NOTES for Rom 6:3-11

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."

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.

Speaking about the spiritual life of Christians, Paul says: all of us who were washed, or "baptized," into Jesus Christ were washed in His death. What does he mean? If Christianity were simply a new religion, the apostle's words would not be hard to understand: in the history of many movements, including religious movements, it has happened that the death of a founder gave the movement for which he gave his life a powerful impulse, followed by explosive growth. But Christianity is not a new religion; it is a new life, life in the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world. And when we enter the Church, we are washed not only with water, but also with the breath of that Kingdom, the breath of that love of God without which there can be no talk of any new life.

How, then, is the Savior's death on the cross connected with the washing that brings us into new life? The simplest answer is this: Jesus accepted death voluntarily so that the Kingdom might enter the world fully and to the end. Had He renounced His mission and not carried it through to the end, and this was possible in principle, because during His earthly ministry Jesus was just as free as any of us, and free to an infinitely greater degree, since sin has no power over Him, the Kingdom would not have existed in our world and would not have come near to us. His earthly path, walked by Him to the end, all the way to the cross, is the door that opens the Kingdom to us.

But there is something else as well: our own life in the Kingdom. It is the life that we, if we are truly Christians, share with Him and with His heavenly Father, who through Him is also our Father. And this life, just like the life of Christ Himself, must belong wholly to the Kingdom. Then we will inevitably have to become strangers to the forces of the evil in which, according to the word of the Gospel, the world lies. In the ultimate sense, the life of the Kingdom is the death of that evil in which the world lies. And for the world this means the death of the one who lives the life of the Kingdom. Death, because the world, lying in evil, follows the lead of the evil in which it lies. And it strives to kill, to destroy the bearers of the Kingdom, just as it strove to destroy the Messiah who brought the Kingdom into the world.

Paul tells us: the action of God's grace is especially noticeable against the background of human sin. So then, should one expose one's sinfulness in oneself as much as possible, let sin manifest itself in all fullness so that the action of grace may also increase? Of course not. The apostle understands perfectly that this is not the way. The Christian way is different, and it is connected with the dynamic of a person's spiritual life that arises when God's power and God's love meet human sin.

Sin and God's grace are incompatible. But until complete transformation, the complete qualitative change of human nature, they will inevitably coexist in one and the same person. Yet they cannot unite, just as they cannot coexist in one and the same spiritual space. Where the Kingdom is, where grace is, where God's power and God's love are, there is no place for sin; and where sin is, there is no place for God.

Even in pre-Christian times the path of righteousness was life in God's presence despite one's own sinfulness. But then God's presence had not yet been manifested to the world in such fullness, leaving no room for sin, as is proper to the Kingdom. Now the righteousness of the Kingdom and sin are altogether incompatible. Either one or the other. Jesus inevitably had to die because the world in its present state cannot contain the Kingdom He brought in all its fullness. And the existence of sin in the world became death for Him precisely because His life and sin are incompatible. But the same can be said of every Christian, if only he is truly a Christian, and therefore an inhabitant of the Kingdom. Everyone who receives baptism agrees to such a path and to such a life.

It is no accident that the apostle says that, having been baptized, the Christian in this world is united with Christ "in the likeness of death": for the life of the Kingdom, until the complete transformation of the world, will still remain alien to this world, and therefore the Christian can live in this world only by dying, dying to the world that lies in evil, renouncing its life more and more. And, correspondingly, sharing more and more in another life, the life of that Kingdom which the Savior brought into the world. The life of the Kingdom must drive out the life of the fallen world for the Christian. One must, in the process of his own existence, replace the other. For this world such replacement means death: the world ceases to see transformed people; they disappear from it and cease to exist for it. This is not surprising: for the fallen world, Christ too ceased to exist immediately after His death on the Cross. The fallen world does not believe in His resurrection; for it, the resurrection does not exist. Such too is the life of every Christian, disappearing more and more for this world and manifesting himself more fully and clearly in the Kingdom.

