Putting Off the Old Self: A Lenten Reflection

Last updated on: March 24, 2023 at 11:14 am by Talley Cross

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Putting Off the Old Self: A Lenten Reflection 2023-03-24T11:14:24-04:00 Talley Cross

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Putting off the old self

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For many Christians, Lent involves putting off the old self, or giving something up to draw closer to God, as we prepare to remember Jesus’ death and celebrate his resurrection.

This yearly custom recalls Colossians 3:9: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”

The Lenten fast is a ritual that helps us put off our old, sinful selves and put on Jesus, the perfect human being.

Yet putting off the old self happens in a larger context. When I cast off my sinful self, I am not merely casting off my sinful self, but the sinful heritage bestowed upon me by Adam and Eve, the first human sinners. I cast off the old humanity – Adam and Eve – for the new humanity: Jesus.

The bigger picture here is conveyed more effectively in the original Greek text of the passage. The word “self” is a translation of the Greek anthropos, which means humanity (we see the meaning of the Greek root anthropo- in such English words as anthropology, the study of humans).

A few Sundays ago, a priest at my church gave an excellent sermon on putting off the old self, but rather than honing in on anthropos to highlight sinful humanity, he focused solely on Adam. He argued that anthropos here means man – and not “man” in the sense of humankind, but “man” in the sense of a male: Adam. Thus, he said, we put off the old man, Adam, and put on the new man, Christ.

I challenge his interpretation on the following points:

Rendering anthropos as “a man” (and further inferring Adam from that) is a highly questionable translation, since the word for “a man” in Greek is aner, not anthropos. Bottom line: if Paul had wanted his audience to understand that he was talking about “a man” here, there is a much more obvious word he could have used to convey that.
The idea that anthropos means Adam doesn’t make sense because the origin of human sin wasn’t exclusively male. Eve was also involved. She sinned too. In fact, God holds Adam and Eve separately accountable for their sin in Genesis 3:16-17, questioning each of them in turn.

I’m troubled, as I wonder why a priest would erase Eve from this story with such conviction, especially when the term anthropos is inclusive of male and female. While Paul elsewhere speaks of Jesus typologically as the new Adam (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:45), it seems a stretch too far to essentially “masculinize” sin itself by reducing it to Adam alone – based on an alteration of Paul’s own words!

Likewise, I seriously doubt that Paul’s use of the Adam/Jesus typology, in select passages, gives us writ to apply a male-centered interpretive framework to the whole of his writings. In fact, as I’ve noted previously, Paul takes pains to stress the interdependence and mutuality of men and women. Col. 3:9 – especially in the original Greek – coheres with this emphasis.

If we really want to give up the old anthropos for the new anthropos, it would probably be prudent to recognize that anthropos is more than just “Adam.” As it is written in Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Our Lenten disciplines help us in putting off the old self so we can draw closer to God. At the same time, they may also show us that old (bad) habits die hard.

This maxim is as true for individuals as it is for the church.

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About Talley Cross

Talley is a compliance manager at a global payments company. She received her Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University in Cairo, where she was a University Fellow, and worked with the Anglican Diocese of Egypt on Muslim/Christian interfaith dialog projects. Talley has a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies from Sewanee / The University of the South. You can read more about the author here.

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