“For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” (Rom. 5:19)
In the name of the (+) Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Amen.
I hope Lent has been going well for you these past few days. For me, the impending arrival of Lent results in mixed feelings. Should I give something up? Should I take something on? There’s a fair bit of anxiety about prospective changes to the daily routine, as whatever discipline I might settle on takes effect. Then there’s the constant self-examination aspect: how well am I keeping my commitments? Am I obeying the rules I set for myself at the start, or am I falling short in some way? Lent is surely a perfectionist’s nightmare. By setting oneself a variety of Lenten observances, we open up the possibility of failure, which can lead to a sense of letting oneself, or of letting God, down. And then how much more aware we become of our imperfections and our sins.
In reality, this added potential to become aware of the brokenness of our existence does not change the fact that it was there before – the extra demands we place on ourselves during Lent make us more aware of something that was already there. Sin is unavoidable, it would seem: this is the reality of human existence. And likewise the consequence of sin – death. None of us can escape the brutal truth that one day we shall return to the dust from which we came. Our dramatic Ash Wednesday liturgy calls us to remember our mortality, and so in these first few days of Lent we have had these two inescapable and unpleasant aspects of human nature thrust uppermost again into our minds.
So, if we can’t escape sin, we might as well try to understand something about how it works – and this is what Paul attempts in his letter. Here, sin is revealed in its character of transgression – rule-breaking. The sin of Adam was to disobey the one specific rule given to humanity by God. Likewise, once the Law was given through Moses, people had a code of rules to live by. Unfortunately this meant that there were an awful lot more rules all of a sudden, and therefore a lot more ways to identify sin. So the Law amplified the problem. Paul is making clear that Moses is not the answer to Adam’s sin – the Law cannot save us, because what is does is expose quite how deliberate human disobedience actually is. We are told how to live in great detail, yet we still do not listen.
And Paul recognises that even the holiest and most observant (“righteous”) of people continued to die, of course. If death is seen as the consequence of sin, then sin must be about more than simply breaking commands. Just like Adam experiences in his encounter with the serpent, sin plays on our weakness, and we end up falling short. Paul’s writing supports a doctrine of what the church has come to call “original sin”. Paul writes that “death spread to all because all have sinned”. We all share collectively in the sin of Adam. There is no escape, and therefore Paul doesn’t waste time thinking about what life might have been like before sin came into the world. We can’t change the way things are. We simply accept that we cannot ourselves do anything about it. Later in the letter he will observe “I do not do the good I want, but that which I do not want, that I do” (7:15). We need help.
The Christian faith teaches that because nothing in the world could possibly have the power to break the hold of sin, only something beyond creation itself – only God – could do anything about it. Which is why God became man, because nothing short of this would do. Paul’s language is rather complicated, but it boils down to the antithesis that he sets up at the end of the passage – just as Adam brought about humanity’s sinful state, and began the reign of death, so Christ acts as a counter to that. Adam brings death, Christ brings life. Christ is the new Adam, who by his death and resurrection sets us free from the old order. The process by which this is achieved is called “atonement” (at-one-ment – the way we are reconciled to God, and made one with him), and there are a variety of models depending on which branch of the church you gravitate towards. You’ll be delighted to hear that we haven’t time for a detailed discussion of these tonight, but the core message that Paul is trying to establish here, which goes to the heart of the matter, is that in the same way that Adam’s disobedience brings sin and death, so Christ’s perfect obedience – something that no human being could achieve – brings about reconciliation and life. Death no longer has the final word.
And so, at the beginning of Lent, we are reminded that there is hope. It is good that we set ourselves targets and discipline ourselves for a short while, not out of some act of self-punishment, but to remind ourselves of our dependence on God. We cannot earn our own salvation by being extra holy, giving things up, taking things on, or whatever you might decide to do. By becoming aware of this reality, and perhaps through failure to keep to our regimes as well as we might have hoped, we are reminded of our need for God’s mercy and his forgiveness. God knows that already, of course, which is why he came to us in Jesus Christ. Through him, the power of the sin of Adam was broken, and in baptism we are washed clean of our share in this, beginning our new life in Christ. But we persist, don’t we? We still do things wrong, and we still need that “grace which abounded all the more”. This can be received through the continuing ministry of reconciliation that Jesus entrusted to the Church. Lent is a popular time of year for people to make use of sacramental confession, when this forgiveness is made known in a very powerful to an individual, by a priest acting as an instrument, focusing God’s forgiveness like a lens. If you have not considered this before, then I would suggest exploring the possibility with one of us this Lent, in complete confidence.
So, sin is unavoidable, and so we die. Yet we Christians dare to hope nonetheless, because the old order is overthrown in Christ. The late 16th / early 17th century poet John Donne writes powerfully of this confidence:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.[1]
[1] Death be not proud (Holy Sonnet X)
Grasping at Holiness 