift from being one thing to being an entirely other thing is symbolized in baptism. As Paul continues here:

Don’t you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? We have been buried with him through this baptism unto death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so too may we walk in newness of life. (6.3-4)

It’s clear that Paul takes this language very seriously. He is arguing that in baptism we share Christ’s death with him, so that we also share in his resurrection. It’s as though we enter the waters as one species, Homo sapiens Adamius, and leave it another, Homo sapiens Christianus. We enter as Adams and leave as little, newborn Christs. In this framework, continuing in sin — in the ways that break faith with God and each other — is ridiculous because it’s simply not behaviour appropriate to the ‘Christian species’ — it would be like a cat hopping like a rabbit, or a dog slithering like a snake. Accepting God’s grace is to accept a whole new way of being in the world, one modeled after way of Jesus.

The passage ends by picking up on this theme:

But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (6.8-11)

Again, it is the ‘old’ life that is oriented towards sin; the ‘new’ life is oriented to God. So sin should have no bearing on us.

This is great theology; it offers a pretty powerful image for understanding the depths of what being a Christian means. But, as the past two thousand years have abundantly shown, things aren’t quite as simple as all that. No matter how much we may want to live into our new identities in Christ, the old human remains alive and well in us. This isn’t a rejection of what Paul’s teaching — if it weren’t true, Paul wouldn’t have needed to write his Epistles in the first place! So we might think of it more as an ideal we work towards, or a vocation we seek to live out. Or perhaps better, the point of being birthed into this new life is not to keep on being born again, but to grow up, into maturity, “the full stature” of Christ. Becoming a Christian is not the end of the process, but its beginning.

So, today, this week, and beyond, may we all seek to grow up, just a little bit more, in Christ, dying just that little bit more to the old human, and being raised just that little bit more to the new life.