Thoughts from Culhwch

If we are dead to sin, how did we die to it? v4 links us to Christ’s death through baptism. v5 links us to Christ’s death by some kind of analogy. I am tempted at first to say that baptism serves as the analogy, but would first century christians have practiced immersive baptism? I think there is a great deal of opinion there. Neverthless, we have been united with Christ “in the likeness of his death.”  What do these words tell us about how we should live? We should live our lives in such a way that they are always shaped to look like Christ’s death. We are always to be finding ways not just of giving up ourselves, and our own self-interest, but also of taking on other’s burdens, carrying their load, even to the point of our own undoing, especially to the point of our own undoing. We must reach the end ourselves in bearing one another’s burdens. But we cannot stop short merely at the ambiguous “burden” A christ-like death involves us even suffering for the sins of others. Of course that suffering can never be salvific, can never make others or ourselves righteous, that rightly falls to Christ himself. But the way we live should  recreate that, refract it or, analog it. We should live Christ’s death in our bodies, toward sin, and maybe toward evil generally. We must die to sin, but must we die for it, because of it, to resist it, and seek its end? I think the answer is yes.

When sin confronts us, we are to be dead to it, Christ having already suffered and died for it to bring us freedom from it. But we must also be dead to it in the way that Christ died to sin, giving up his life for all of us, to free all of us from sin.

But this also comes with a promise, being like Christ in his resurrection. Christ did not just die, but rose again. So there is a promise of hidden life for being united with Christ in his death. When we die to sin, when we die to set free from sin, we are given life, the kind which allows us to “walk in newness of life.” But we wear out Christ’s resurrection if we fail to be astonished at it. We take it for granted when we accept it as if this was an easy thing to believe. If we are like Christ in his ressurection, then our new life should be astonishing, should seem completely unexpected, should break the mold of how others think we live. Remember the medieval descriptions of Christ’s death as the trick played on the devil. Our dying to sin is like the trick played on sin itself. When sin had thought it defeated us, when we thought ourselves defeated by sin, Christ comes and unites us to him in his life. We are now ready to be made and remade by God, and sin has been defeated. But in ressurection, we are also called to testimony, called to bear witness to what God has done, to open other’s eyes to the truth of what has occurred. We become story tellers, preachers, proclaimers of the gospel.

This death brought us freedom from sin, and entailed nothing less than that our old self be crucified with Christ. This union with death is clearly not pain free. It will hurt, it will thrust a huge burden on us, which will stretch us beyond the limits of the ethical treatment of another human being. To call it uncomfortable is an understatement. Dying to oneself is perhaps one of the most difficult and painful ways to die. But the result is freedom, true freedom, because this death exhausts sin’s claims on upon us. By uniting with Christ we not only die a terrible, awful death, shameful to look at, or speak of, but we gain life, abundant life. And as v7 reminds us, we are freed from sin. At such a point the Christian has no other claims but Christ upon his life.