Commentary on Romans 5.9

“For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be of his resurrection; knowing this, that our old man was crucified together with him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, that we should no longer serve sin. For he who has died has been justified from sin.” All these things look back to that question, so that he may not seem to have given room for sinning when he said: “But where sin abounded, grace superabounded.” For this reason he both says that we are dead to sin, and says that all of us who were baptized in Christ were baptized in his death; and now he writes that we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, adding that if we bear the likeness of his death, by which he died to sin, we ought also to hope for the likeness of his resurrection. But how far this can come about he shows, saying that our old man ought to be crucified together with Christ. And our old man is to be understood as the former life which we led in sins, of which we make an end and a kind of destruction when we receive into ourselves the faith of the cross of Christ, through which the body of sin is so destroyed that our members, which served sin, no longer serve it, but God.

But now, taking up the words again, let us see what it is to be planted together in the likeness of the death of Christ. In this he shows the death of Christ as the plant of some tree, in which he wishes us to be planted together, so that our root too, taking from the sap of its root, may put forth branches of righteousness and bear fruits of life. And if you wish to learn from the Scriptures what this plant is in which we ought to be planted together, and of what kind of tree, hear what is written of Wisdom: “She is a tree of life,” it says, “to all who hope in her, and to those who trust in her as in the Lord.” Christ, then, the power of God and the wisdom of God, is himself the tree of life in which we must be planted together; and by a new and lovely gift of God his death is made for us a tree of life.

And the Apostle did well, knowing that in the present place he was treating not of this common death but of the death of sin, not to say, “For if we have been planted together in his death,” but … [the scan has lost text here] … “if his life has been one day.” That very death, then, by which Jesus died to sin, so that he did no sin at all, we cannot die, so as to know no sin at all; yet we can have the likeness, so that, imitating him and following his footsteps, we may abstain from sin. This, then, is what human nature can receive: to come to be in the likeness of his death, when by imitating him it does not sin. For to know no sin entirely and wholly belongs to Christ alone.

But certain of the heretics, not understanding this, have tried to assert from this place of the Apostle that Christ did not truly die, but had a likeness of death, and seemed to die rather than truly died. Since it is very easy to answer them, I do not think it necessary to bring the weight of testimonies from the other sayings of the Apostle or of the Gospels, where death simply, and not a likeness of death, is written, since we can say to them: If it was a likeness of death and not a true one, the resurrection too was a likeness and not a true resurrection; and so we too shall seem to rise and shall not truly rise; and we shall seem to die to sin, and shall not truly die. And so everything that has been done and is being done has seemed to be done, but has not been done. It follows, then, that in our having been saved we seem to have been saved, but have not truly been saved. Since these things are so absurd that they need no proofs, let us turn to the explanation of what follows.

He wishes us, then, to be planted together in the likeness of his death, by which he died to sin once, so that we may also be planted together in his resurrection. For “planted together” must be understood with both. And see how necessarily he has taken up the figure of planting. For every plant, after the death of winter, awaits the resurrection of spring. If, then, we too have been planted together in the death of Christ in the winter of this age and of the present life, we shall also be found in the spring to come bearing fruits of righteousness from his root; and if we have been planted together with him, it is necessary that the Father, the husbandman, should prune us as branches of the true vine, so that we may bear much fruit; as he himself says in the Gospels: “I am the true vine, you are the branches, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch that does not abide in me, my Father cuts off. But whoever abides in me, he will prune, that he may bear much fruit.” In this way, then, we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, so that we may also be planted together in the likeness of his resurrection.

And what it is to be planted together in the likeness of his resurrection … [the scan has lost text here] … teaches: “Little children, we do not yet know what we shall be. But if he is revealed to us, we shall be like him.” And again the Savior himself says: “Father, I will that where I am, these too may be with me”; and again: “As I am in you and you in me, that they too may be one in us.” This he certainly says of those who in the present life have been planted together in the likeness of his death. And I think this can be said gratefully of that thief too who hung on the cross together with Jesus: through his confession, in which he said, “Remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom,” and his rebuke of the other who blasphemed, he was seen by these things to be planted together in the likeness of his death; and he was planted together in his resurrection by what was said to him: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” For worthy of paradise was the plant that was joined to the tree of life.

