Romans 6:12-23 Commentary

This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s preachers might begin their message by saying something like, “Claims of mastery over any human being is despicable – except in one case.” That won’t just, after all, grab our hearers’ attention. Claiming that one form of slavery is beneficial is, in fact, also at the heart of Romans 6:12-23.

While Paul’s entire letter to Rome’s Christians is theologically rich, few of it sections are more theologically loaded than chapters 6-8. The apostle introduces them with Romans 5:20-21’s remarkable assertion: “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

It is a startling assertion of God’s amazing grace’s supremacy. But it’s almost as though Paul senses that it also raises questions about believers’ faithful response to that grace. “What shall we say, then?” Paul rhetorically asks in Romans 6:1. That’s echoed by verse 15’s question: “What then (ti oun)?” Grace reigns supreme. But now what?

Our text’s Paul offers some potential answers to that question. In verse 15 he admits that Jesus’ friends might choose to “sin (hamartesomen) bcause we are not under law (hypo nomen) but under grace (hypo charin).” Some people who claimed to be Christians have, in fact, claimed that grace renders God’s law completely irrelevant to how they lead their daily lives. Some of God’s adopted sons and daughters think of grace as God’s permission to, as The Message paraphrases this, “live any old way we want.”

In verse 15 we can almost hear the apostle shout his response: “By no means (me genoito)!” He insists that God’s grace is definitely not a license for any kind of behavior. Deliberate disobedience does not characterize God’s servants. Sinful words, actions and thoughts are, in fact, activities not of God’s servants, but of sin’s slaves.

Of course, as we noted a few weeks ago, perhaps especially western people assume that we’re no one or things’ slaves. We like to think of ourselves as not just self-made, but also self-directed. People naturally assume that we’re moral free agents who get to choose whatever we think is best for our families, friends and us.

But Paul insists that’s a lie. All of us are basically slaves to someone or thing. By nature, he says, we are what verse 16 calls “slaves to sin (douloi hamartias).” We, however, generally imagine, writes the biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore, that sin is disobedience, separation, or alienation.

In Romans 6, Shore says, the apostle speaks of sin as “that power that vies with the Creator for control of creation to such an extent that Paul can speak of humanity’s having been ‘enslaved to sin’.” Sin, in other words, controls its slaves’ bodies and souls. It forces them to act in ways contrary to those that are best for them.”

Paul goes on in verse 19 to speak of what such enslavement to sin looks like. “You used to offer (paratesate) the part of your body in slavery to impurity (doula te akatharsia) and to ever-increasing wickedness (anomia en ten anomian – literally, “lawlessness unto lawlessness).” It’s a startling picture not just of a kind of static immorality, but also a growing lawlessness. The apostle implies that sin’s slaves become increasingly disobedient.

While his readers might deduce that Paul is claiming that sin’s slaves are as bad as they could possibly be, that’s not what he actually writes here. He doesn’t claim that sin’s slaves couldn’t be any less moral. The apostle, instead, insists that sin’s mastery over them affects every part of its slaves’ persons.

Such pervasive immorality, grieves Paul, is deadly. It, according to verse 16, “leads to death (eis thanaton).” Slavery to sin isn’t just a one-way road to both a kind of living death and eternal death. In verse 21 the apostle says that its disobedience “result in (telos ekeinon) death.” It runs into what The Message calls a “dead end.” Sin’s slavery’s “wages” (opsonia) is death.”

But, sings Paul, God has graciously liberated God’s people from such lethal slavery to sin. God has, according to verse 18, mercifully “set us free (eleutherontentes) from sin.” Jesus’ death and resurrection have graciously liberated his friends’ from our slavery to and mastery by sin.

Yet in a very real sense, adds the apostle, Christians actually simply trade one form of slavery for another. God hasn’t freed us from slavery to sin to make us moral free agents. God graciously freed God’s adopted sons and daughters in order to transform us into God’s beloved servants.

This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s Paul, however, chooses to describe that new slavery in perhaps surprising ways. He doesn’t, after all, just say that God has made slaves to God (22). In verse 16 the apostle also insists that God has freed us from slavery to sin in order to make us slaves to “obedience” (hypakoes). What’s more, in verse 18 he describes us as slaves to “righteousness” (dikaiosyne).”

Slavery to God is relatively easy to understand. It suggests a joyful, whole-person submission to both God and God’s ways with God’s people in Jesus Christ. God’s slaves voluntarily take our marching orders not from ourselves or our culture, but from the God who offers us the only kind of slavery that is good for our neighbors and us.

It’s more difficult, candidly, to know to what Paul refers when he speaks of God’s dearly beloved people as slaves to “obedience” and “righteousness.” Certainly he doesn’t claim that we’re slaves to them in place of slavery to God. Jesus’ friends owe our complete loyalty and submission to God.

Paul’s profession in verse 16 that “obedience leads to righteousness” makes what he means by the twin slave masters that are obedience and righteousness even harder to fully understand. It’s particularly hard to understand for Christians who believe that righteousness comes through the faith alone that receives God’s grace.

Perhaps, as John Stott (Romans, Intervarsity Press, 1994) suggests, Paul is simply reminding his readers that “obedience” is essential to slavery, and that righteousness is basically synonymous with life. Yet to whatever else slavery to righteousness and obedience may refers, it almost certainly means a full-bodied and life commitment to them.

Jesus’ followers aren’t slaves to obedience and righteousness in the same way that we’re slaves to God. However, the Spirit empowers us to offer our whole persons to obedience and righteousness. So Christians might think of ourselves as mastered by them.

Yet debates about things like same-sex attraction and intimacy remind Jesus’ followers that we sometimes struggle to know just what such mastery looks like. Our disagreements about it are sometimes so strong that talking about that struggle may endanger some preachers’ relationships with their churches and denominations.

But perhaps those who preach Romans 6 can find a safe place to land where Paul “lands” it. Christians disagree about the scope of the sins that pay deadly wages. But we agree that “the gift of God (charisa tou Theou) is eternal life (zoe alonios) in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Christians may debate about the ways that slavery to sin, Satan and death manifests itself. But there’s little arguing that our eternal well-being is a gracious gift from God.

And who knows? By God’s amazing grace, righteousness, obedience and God’s slaves may even find ourselves enjoying that eternal wellness with people whom we’d always assumed were sin, Satan and death’s slaves.

Illustration

If you need any indication of how well known Paul’s final words from Romans 6 are, you need look no further than a New Yorker cartoon from some years back.  The cartoon shows a highway toll station with three toll booths.  The booth on the far left is labeled “CASH”, the center toll booth is for “EZ-PASS,” and the one on far right “WAGES OF SIN.”  But that toll booth did not feature the usual window through which to pay the attendant but was clearly a curtained Confessional Booth from a Catholic church.  And it was the only “toll booth” to which a car was headed!

Even the secular world well outside the church has some sense that there is such a thing as sin, that it does have some kind of consequences, and that sooner or later we each of us needs to deal with that fact.  CASH and EZ-PASS will only get you so far .