11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; 13 let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Romans 13:11-14 NRSVue
In the thirteenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul exhorts his audience to live in accordance with the event of Jesus Christ’s overcoming of our fundamental plight. Because of this epochal intervention, new possibilities of freedom become available for the first time. But we also retrospectively understand the shape of our lives differently.
Paul outlines the ramifications of this massive shift the world has undergone in and through Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. But he doesn’t simply convey information. He also encourages his listeners not to grow weary in going against the grain of the present age. The day they await is coming and is nearer now than when they first turned to Christ in faith.
Paul writes to those who inhabit the time between darkest night and brightest day, the time in which dawn is breaking through the conditions they had previously accepted as normal. The light of day disrupts these patterns and reveals the night’s features and its subjects for what they really are. In light of this, they are urged to resist the flesh and instead allow Jesus Christ to reshape their subjectivity.
Part of Paul’s apostolic task is redescription. The event of Christ’s coming and his mission is the hermeneutic Paul applies to the world’s conditions to expose their unreality or their fittingness. He writes to show what the case is and what flows out of it and corresponds to it. This is crucial for understanding what we are to do, because we must know both what the problem is and what time it is.
Phenomenologically, the night might seem exterior to us and thus as something we can evade. But the night obscures and conceals. It is active and intimately near: it is within us, surrounding and commandeering our desire. The flesh corresponds to the night both are aspects of the phenomenon of Sin’s reign. This, too, is revelation mediated through apostolic ministry. Earlier in the letter, Paul exposed the agency of Sin as a power antagonistic to both God and us. “Do not let Sin reign in your mortal bodies,” Paul urged in Romans 6:12.
The flesh isn’t our embodiment in itself. It isn’t any particular instance of sin but is rather its condition of possibility. Sin opposes God and dominates human beings; this domination is enacted in and through discrete sins. The flesh is the embodied, existential register of this phenomenon, and the night is its wider cultural and temporal register. Paul admonishes us to make no allowance for the flesh because it is the subjectivity of our prior domination by Sin.
We tend not to recognize the flesh on the surface of our lives, in our decision making, in the unfolding of our desire and its seizing upon an object. But immediacy deceives us; it obscures the operation of the flesh and our own self-sabotaging. It twists our senses. Our experience is no sure guide to what is true or best. We misunderstand and misremember; we do not learn from what transpires.
This is why revelation is needed to lighten our darkness and break through the closed circle of fallen reason. What seems apparent is not. A new relation to God, to others, and to self is possible now. Why? “The night is far gone,” Paul writes, “the day is near.” That day is the new age that has dawned with the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. And this new age makes nonsense of the ways we have become accustomed to living. The dissolution that characterizes so much of our lives belongs nowhere but the night.
It’s crucial that we recognize that it is not out of our freedom that we carry out these acts. It is a captivity, rather, that is rooted in the subversion of our desire. The desire of creatures is loving fidelity to their Creator; this is their fulfillment, and the world was meant to be the means of their satisfying this desire.
The flesh, however, undermines this. The flesh splits our consciousness and diverts us from our truest satisfaction. It compels us instead towards things that routinely harm us or degrade us. It effectively hides itself in plain sight under the attractive banners of choice and liberty and autonomy. The permissive ideology of our era encages us in alienation from God and ourselves. To tell ourselves we are free in and by indulging the flesh is to belong to the night.
Effective action for real, substantive good cannot be counted on from moral subjects in the grip of the flesh. This is the shape of our subjectivity in the present age, the principle ordering our existence in the time of the night. We are constitutionally preoccupied with ourselves, certain we know what is best for ourselves, and blind to how we act against our own self-interest.
The flesh curves us in on ourselves. Our sense of self-importance grows out of proportion with reality, and we feel ourselves to be the most significant, most honorable, most interesting, the most wronged, even when it should be apparent, we are not. We inflate our strengths and overestimate our confidence. We deny our weaknesses and minimize our sins.
The flesh is the fatal injury to any program founded on self-mastery. It precludes any such idea. The flesh is where all self-knowledge comes up short and fails. It is the site of our alienation from ourselves and the interface by which that alienation reaches into the wider world. The flesh corrodes any effort of ours to be anything contrary to the night.
The day is out of joint, furthermore, with the belligerence we accept as necessary to fight the corruption we rightly recognize infecting our world. For even the ways we try to fight its corruption are shot through with the same corruption. Our efforts to combat the darkness so often contribute further to that darkness.