Because, then, the Apostle had said “planted together in the likeness of the death of Christ,” he repeats it again with another figure and says: “that our old man was crucified together with him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed.” We have already said in many places and often what it is to be crucified together with Christ, and we have often treated of the old man; so in the present place we say briefly that the old man is he who lived according to Adam, liable to transgression and sin, over whom the death of sin ruled, and of whom he who had the power of death held the bonds of sin; and since Christ blotted these out with his blood and fastened them to his cross, we too ought to be crucified according to the old man, who was liable to sin, “so that the body of sin may be destroyed and we may no longer serve sin.” And I think it must be observed that where the Apostle says the body is to be destroyed he adds “of sin”; but where he does not say it is to be destroyed, he does not speak of the body of sin but says it is we ourselves who are not to serve sin; to show that, if the body of sin has been destroyed, we no longer serve sin, which, namely, we served so long as it was not destroyed in us, and our members which are upon the earth had not been put to death.

But we must go over still more carefully how he said “the body of sin.” In this a double … [the scan has lost text here] … can be put; we shall set out what seems right to us about both. For if we suppose that sin has its own body, it will seem that, just as it is said of those who have been restored in the new man, “You are the body of Christ and members in part,” so it can be said of those who have not yet crucified the old man that they are the body and members of sin, of which body the devil is the head, as Christ is the head of the body of the Church, which has no spot or wrinkle. And the members of which this body of sin consists may be seen to be those which the Apostle enumerated above as members that are upon the earth, that is, sexual immorality, uncleanness, shamelessness, greed, strifes, anger, deceits, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envy, revelings, and things like these; from all of which members the body of sin may fitly be said to consist, and this body to be called the old man. If someone destroys this through the cross of Christ and is changed into the new man, who has been created according to God, he will no longer be said to serve sin, which without doubt he serves so long as he is subject to any of these which we set out above as members of sin.

But if the Apostle is rather understood to have called this body of ours the body of sin, it will certainly be taken in that understanding in which David too says of himself that “I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother conceived me.” And the Apostle himself says elsewhere: “Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”; and again he names our body the body of lowliness. And of the Savior he says in a certain place that he came “in the likeness of the flesh of sin,” so that “concerning sin” he might “condemn sin in the flesh.” In this he shows that our flesh is indeed flesh of sin, but the flesh of Christ is like the flesh of sin. For it was not conceived from the seed of a man, but the Holy Spirit came upon Mary, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, so that what was born of her should be called Son of the Most High. So, then, Paul, through the ineffable wisdom of God which was given him, seeing some secret and hidden thing, I know not what, calls our body “the body of sin,” and “the body of death,” and “the body of lowliness.” And David too, knowing the heavenly secrets by the same Spirit, said of the body: “And you have brought me down into the dust of death”; and again: “Our soul has been humbled in the dust.” Jeremiah also, aware of a like mystery through the Spirit of God, says in his Lamentations that all men are prisoners of the earth, namely because of the body; and he says: “To humble under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, because they have turned aside the judgment of a man in the sight of the Most High, and have condemned a man in judging.”

Our body, then, is the body of sin; for neither is Adam written to have known Eve his wife and begotten Cain except after the sin. Indeed in the law too it is commanded that for a little child who has been born a sacrifice be offered, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons, of which one is for sin and the other for a burnt offering. For what sin is this one young pigeon offered? Could a newborn little one already sin? And yet it has a sin for which a sacrifice is commanded to be offered, from which it is denied that anyone is clean, even if his life has been one day. Of this, then, David too must be believed to have said what we mentioned above, that “in sins my mother conceived me.” For according to the history no sin of his mother is declared. For this reason the Church also received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to little children. For those to whom the secrets of the divine mysteries were entrusted knew that there were in all genuine stains of sin, which ought to be washed away through water and the Spirit; on account of which the body itself too is named the body of sin; not (as some of those think who bring in the transmigration of souls into various bodies) for things which the soul committed when placed in another body, but for this very reason, that it was brought forth in the body of sin and the body of death and lowliness; and as he said: “You have humbled our soul in the dust.” These things meanwhile have been able to occur to us for the present about the body of sin. But which of the two expositions agrees with the apostolic sense, or whether neither, let the reader test.

But as to the Apostle’s saying elsewhere that we have already risen together with Christ and been raised together, and sit together in the heavenly places, while here he says, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be of the resurrection”: that is, what elsewhere he said was already done, here he now says is to come and to be hoped for. The reason is that the resurrection is understood to be twofold: one, by which in mind and purpose and faith we rise with Christ from earthly things, so that we think of heavenly things and seek the things to come; the other, which will be the general resurrection of all in the flesh. The resurrection, then, which is according to the mind, from faith, is seen to be already fulfilled in those who mind the things above, where Christ is at the right hand of God; but that general resurrection of the flesh, which belongs to all, is still to come; for the one will be fulfilled at the first, the other at the second coming of the Lord.