According to the apostle Paul, our union with Christ takes place not in life, but in death. Because what we call life, from God's point of view, is dying. And Christ, by His divine nature untouched by death, voluntarily enters our dying in order to meet us "on our territory."

This is a self-emptying of the Son of God completely unimaginable for us, "kenosis" in Greek, an enormous path traveled from God to us. But for a meeting to happen, our movement toward Him is also necessary. It happens when we take a very small step, agreeing that Christ did not simply die for no reason, but out of love for us and for our sake; that in our baptism we experience His death as a fact of our own personal biography, radically changing the direction of our movement, because dying ends there. Having met Christ in death in this way, we are not separated from Him in resurrection either.

The word "believe" is very precise here: this is not scientific knowledge, but trust in God, hope in the saving power of His love for us.

A dead person is one who does not respond when addressed. But every response of ours is an action backed by the human will. The apostle Paul relies on this idea when he offers us this way of living. "It is impossible that temptations should not come," the Lord once said. We live in conditions where sinful thoughts, temptations, and desires will inevitably touch our hearts. But it is possible not to answer them, as a dead person answers nothing.

At the same time, it is remarkably important not to forget the second half of the apostle's phrase: "consider yourselves... alive to God." For if, while not responding to sin, you are nevertheless open to communion with God, then sinful impulses will not break through to your consciousness, because you will have no time to think about them. In fact, all Christian ascetic practice, that is, the tactics and strategy of resisting sin, is built on this simple contrast.

All four evangelists begin their accounts of the Resurrection with testimony about the empty tomb. The empty tomb must both prepare the women who brought spices to understand Christ's victory and express its very essence: the tomb is empty, and death is no more.

Since for the angels the Resurrection of Jesus appears much more natural than His death, they say to the astonished women: 'He is alive, He is life itself. Why are you looking for the source of life in a dark tomb? He could not leave you for long - you will soon meet Him.'

And they do indeed meet Him. He still values their freedom: one can doubt, or one can believe, even seeing Him face to face; one can take part in His fulfillment of the Father's will - the salvation of the world - and hear the final words of Matthew's Gospel, which are in themselves the Good News.

The main feature of the Resurrection was its unexpectedness, and that absolutely for everyone, both for the friends and for the enemies of the Risen One. The women went to the tomb in order to complete the unfinished burial rite; the encounter with the risen Jesus was a complete surprise for them. And the apostles, even after hearing about the Resurrection, did not believe it: as we can see, they decided that the women had simply imagined something in the darkness.

A natural question arises: why? With the enemies of the Risen One everything is clear: for them His Resurrection was the most nightmarish possible end to this story. But when reading the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, at times one begins to think that, paradoxical as it may sound, even to Jesus' disciples His Resurrection appeared strange and even unnecessary. They refuse to believe; it seems to them that all the stories about the Resurrection only trouble people. Of course, they really did not expect anything of the kind. But there may have been something else: Jesus' disciples still could not free themselves from their traditional and very human ideas about the Messiah and messiahship.

After the terrible night of Gethsemane, they understood only one thing: everything was lost; He was not the one they had taken Him to be; there would be no messianic war; the dream had to be abandoned. And at the same time there remained the sacred memory of the Teacher, whom they could no longer forget, with whom, despite failure, too much was connected to renounce the memory of Him. This, too, is a fully formed way of seeing the world, even if a tragic one, which a person can carry through a whole life and with which he can live that life. And suddenly it turns out that not everything is over, that the nightmare and horror of the paschal days already lived through were not enough, that the story has not yet ended; people say He has again been seen alive! What else now? What this time? What other hopes will He give and then destroy? Or is it not Him at all? Maybe the women simply went mad with grief? The last thing needed was for the Teacher's memory to be darkened by mad women crying out.

It is no wonder that after His Resurrection Jesus has to convince His disciples again and again that He is Himself, that He is truly alive, that the most terrible thing is really already behind them, and ahead lies a whole life with Him in His Kingdom. And that only there, in the Kingdom that has "drawn near," will history be completed. And life will begin. Life in all its fullness.

