Thoughts from Culhwch

“Now if we have died with Christ.” The imposition of the “if” forces us to question ourselves. We cannot merely assume that we have died with Christ. We can never presume to be so close to Christ. And yet, we are still called to die with Christ. The phrase will not let us mistake that one call, we must die with Christ, we must find our end, be crucified, take up our cross. But we do not die alone. First of all, “we” die. We die as brothers and sisters in Christ, we die in community with one another, we die to sin and death with those whom we try to bear up as well. We die to sin together. Death is no longer lonely, or lonesome. It is not an ultimate act of separation from those that we love. It does not castigate. Rather, we all share death. We are in community in this moment. Of course, that death is not simply death, the “we” is further united to God. We die with Christ, the body of the church is together with Christ in this dying. This dying unites the church to her maker. Or her maker unites the church to himself in dying with him.

“We believe that we shall also live with him” We believe. This does not mean that we have attained that life, that newness of life is not yet fully established. Our resurrection together is not yet complete. We still see sin in ourselves and in our church. But we do not despair, we have been anchored and so can look forward to our life with Christ. We can lay hold of the event before it happens, have access to a new future that has not yet come to be. Our death to sin, to ourselves, with the church and with Christ is not the final act of the story. There is life to come. But just as the death was not alone, but was in community with the church and Christ, so too our life will be in community with the church and Christ. “We” are called to believe.

But the two phrases are linked together, they form an inseparable unity. We do not choose one without the other. When we die to sin; we also must believe in the life to come. When we believe in the life to come there must also be (or have been?) a death to sin.

And there is still more… but I think I’m losing track of it.

“Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again” When we experience this death and look forward to this life we are also acutely aware of that which makes it possible. That Christ was raised from the dead. Without that there is no hope. There is no reason to believe, the faith would be a fraud. But with that, we also have not only hope in the resurection, but hope that Christ’s death to sin provided the final answer to sin, the final death of sin in Christ’s dying to sin. So then, we have hope to be free of sin -as Christ was free from sin. We will finally be made free from sin too. We will not always live in belief alone, but belief will be perfected. The time will come when we are made new, made whole, made to live. And at that point we will not die again either. The whole point of this is not simply that we are free from sin now or tomorrow, but forever freed from sin, so that no more death would ever be needed or happen again. The death of death is upon us, demonstrated in Christ, and we cling to his death looking forward to the time when our death to
sin will be complete, and at he same time our life to God, our living before him will be made complete as well. We look forward to life and life abundant, while we cling to the hope that our own sin and sinfulness will not last forever, but will, praise God, come to an end.

“Death is no longer master over him” Death is no longer master of Christ. Death cannot happen again, Christ has died and cannot die again. Why? because death itself is powerless, it has lost it’s sting. So what do we do? In Christ do we have a claim that death is no longer master over us? Yes. Because the power of death is defeated. We no longer have eternal separation from God. Death is not the end, the grave does not hold us. So death, having been mastered by Christ, is fully under his control. Death to us is no longer the terror of night, the evil that befalls or the cause of anxiety. Death is mastered and can do nothing to harm us. In fact, we daily master death, by dying to sin.