Romans 6

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Paul’s letter to the church in Rome has the flavour of being directed to a particular issue in a particular group of people who apparently haven’t grasped an essential, pivotal point in his teaching ministry. Summed up, as he does in the last verse, the chapter reinforces quite dramatically that “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23, NRSV)

The forcefulness of his message to church-people suggests that having been baptized into the faith, Christians in Rome were continuing to live in the lifestyle of their culture, including aspects Paul clearly considers “sinful.” What exactly Paul considers “sinful” he delineates at other places in his letters (see Galatians 5:19, for instance) but I have no doubt that whether it has to do with sexual promiscuity, activities in the bath houses, questions of slave ownership and their treatment, economic practices for those in trade, the readers of Paul’s letter probably already knew to what their mentor was referring.

There will always be issues with earning your daily bread inside a surrounding culture without becoming or remaining subject to its conventions and practices.

Paul’s message is one we can embrace in our time, and it’s not the one some Christian communities have taken, namely to go into isolation in order to be freed from the temptations abounding in the marketplace of common culture. In verses 15 to 19, Paul reverts to slave/master imagery, then apologizes for it, saying, “I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations.” The point of this section could be summed up very simply with Christ’s words in Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters, etc.” It’s a pretty obvious principle: two masters may not agree on what the servant is to do, so make a clear and decisive choice to follow one or the other, then obey that one exclusively.

Paul’s attempt to clarify the redemption paradigm again hints at his suspicion that only “human terms” will be understandable. The crucifixion represents, he says, the execution of our sinful nature, where it dies with Christ. Baptism is symbolic of our burial with Christ where we await the resurrection to a new being. (verses 3 & 4) Unfortunately when we overplay the symbols, we can lose sight of what it is they represent. I’ve been in and through a number of cathedrals here in Mexico and been reminded how close to idolatry the reverencing of icons and imagery can become as I saw Christians kneeling before statues of saints.

We have what Paul’s hearers may not have had to hand, namely a written gospel in which what it means to serve Christ, our “master” is abundantly clear. It’s by the teachings inherent in the Sermon on the Mount, his responses to suffering around him, his promises that strength will be given to follow in his footsteps, in the example in his sacrifice “even unto death” that we choose our own path. It’s these principles against which we weigh our ethics, not against the prevailing noise around us or our own desires.  

But experience has taught us that the precise way of following the one master in our choices and in our efforts can’t be simplified to a clear formula. Each day seems to bring with it a wrestling with questions of which neither Paul nor the Romans could have conceived. There lives in us a desire to codify what is sinful and what is righteous, and there are Christians enough who do exactly that. But circumstance has us following with fear and trembling Jesus’ summation of all that is law and all that are prophets: Love God with all your being and treat your neighbours as you would wish to be treated.


The Greatest Commandment Matthew 22: 34-40

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Surely this is the master we follow.

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