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Keeping the "Old Man" Buried
By Graemme Marshall

In ages past when someone died it wasn't a certainty they were actually dead.

n an enormous Gothic building in Munich, the dead were once laid in long rows all connected by cords leading to bells in the central office of a caretaker. It seems his sleep was disturbed often enough to make the arrangement worthwhile. The sound of the bell announced that someone was not dead after all!

There is, of course, a time limit on how long one can leave a body lying around. One of the oldest tests to prove death was a lighted candle applied to various parts of the body on the assumption skin no longer blisters once circulation has ceased. This worked for Luigi Vittori, a cavalryman in the service of Pope Pius IX. Luigi was certified dead of asthma in a Rome hospital, but a more skeptical doctor held a flame to his face. Luigi shuddered back to consciousness and resumed his duties at the Vatican with third-degree burns thereafter.

English novelist Wilkie Collins, a close associate of Charles Dickens, left a note by his bedside each night specifying certain precautions to be taken before it was assumed he was dead. Hans Christian Andersen around the same period never went out without a similar note in his pocket.

This kind of concern seems to have arisen largely because of the activities of the Resurrection Men. In Britain, these entrepreneurs dug up and sold the recently dead to the Barber Surgeons Company, which received an official grant of only four corpses a year but paid top prices for additional subjects and asked no embarrassing questions. The trade became public in 1824 when John McIntyre, who was certified dead and properly buried in his local churchyard, woke up on the dissecting table at a London medical school when the demonstrator's knife pierced his chest.

When medical science was rudimentary or nonexistent, mistakes were often made.
In times of war and plague when thousands of dead bodies have to be disposed of as quickly as possible, many are buried alive. When medical science was rudimentary or nonexistent, mistakes were often made. Today with people certified by attendant doctors and prepared for disposal by professional undertakers, errors would seem impossible. And yet, on December 11, 1963, 35-year-old Elsie Waring collapsed at her home in London and was taken to the Willesden Hospital where three doctors certified her as dead on arrival. Ten hours later, she gasped and began to breathe again while being lifted into her coffin at Kilburn Public Mortuary.

What's the moral of the stories?

When a person intends to commit his life to being a follower of Jesus Christ, he must begin his new way of life by being baptized for the forgiveness of his sins (Acts 2:38). This symbolizes the crucifying (putting to death) and burial of the old way of life and the rising up to follow a new way of life (Romans 6:6,4).

However, some converts don't follow through and don't much change. Others make good changes but later revert back to old bad habits. For Christians, when the "old man" is buried at baptism, it is often still a struggle to leave the body symbolically buried in the watery grave. There are some who years after their baptism still seem much like the "old man" supposedly buried. Christians must keep their "old man" (or woman) buried or subdued. How much does the old way dictate your lifestyle and attitude?

Many religions practice sprinkling or pouring at baptism. Augustine in the late fourth and fifth centuries laid the foundation for infant baptism in the Roman Church. To them, the infant's head is sprinkled with water to cleanse its soul. Sprinkling water on the head is neither a burial nor immersion to symbolize the "old man" being buried. Being completely buried in water symbolizes the death and burial of the old way of life. Coming up out of the water symbolizes a new life in Christ.

But leaving the "old man" in the watery grave isn't easy.

The struggle against our erring mind

When Christians sin, they are responsible for their actions.
When Christians sin, they are responsible for their actions. There can be no excuse that others made them do it. C.S. Lewis, in his Screwtape Letters, has an interesting perspective on the problem of self-deception, of humans seeing themselves. He writes of a person in a deceived condition such that, "he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who lived or worked with him in the same office." This reminds us of James 1:24: "...for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was."

In another example Lewis explains: "When two humans have lived together for some years it usually happens that each has irritating tones of voice and facial expressions. A lift of the eyebrows that a son learned to dislike in nursery school -- which now later he assumes his wife does deliberately to annoy him. And never let him suspect that he has similar annoyances which he cannot see or hear about himself."

We are to "put off the old self" and put on the "new man" (Ephesians 4:24). Each Passover brings a yearly checkup of how well we are doing in keeping the old man buried. In running our Christian race, the season of God's feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread is a good time to evaluate whether our "old man or woman" is being kept under the waters of our baptism. Paul's zealous example is good advice: "But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified" (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).

God's people should always be working to clear the leaven of sin permanently from our minds, attitudes and lives, every day, all year long (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). Work to be the "new man" and leave the "old man" dead and buried!

Recommended reading

To learn more about how you can live a new life, read the booklet .

Copyright 2007 by United Church of God, an International Association All rights reserved.


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