Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Colossians · About this commentary
Buried with Him in Baptism
Colossians 2:11-12
11 In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, · WEB
The circumcision the readers already have was not performed by hands — and baptism is described as burial and resurrection.
In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands. Something in the Colossian package apparently involved the rite; Paul does not argue about it but says they have already undergone the thing it signified.
The qualifier not made with hands is Scripture's way of marking the divine counterpart of a human act, and the content is given: the putting off of the body of the flesh. What is cut away is not a piece of skin but a whole manner of existence.
Verse 12 supplies the event where it happened: buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him. Both verbs are compounds beginning with — the letter's recurring preposition for union.
The picture is not cleansing but funeral and resurrection, as Paul argues at length elsewhere Romans 6:4. Baptism corresponds to circumcision here as the sign of belonging, and what it signs is a death that has already occurred.
And the means is named so that nothing turns on the ceremony itself: through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. The power is God's, the connection is faith, and the same resurrection that raised Christ is what raised them.
settled What this mark means