Quite a bold and challenging mediation from Sister Vassa! She addresses a real temptation that even Christians have to deal with.
“ In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” (Col 2:11-12)
It’s hard to understand how today’s feast (NC), of the Circumsion of the Lord on the eigth day after His birth, is relevant to our own lives, as Christian women and men. But the above-quoted passage is one of the places in which St. Paul is explaining this to us, so let’s think about it this New Year’s morning, - if there’s anybody among you out there, open to think about such a thing on New Year’s morning! 🙂
St. Paul is inviting us, both women and men who have been baptised, to think of ourselves as having been circumcised invisibly, “ with a circumcision made without hands.” What does that mean, in practical terms? It means “ putting off” (or shedding) “ the body of the sins of the flesh,” which is one thing we are doing when we are baptised; we are letting ourselves ‘lose’ the kinds of aspirations and desires that lead us in the wrong direction, away from God and His people, and towards our own, egotistical and ultimately self-serving and self-isolating goals. If I put this in very simple terms, even vulgar terms, circumcision was a symbol of cutting off that part of ourselves that wants to tell everyone else “ F** you,” (note the sexual violence implied in that phrase), or “ F* it, I’m doing my own thing.” And let’s note that both women and men can have this attitude at times, an attitude that says, F* it. But circumcision was cutting that attitude down a notch, quite literally. You can think about it further, how the most extreme, even genocidal violence is manifested in sexual violence, on the most primitive level, which is why people tend to use the “ F word” when they are most angry.
And if we might ask, what did circumcision have to do with women? The answer is, in Old Testament times, all females and female bodies were seen as extensions of males, ever since Eve was created from the flesh of (the ‘old’) Adam. After the coming of Christ, this changes, because we are all (re-)created not from the ‘old’ Adam, but from and in Jesus Christ, in Baptism.
But the “ putting off” of our F* itattitudes is not the only thing we do, or begin to do, I should say, in Baptism. We also are “ raised with Him” (when emerging from the waters of Baptism) “ through faith in the working of God, Who raised Him from the dead.” Baptism is the beginning of our process of being ‘raised up’ and straightened out, up into the new life we take up in Christ. In the New Covenant that He forges with us, we take up a life in which we repeatedly (and not just at our Baptism) let ourselves ‘shed’ the egotistical desires that aim to cut down, overpower and proverbially f*** everyone else. That is, we let God cut off from us those desires, time and again, when those desires rear their ugly heads.
One more thing to think about in this context, my friends, is how this learning-process evolves as we age. While both circumcision and baptism are something that involves infants, I think we continue to ‘shed’ a lot of our physical capacities, obviously including also the sexual ones, in which human beings (both male and female) might tend to take pride, as we age. When our youth or beauty is fading, we might resist this, as evidenced in all the anti-ageing technologies our society invests in. Let’s be reminded that our loving God, in His Son and by His Spirit is leading us to ‘shed’ the externals that are attaching us to this life, (which Bob Dylan called “ life and life only”), so as to prepare us for the Life of the age to come, in eternity, symbolised by the number 8. This is why circumcision was done on the eigth day, and why baptisms were often celebrated in the ancient church on Sunday that was known as The Eigth Day. Thank You, Lord, for leading us to You, into Your peace, humility, meekness, love, and true Kingdom, through all of it. For Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Let us keep striving for it in this New Year, dear friends.❤️