Commentary on Romans 8:1-11

This is the fourth Sunday of a potential four-week sermon series on sin, based on the lectionary readings from Romans.

Paul is writing to the church at Rome, composed of Jews and gentiles, and he is trying to lay out what the Christian life entails.

Traditionally, there has been much made about the word “flesh” in this text and others where Paul seems to equate our physical desires and longings with sin. This has contributed to the false belief that Christianity is anti-body.

Reading Paul’s words in Romans 8:1–11, it can sound like Paul is distinguishing between the body and the mind, critical of when the mind aligns itself with the body rather than the Spirit. But it is important to think of the word “flesh” in broader terms.

Paul was Jewish, so it is helpful to understand what “flesh” meant within first-century Judaism. Looking to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, we can learn that the Hebrew word for “flesh” is basar, which can refer not just to the body, but also “to all of humankind (Isaiah 66:16); the weaker side of human nature (Ezekiel 35:26); weakness (Isaiah 31:3); and food (Daniel 7:5).”¹

Thinking of flesh in these broader terms can help us clarify for our listeners that Paul and the Christian gospel are not against the body—and, in fact, that honoring our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19–20) means we should not devalue our physical bodies.

Instead, listeners can identify ways this word “flesh” can refer more broadly to the ways our own wills are weakened around certain impulses, topics, and issues.

For instance, and as in other weeks when talking about sin, it is important to draw attention away from a simple view of sin as individual, instead helping listeners see how “flesh” can refer to our weakness as a society to commit to doing what needs to be done to address inequality and to offer greater support for those who need a social safety net: the elderly, persons with disabilities, the single-parent family, the orphan, the refugee, the unhoused, the hungry.

According to Paul, we who are “in the flesh”—that is, part of a weakened will within humanity to do the right thing—are not living lives that please God (verse 8).

And yet, Paul is also reminding us that we are in the Spirit, and that “there is no condemnation” (verse 1) for us who are in Christ. So we cannot simply preach that we are sinful beings, deserving of God’s wrath. Paul says this in Romans 5:8: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

There is this dichotomy: Sin separates us from God and one another, and yet we are not condemned because we are in Christ, and the Spirit of God dwells in us.

Then why talk about sin at all?

It is in the knowledge of God’s great love for us, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, that Christians can look inward and outward, noticing the many ways we still fall short and do not have the will to make the changes we know can improve the lives of those around us.

It is in understanding the wonderful love of Jesus that our gratitude moves us to act.

It is a strange paradox: We need to talk about sin because it continues to dog us, but we only respond to that sin not out of a sense of guilt or shame but out of gratitude because of what God has done for us in Christ.

And while this passage is not about our forgiveness of others, talking about sin should also include how the sin of the world includes how we have been sinned against. Sin is not just about our relationship with God, but also with one another. When we have been sinned against by someone else, it can drag us down and make us feel as though our “body is dead because of sin” (8:10).

Maybe there is someone in your congregation who is bearing the burden—perhaps even felt literally like heaviness—of having suffered abuse as a child or in their marriage. Being sinned against in one’s own body can make a person feel separated from one’s body—which is another reason why preachers need to correct for the harmful image Christianity has given off about the body being “bad.”

Joni Sancken, vice president and professor of preaching at Vancouver Theological Seminary, writes about trauma-informed preaching and ways to help churches process trauma in her books Words That Heal: Preaching Hope to Wounded Souls (2019) and All Our Griefs to Bear: Responding with Resilience After Collective Trauma (2021).

Sancken defines trauma as

circumstances in which one’s own life or the life of a loved one is under threat, where one loses a loved one suddenly, or when the ability to process the experience is exceeded by the magnitude of the experience itself. Symptoms related to experiences of trauma—digestive changes, bouts of crying, difficulty remembering things and making decisions, elevated blood pressure, and changes in attention span—are the body’s way of processing the trauma and dispelling energy created by the flight-fight-freeze response.²

Attending to our bodies in response to trauma and the impact of sin on our broken world is a key component of recognizing the life that still lives in them. Preaching about the impact of “sin” on our “flesh” can be an important way to remind listeners of the hope we have in Christ, for “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you,” (Romans 8:11).

Notes

1. Note for Romans 8:3, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 301.
2. Joni S. Sancken, All Our Griefs to Bear: Responding with Resilience After Collective Trauma, (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2022), pages 18-19.