Because we routinely hide our self-undermining from ourselves, it is easier by far for us to condemn our enemies than it is to own our collusion with Sin and Death, to recognize that our truest enemy is within us, working against us inside our own subjectivity. Blaming and hating them affords us the illusion of innocence.
The common factor linking those with whom we disagree and us is the flesh. This does not negate their wrongdoing; it simply admits the truth that we are also in the wrong. This means we have much more in common with them than we usually allow ourselves to acknowledge. A politics that reckoned seriously with the night and with the flesh, then, would be a humble endeavor that sought first to change itself before anyone or anything else. It certainly would not presume to understand exhaustively or to have history on its side.
Political action that belongs to the day will seek to awaken others from the narcolepsy of the flesh and its futility. This happened to Paul, whose passage from persecutor of the church to apostle is emblematic of revelation’s transformative power. The course of his life was interrupted by Jesus Christ, and all his former presuppositions and allegiances were transvaluated by the revelation that the Jesus he had sought to extinguish was the promised Messiah. All he had done was for a purpose of which he was certain, but in a moment of apocalyptic reversal, their true significance was exposed. He had been harming himself in the pursuit of his aims.
The same is true of all of us. We have injured ourselves, those we love, and the causes we ostensibly serve with our flesh-warped desire. Paul himself was consequently awoken and dedicated himself to organizing communities of other dawn-awaiting, Christ-following subjects.
The ideologies of the flesh are a kind of dream state. We must be awoken from it, or else we will continue our futile courses, imagining we are accomplishing something when in reality we are asleep.
”It is already the moment for you to wake from sleep,” Paul writes. This moment is not the time of triumphalistic, crypto-theological myths of progress or the inexorable succession of second after second after second marking the decay of all created things. This moment is occasioned by Christ’s inauguration of a new course. Eschatology is a matter of this future breaking into the present. The dawning day is a new time distinguished from the linear course of disappointment and disintegration that dooms all our schemes.
The announcement of Jesus’ victory over the night and the flesh carries the impact of that victory in its telling. The reception of that message rouses the hearer from slumber and recalibrates their subjectivity. Their subjection to the flesh is contested by the sovereignty of Jesus over the conditions of the world’s night.
We will not overcome the night by any strategy we concoct or by any superior righteousness we think we possess. We are of the night, and our natural ends belong to the night. Whatever superiority we imagine we have is, precisely, imaginary: a function of our flawed need to be better than we actually are.
What we must do, Paul implores, is “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” To put on Jesus Christ is to be recalibrated to his freedom and his dedication to the good and true and beautiful. For it is in taking in his subjectivity, adopting his posture and inhabiting the shape of his life, that light breaks upon and within the darkness to which we are habituated, exposing it as darkness and us as subject to it.
The chief political project of the time between night and day is preparing oneself with the light that is dawning. “Put on the armor of light,” Paul instructs. Collective action that welcomes the day is only possible when and where the flesh is recognized and resisted with the putting on of Christ. To put on Christ in any consistent manner and to live in fidelity to the event of his mission requires others who have also been awakened. It cannot be done alone, as humanity was never meant to be alone. Political existence is inescapably communal as it regulates the shared goods of a shared life.
The common goal of self-rule cuts against this ethic. But such a good is only ever illusory, as the ego claiming it pretends to wield a competence it does not natively possess. It is an impossible ambition for the divided subject to fantasize. And it is a violently competitive fantasy to indulge. So many harmful repercussions follow our futile attempts to actualize this fantasy.
So much of our political striving amounts to little more than doomed attempts to impose such fantasies upon the world. Our need to fulfill them distorts and degrades us. There is no emancipation to be had in fantasy, only further self-enclosure and self-deception.
Ideology asserts that something other than Jesus Christ awakens one from the world’s stupor. But no other force is adequate to the task. The only revolution that has reckoned adequately with the ontology of the world that is and the world that will be is the overthrowing of the powers that oppose both God and humankind by Jesus Christ.
He is the substance of the age to come, disrupting the chaos of the present age. A hypothetical future divorced from him is sheer temporal exhaustion, the inevitable foreclosure of possibilities and potentialities. History reified as an agent has neither power nor authority to change the world’s conditions. It is a fantasy figurehead. The subject of history is Jesus Christ, and decline, anomie, and tyranny are the norm when and where his newness of life is not restructuring human subjectivity and relationships.
We have been enthralled to the flesh for long enough. The age to come has dawned, and the night is coming to an end. May we be roused out of our fleshly fantasies to wakefulness and take up substantive freedom by putting on Jesus Christ.
