NOTES for Rom 6:5-6

Holy Saturday is the only day of the year for which there is no church service at all. As we remember, the sacrament of the Eucharist was not celebrated yesterday, but there was the Service of the Lord’s Passion. Today there is simply no service. The tabernacle is open. God has died; He is not there. Holy Saturday is a day of silence.

But in the evening the Easter liturgy will begin. All the readings appointed for today are already Easter readings. Holy Saturday is the mysterious time in which the victory over death takes place, the moment of passage from death to life. As an ancient homily for Holy Saturday says: “A great silence has covered the earth, a great silence and emptiness. Great silence, for the King has fallen asleep. The earth was afraid and grew still, for God slept in a human body in order to awaken those who had slept from of old. God died in the body and destroyed Hell. The sleep of My death brings you out of the sleep of Hell. Rise, let us go from here! Once Satan led you out of the land of paradise; now I bring you not into paradise, but to the throne of heaven. You have no access to the tree of life, but I, Life itself, give Myself to you”... By dying with Christ, we receive His life.

The most terrible and empty day is Holy Saturday, when the Savior of the world rests in the tomb and our house is left to us empty. But here is what our worship says on this day: "Moses the great mystically prefigured this present day, saying, 'And God blessed the seventh day'; for this is the blessed Sabbath, this is the day of rest, when the Only-begotten Son of God rested from all His works, keeping Sabbath in the flesh through His own plan in death; and, returning again to being through the Resurrection, He granted us eternal life, the only Good One and Lover of mankind."

"Let all human flesh keep silence, and let it stand with fear and trembling, thinking of nothing earthly; for the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to be slain and to give Himself as food to the faithful. Before Him go the choirs of angels with all principalities and powers, the many-eyed cherubim and six-winged seraphim, covering their faces and singing the hymn: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia."

We often compare our own baptism and conversion to God with the beginning of a new life. The apostle Paul tells us that in reality, by becoming Christ's, we first of all accept death, and it is precisely in death that we are united with Christ. He tells us that our consent to enter His grace is first of all our consent to share Christ's suffering in this world, to take upon ourselves at least the smallest part of His wounds. It is this likeness above all that Paul is speaking about.

For unless we bid farewell to sin, to that very “old self” within us, we will not be able to come alive with Christ for eternal life. The burial the apostle has in mind is first of all the death of our passions and our self-love: our desire to have our own way no matter what, our hatred or simply our indifference toward our neighbor. We must part with all of this in order to rise again, renewed by His grace and His forgiveness, so that it will no longer be our sin that lives in us, but Christ.

Continuing his reflections on the Kingdom and on righteousness, the apostle asks a rhetorical question: if the action of God's grace is especially visible against the background of the sin in which fallen humanity dwells, does this mean that even sins committed by Christians are useful to God (v. 1)? If the history of the Torah and the Kingdom is such that the Kingdom enters the world when the world reveals its sinfulness in full measure, perhaps the spiritual biography of an individual person or a particular Christian community must also include, so to speak, a stage of the "revealing of sin" in order to give room for the action of God's grace. But Paul immediately rejects this possibility, pointing out that now, when the Kingdom has entered the world, the situation has become different, and it is not worth reproducing the history of salvation in one's own life. He speaks of other spiritual processes that are inseparable from the main thing that began with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. He reminds us that the washing (baptism) with which everyone entering the Church is washed in the name of Jesus Christ is nothing other than participation in the death by which Christ died on the cross (v. 3).

This may seem somewhat strange, since the Savior's death on the cross was only a stage of His path, which is ultimately completed not by death but by resurrection. But Paul's further reasoning clarifies what he meant when he spoke of "baptism into death." He speaks of the likeness of the death on the cross that unites the Christian with Jesus in His resurrection (v. 5). The apostle's logic is simple: sin holds a person captive only as long as he is alive (v. 7). Death frees him, so that sin no longer has power over him (v. 6). But death can be either a departure into Sheol, as it was for countless generations who lived before the Savior came into the world, or a step into new life, into the life of the Kingdom, which the faithful can share with the risen Jesus (vv. 8-9). For Paul, as we can see, life and death are not successive states of human existence, but forms of relationship with God, possessing different measures of fullness, from the Kingdom, where the fullness is absolute, to Sheol, where the relationships themselves are almost entirely absent. And righteousness and sin are two paths: one leads to the strengthening and deepening of relationship with God, ending in the Kingdom, and the other leads to their destruction, ending in Sheol. Jesus walked His earthly path, the path of the righteous One who overcame death (v. 10). But the Kingdom has not yet entered the world in all its fullness, and the Christian seeking the Kingdom must understand that every sin of his now becomes an obstacle not only on his path into the Kingdom, but also on the path of the Kingdom in the world (vv. 11-13). Before, prior to the coming of the Messiah, the question of human sinfulness was, in a certain sense, a private matter.

Of course, sin in every age separated a person from God. But before, the question concerned only purity or impurity, whether a person was ready or not ready for the meeting with God that took place at the altar. Now the question of human sinfulness has become a global question; it has become a question about the Kingdom, about whether a person will enter the Kingdom or not. And about whether he will carry the Kingdom into the world or remain on the sidelines. The history of the Torah and righteousness ended with the coming of the Savior. The history of the Kingdom conquering the world began. And as in every war, each step here can be a step leading to death. Or a step leading into life.