With all of the baptisms we have had recently, and ones that are coming up, the reading from the Epistle today seemed like the perfect opportunity to explain what the Church means when it says that we are to “put off the Old Man” and “put on the new”.
St. Paul describes for the Colossians what the Old Man represents: The animalistic passions we spoke about a few weeks ago when talking about fasting. The Old Man represents those who are fornicators, unclean, full of passion, evil desires, and covetousness. It is those passions within us, deep down, that cause us to have anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, avarice, and lust.
Anyone who is thinking to themselves: “well, none of those describe me”, I invite you to read a single chapter of the New Testament, compare yourself to Christ, and then put on some truth goggles so that you can see that from time to time, all of us are still afflicted with this life of the “Old Man”. Despite being made new in Holy Baptism, all of us have “sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God”.
It wasn’t always like this, dear ones. There was a time when mankind didn’t have an assemblance of this “Old Man” syndrome. When we were fashioned in paradise, man was a superb creation! We were created even higher than the angels! There was no evil inside of us! Genesis describes man walking around in paradise, in the Garden of Eden, completely naked. That point is made in scriptures not just to point out that we had no need of clothes, but it rather described our innocence as well! We were healthy! We had no experience of sickness or death. There was no envy or evil desires. God described His creation of mankind as being “very good!”.
Yet, because of our carelessness, we gave birth to the greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind through sin.. The Old Man was born on that day, and that one germ of sin infected all of humanity and even creation itself. It was sin that brought tears into the world, starting with Cain killing his own brother. Sin was like an infection that changed us…destroying that angelic beauty and making us unrecognizable from what we were in paradise.
There is a wonderful homilist who is not widely known of here in the states named Archbishop Agostinos of Florina in Greece. He comments on the difference between this Old Man and the life that we are called to get back to by offering this image:
“Imagine a sculptor making a statue from pure bronze. It is beautiful and perfect, and when the unveiling happens, everyone stands there marveling at its splendor and glory! Then sun’s rays bounce off of it, making it radiant to all who come near it!
One day, barbarians come and knock the statue off of its pedal stool. It is left abandoned, covered with dirt and filth, and buried for centuries. Yet the sculptor discovers it and does not despair. He takes it, throws it back into the fire, melted it, and from its own material, makes a statue that is 1000 times more beautiful than the first one!”
Bishop Agostinos is describing our lives in Christ dear ones! It is what this entire 40 days of preparation for the Nativity of Christ is pointing to! We all have fallen from that angelic beauty and have become that “Old Man”. Mankind was buried in the dirt, bereft of glory and form. Yet our Lord, our sculptor, in the middle of a cave in Bethlehem, came down into the very dirt that he created man from in order to raise us up and restore us…not to our former glory, but to something new…an even greater glory than mankind had in paradise.
This is the new man…the transformation that we receive at Holy Baptism and Chrismation. And, as St. Paul says at the end of the epistle today, it is the life that unites us all!
May we continue to walk together towards the brightness of the Nativity as shining examples of what it means to live a life clothed with Christ!