The angel who announced the Resurrection addresses the women who came to the tomb, but not the guards who are nearby. This must be because there is no point imposing factual knowledge on those who are not yet ready to receive it. After all, to accept the Gospel message does not mean to memorize the contents of a text; it means to begin a new life. So the guards are free to decide how they should relate to the miracle that has taken place. The Angel addresses those who accepted Jesus and love Him, and to them the Angel entrusts the task of telling the disciples the news of the Resurrection.

On the way to the apostles they met the Risen One Himself. Well, a meeting with Him can happen precisely when, fulfilling our duty, we are going to our brothers. And how important Matthew's testimony to the faithfulness of these women is!

The behavior of the chief priests may seem strange. Are they really blinded to such a degree that they are unable to accept the miraculous event as testimony that Jesus truly is the Son of God?

Yes, to exactly that degree. The level of teaching they have absorbed is for them the fullness of truth, and what goes beyond rigid boundaries is hard for them to perceive. And pride and "political considerations" prevent them from admitting that they were wrong and had sent an innocent man to death. They do not need the Truth. But Truth nevertheless rose.

Even during His earthly ministry, Jesus said that He had come to bring not peace but a sword, meaning the division that His witness to the Kingdom would cause. This was so before His resurrection, and after that event the division between those who accept and those who reject became even more noticeable. It would seem that trying to suppress such a significant event, even for unbelievers, is a hopeless undertaking, and yet attempts to do this began from the very start, from the first day when the Risen One appeared to those who no longer hoped to see Him alive.

And later, those who denied Christianity almost never tried to explain what the apostles and other witnesses saw and testified to. Their entire argument was usually reduced to the claim that all the testimony was deliberate or unintentional deception (in the second case people usually speak of the good-faith error of witnesses who took their hallucinations or the fruit of their overheated imagination for reality).

Why then, over centuries and millennia of Christian history, have Christianity's opponents come up with no other, more convincing explanations? It should be clear to everyone that a movement based on deception, or even on good-faith error, cannot exist for millennia! The answer to this question is simpler than one would think, and it is contained in the Gospel itself.

Even in the time of the Savior's earthly ministry, His words were received with hostility by many not because those who rejected them had some logical or other arguments, but because the Kingdom and the One who brought it into the world were unacceptable to them in principle, at any rate as they appeared before them. To accept the Kingdom to which Christ bears witness and its laws means for everyone to stop being what he is, to change radically, and therefore to part with his former self, no matter how much at times the one accepting may like himself. If a person does not want this and is not ready for it, he says "no" to Christ and the Kingdom, a "no" that for him no longer needs explanation.

For those around him, the easiest way to explain his refusal is to declare the whole story a lie, a delusion, a fabrication of adherents; in a word, anything that would rule out further discussion in advance. This was so in the days of the Savior's resurrection, it was so centuries later, and the situation remains the same today. Of course, everyone has the right to make his own choice when it concerns his own salvation. The main thing is not to deceive oneself about the motives of this choice. And not to deceive others either.

Compared with the other Gospels, Matthew’s account of the Resurrection is quite brief, and the most remarkable feature of the evangelist’s description is that here too he speaks of the lie with which people tried to surround Jesus even after His resurrection (vv. 11–15). The episode about bribing the guard appears only in Matthew; the other evangelists do not mention it. In Matthew it stands at the center of the narrative, set against another episode describing the angels’ appearance to the women who came to the tomb (vv. 1–8). A brief insertion about meeting the Risen One separates the two episodes (vv. 9–10), while a short epilogue concludes the Resurrection narrative (vv. 16–20).

This structure of the passage highlights even more clearly the contrast between the two episodes as the foundation of the plot of Matthew’s Resurrection account. This is certainly no accident: the evangelist again draws his readers’ attention to the confrontation between the Kingdom and those who reject it. Apparently, it did not cease even after Jesus’ resurrection. One might think the victory had been won and a new age had begun, the age of the approaching Kingdom. But those who reject the Kingdom seem not to notice the change. Most likely, they truly do not notice it, because one can see the Kingdom only when one wants to.

