Coptic for GOD

St Cyril the Great

How Our Old Man Was Crucified with Christ

We must closely examine what is our old man, what is the body of sin that is done away, and how it was crucified with Christ (Cf. Rom 6:6)… The Apostle means by the body of sin and our old man the body of dust that has the inevitability of decaying according to its oldness that was in Adam. For we were condemned as such at the beginning through Adam. The ill was aggravated by our carnal appetites, for this was an inbred condition of the flesh according to nature.

How was it crucified with Christ? The Only Son became man and acquired the body made of dust, that was condemned to death, as I have already mentioned, in accordance to its oldness in Adam, and became as if in labor, due to its ingrained appetites having an overwhelming tendency to sin. But the law of sin was incompatible with Christ’s totally holy body. We do not say at all that any human deficient suffering stirred within Him except that for which there is no blame, such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, and every thing the law of nature creates in us without fault. Although the law of sin did not stir whatsoever in Christ due to His superiority through the power and strength of the Logos in Him; yet we find nature’s body in itself, even when we consider it in Christ, no different to ours.

We were crucified with Him when His body, with all our nature in Him, was crucified, like that which happened in Adam when he was cursed: all nature suffered the curse. It is thus said that we were also raised with Christ and were made to sit with Him in the heavens, because although Emmanuel is above us as God, but in that He became like us, He is considered one of us raised and seated with God the Father. In the same way the old man was crucified with Him and through His resurrection the power of the old curse was broken “that the body of sin might be done away with” (Rom 6: 6). I do not mean the body unrestrictedly, but the ingrained carnal appetites within it, that always disturbed the mind with shameful matters, casting it in the mud and mire of the delights of dust.

As for these matters that were fulfilled in Christ to the benefit of human nature, how can anyone doubt it when St Paul clearly declares: “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8: 3).

Do you see then how the flesh of sin was done away with? The thorn of sin was condemned in the flesh and first died in Christ, then through Him and by Him this grace was also transferred to us.

On Romans 6:6