That ‘circumcision made without hands’ is a
reference to baptism can be seen from the other details we find in verse 12: ‘you
were buried with him in baptism’ and ‘you were also raised with him’. This
analogy has its foundation in the spiritual order. Just as circumcision removes
a strip of flesh from a man’s body, so baptism too effects a radical stripping—the
putting off of the body of flesh. For St Paul the flesh is the power of sin in
man, for ‘the mind that is set on flesh is hostile to God’ (Rom. 8:7). Through it,
man ‘serves the law of sin’ (Rom. 7:25) and is ‘sold under sin’ (Rom. 7:14).
The ‘body of flesh’ is the body in subjection to the sinful inclinations of the
flesh; in Rom. 6:6, St Paul calls it the ‘sinful body’. This body is destined
to death. More, it is ‘already dead because of sin’ (Rom. 8:6). It is from this
double, and fatal, tyranny of sin and death that baptism delivers the
Christian: ‘You, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your
flesh, God made alive together with him’ (Col. 2:13). This symbol of the ‘circumcision
of Christ’ through the ‘putting off’ of ‘the body of flesh’ is closely linked,
as we can see with the images of the putting off of the old man and of burial
with Christ. What is more, our text associates them formally.
However, this symbol, like the others, is not
a completely negative one. The description ‘made without hands’ shows us this.
It refers to an eschatological reality of heavenly origin through which God
himself fulfils in a new spiritual order what was only prefigured by the institution
of circumcision under the old covenant. By effecting within us this putting off
of everything that is sinful (something with the circumcision of the old
covenant was unable to achieve) baptism opens out to us and associates us with
the fulness of Christ, in whom ‘the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily’
(2:9). Baptism—the ‘circumcision of Christ—delivers us from the dominion of ‘the
elemental spirits of the universe’ and from the whole realm of the transitory
and the ‘earthly’, which is represented by the old prescriptions of the Law,
and dedicates us to God.
The idea that the ‘circumcision of Christ’s
admits us to the new people of God, just as the old rite of circumcision
admitted the Hebrews to the old Israel, does not seem to be envisaged in the
epistle to the Colossians. But it is perhaps suggested by a text from the
epistle to the Ephesians, which may possibly contain a reference to baptism
(cf. H. Sahlin, Die Beschneidung Christi
Lund, 1950).
‘Remember that at one time you Gentiles in
the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which
is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated
from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel . . . But now in Christ
Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ’
(Eph. 2:11-13). (D Mollat, “Baptismal Symbolism in St. Paul,” in Baptism in the New Testament: A Symposium [trans.
David Askew; Baltimore, Md.: Helicon Press, 1964], 63-83, here, pp. 77-78)