This is not a matter of imagination, but of the fact that one cannot see the Kingdom without accepting the One who brought it into the world, and one must want to accept Him. It was the same during the Savior’s earthly ministry: He imposed neither Himself nor His messiahship nor the Kingdom on anyone. He revealed Himself and opened the way into the Kingdom only to those who wanted it. Nothing has changed today: the way is open to everyone but imposed on no one. Therefore, those who do not want the Kingdom do not see it. In Jesus they see neither the Messiah-Christ nor the Son of God, but at best a teacher of morality, and at worst a deceiver who passed Himself off as the Messiah. The latter view, although more offensive, is at least more honest: Jesus Himself never tried to pass Himself off as any kind of teacher of morality. He spoke in such a way that He could either be accepted as He is or rejected with indignation, as many of the Pharisees rejected Him.

The compromise of calling Him a “teacher of morality” will not work. Sooner or later, every reader of the Gospel will still have to choose between the two explanations offered by the evangelist. Everyone who met Jesus during His earthly ministry faced this choice, and it remains the same today.

Let us look at the women who came to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. As the beginning of chapter 28 of the Gospel according to Matthew tells us, there was “a great earthquake,” and the two Marys, the myrrh-bearing women, saw an angel of the Lord who told them of the Lord’s Resurrection. I think it is obvious that they were frightened. Yet the Evangelist still writes about the fear and trembling in the hearts of the myrrh-bearing women, helping us to see what they experienced (see Mt 28:8). The women are frightened by the earthquake and then by God’s messenger. But what does he say? He gives voice to the longing of their grieving hearts and allows the shoot of hope to break through to the surface and become manifest joy and knowledge. Their joy is already great, and they run to share it with the disciples. And then what happens? He who is Himself this Joy longs to fill them with it completely! He meets them, rejoicing that they believed the wondrous news of His Resurrection, with words so often heard from God’s lips: “Do not be afraid.” The place that fear occupied in their hearts is flooded with exultation. This passage helps us see one of the ways of “receiving perfect joy”: like the myrrh-bearing women, we need to come to the Lord and believe Him and His Resurrection. Then He will come to calm us with the words “Do not be afraid,” helping us open our whole heart to His joy.

When the women heard the news of the Resurrection, they rejoiced—but they were also afraid. The word “fear” has many shades of meaning. Of course, what the myrrh-bearing women feel may be called holy awe. But Jesus, who sees their hearts, says, “Do not be afraid.” This means there was something in their fear that poisoned their joy. It seems to me that it was distrust, a very, very slight shade of distrust, which disappears when Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” Distrust is not unbelief; it is precisely uncertainty about what this situation means for me and how I should act within it. The myrrh-bearing women knew the most important thing: they had to go to the disciples and tell them. And they go, rejoicing. Yet something that hinders them still remains. For Jesus, apparently, it was very important that their joy should be truly complete, not darkened by fear. The most remarkable thing is how they are healed of fear. Nothing was required of the women. He simply said, “Do not be afraid,” and the fear departed and melted away.

Matthew does not recount the Risen One’s meetings with the apostles in detail, but he gives a concise account of the essence of their communion.

The fact that Christ gathered the apostles on a mountain calls to mind the Sermon on the Mount, the ascent of the Mount of Transfiguration, and the many other mountains where the Lord proclaimed His will. Matthew does not conceal that not everyone who saw the Teacher immediately believed it was He. But Christ rejected none of the disciples. He came near to them, and His coming near is not merely physical: He draws close to the hearts of those who have received Him.

Now He clearly reveals His divine nature to the disciples, for no one except God possesses all authority in heaven and on earth. That is why the hour has come to carry the teaching beyond the Jewish people and proclaim it to the whole world.

The call to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is clear testimony to the Trinity of God. It is strange to hear the judgments of those who claim that Holy Scripture contains no mention of the Trinity.

Finally, Christ testified that He is with us until the end of the age. Notice that He did not say, “I will be with you.” What He said to the apostles He also says to us, here and now.

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.