March 8: Death (and New Life) in Christ

By Arden Ratcliff

ROMANS 6:1-11

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. 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.

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Wow.  “All who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”  That’s certainly not something we bring up so much in church!  The idea of our having died and been buried with Christ is not a very appealing concept.   Neither is the reality of our own sinfulness.  (I knew a professor in seminary who taught a whole class on how we don’t talk about sin that often in churches nowadays.) 

And yet those are the concepts we are confronted with this Lenten season.   How are we to think of ourselves as having died with Christ?  The apostle Paul explains that through our faith in Christ, our sinful selves are crucified, dead, and buried.  We are born anew through faith, and like Christ, live again in a world where sin does not control us.  Though we never may be able to fully escape sin (we are human after all), it no longer has complete power and dominion over us.  We can resist it, and live our lives in the light of God’s grace.

That’s an awful lot of theology packed into one short paragraph.  How are we to make sense of it during this season of Lent?  Maybe this is the time to reflect on our misdeeds, our shortcomings, on the times when we’ve fallen short of meeting God’s expectations of us. 

But as we do so, we can remember that Christ’s death means the death of sin’s power over us.  And come time to celebrate Christ’s resurrection on Easter, we too can celebrate our rebirth in Christ and our ability to resist sin and walk with God.