First Sunday of Advent — Romans 13:11-14
One size fits all.
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for desires of the flesh (Romans 13:14)
Make no provision — presumably that suggestion applies both to pursuing the fleshly desires and to avoiding them. Make no provision; i.e., don’t plan ahead for how you’re going to deal with them.
To put on Jesus is to clothe oneself in the armor of light (v. 12). You don’t wear armor to protect others; you wear it to protect yourself. If the desires of the flesh arise from within the self, then clothing oneself in Jesus would prevent you from pursuing those inner urges. If the desires of the flesh arise from outside the self, the clothing oneself in Jesus would protect you from being besieged by those external temptations. Either way, you don’t have to concern yourself anymore, since you’re protected.
Alternatively, Jesus functions as a buffer not by protecting you against desires of the flesh, but by replacing them with desires of the spirit. The law tells you what fleshly desires to avoid, but it doesn’t offer protection against either the inner urge or the outer temptation.
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (v. 10)
It would seem that the desire to do wrong arises at the interface between the self and the other. The flesh is the interface between inner and outer, between the self and the world. Clothing is the interface between the flesh and the world.
So maybe there are two suggestions here: fulfill the inner desire to love one another, while at the same time protecting yourself from external temptations. While the other may present a temptation to you, you may also present a temptation to the other. Love, but remain on guard.
Desire is the dream of the sleepwalker, just out of reach, the dreamer reaching for the unreachable. The dream-object appears, and so for the dream to take proper form the dreamer must reach for it. And why? Because, according to the dream logic, it is desirable. And why can it not be reached? Because, according to the dream logic, the object is forbidden. And so the dream becomes a nightmare, always reaching for but never reaching.
Wake up! That which you desire is already within your grasp! But now reality dawns cold and flat: the desire is dead; so too the taboo. The dreamer stripped of desire, the object stripped of prohibition — what will protect us from this shadowless indifference?
Armor. A buffer, positioned not between the soul and the flesh, but between the flesh and the world. A whole and intricate being, you need something to keep you from oozing out into the world, dissipating yourself in the futile pursuit of prohibited desire. But what sort of armor? Darkness protects me from the light; light protects me from darkness — what protects me from both, short of death?
You’ve hit it: death is your armor. Clothe yourself in the crucified corpse, dead to the world, the world dead to it. Clothe yourself in the resurrection, where everything attains its end, its completion, its plenitude. Without lack there is no desire, no struggle and competition and frustration, without end.
But I can’t know that life until I’m dead — all I can do is oscillate between my dreaming self and my waking self, never unified, never satisfied.
True. But you can suit up in the dead and resurrected flesh. Not as costume or disguise, but as buffer. You desire to dominate, gouging and tearing at those who stand in your way, absorbing them into yourself. You desire to submit, dissipating your essence in fruitless pursuit of the unattainable that draws you out of yourself. You have always failed; you always will fail. Buffered inside the dead/resurrected body armor you can keep the inside in and the outside out.
I get to taste them both — the delectation of the flesh, the savor of the world. I’m dead: what can they do to me now? I’m resurrected: my dominion extends to every horizon. I pull longing and temptation into myself; their confluence fuels the new creation.
Jesus recognized that the Mosaic Law does nothing to protect people from sin and damnation:
“The Law and the Prophets were until John; since then the kingdom of God is acclaimed, and everyone is pushing into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to become void than for one dot of the Law to fall. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.” (Luke 16:16-18)
Not only does the Law block everyone’s way into the kingdom by condemning them for their sinfulness; Paul says that the Law creates the sin that leads to damnation:
If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. (Romans 7:7b-11)
So how do you get out of this death trap? By dying:
Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage… But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. (Romans 7:1-2)
… or dying by proxy:
Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the spirit and not in the old way of the letter. (Romans 7:3b-6)
So when Paul tells his Roman readers to put on Jesus, he’s in effect telling them to embed themselves in Jesus’s dead body. Protect yourself not only from sinful urges and temptations, but also from the prohibitions that spawn those urges and temptations.
Or maybe Paul’s injunction to put on Jesus isn’t individual but collective…
For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. (Ephesians 2:14-16)
Ktismatics 