Romans 5:1-11
March 15 MMXX
I.
The first thing we have always to remember about Paul’s letter to the Romans is that it is written to Christians living in Rome, the center and hub of imperial political and economic power. They reside at the heart of the supreme secular authority, the same authority that Pontius Pilate wielded when he executed Jesus. They live in the shadow of Pilate’s bosses.
It is a city that features a glorification of the Emperor and the military, that revels in the wealth of a few, and the prosperity of which is based on conquest, exploitation, and slavery. It proclaims itself as the bringer of peace, but it is a “peace” that is enforced by terror and brutality, whose main end is the stability needed for the economy to keep churning so rich people can get even richer.
Rome also had an ambivalent to hostile relationship with Judaism, and Jews were ejected from the city as undesirable foreigners on several occasions. This is a time when the followers of Jesus were still considered Jews, and the congregation in Rome contained many who grew up Jewish.
Even though he has never been to Rome, Paul is desperately trying to keep this diverse, multi-cultural congregation together. He realizes how important it is for them to be making this amazing witness of love, compassion, peace, acceptance, and reconciliation, right there in the belly of the beast, right there where the values of violence, exploitation, division, injustice, and arrogance are most overtly proclaimed and perpetrated.
When he says, “we are justified by faith,” he means that the followers of Jesus live by trusting in God’s justice, which is very different from the retributive, punishing, terroristic, biased system that Rome calls “justice.” God’s justice is about forgiveness and love.
When he says, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” his hearers at the time would have noticed that God’s peace is the opposite of the propaganda they get constantly fed about Pax Romana, the squalid order that Rome imposed by brutal force. He is reminding them that they are in a community of shalom together, living in and witnessing to a different kind of peace, the peace which is revealed in the Jewish Messiah whom Rome killed, but who nevertheless still lives by the Spirit with, within, and among them. The peace of Christ is a peace that cannot be extinguished by human violence, not even the organized, authorized, legal violence of the State.
When he talks about their “hope of sharing the glory of God” they know that God’s glory is the opposite of the bombastic, counterfeit, arrogant “glory” of Rome, with statues of generals and emperors on every corner, their ubiquitous flags and graven eagles, and fancy uniforms, their magnificent government buildings, and all the other trappings of power.
God’s glory is reflected in God’s Image, with which every human being is endowed, giving every human being value and making every human being holy. God’s Image is catastrophically defiled by the stratification of Roman society, with the few wealthy and powerful at the top and everyone else left to work to enrich them and fight for scraps from their table.
II.
For the congregations of Christians were made up of people who were once enemies. There were Jews and there were people from all of the other nations that Rome had conquered, nations that stayed conquered because Rome fomented mistrust among them, filling their minds with the lie that only beneficial Roman power kept them from constant war with each other.
And yet here were these multi-cultural congregations of people who realized they had in common this victimization by Rome, and came together to worship and follow Jesus Christ, whom Rome killed. He is the fulfillment of the Hebrew tradition rooted in the experience of slaves liberated from slavery in Egypt.
These congregations are also made up largely of people from the bottom of society: slaves, servants, workers, women, people who could relate to the Hebrew stories like the emancipation at Passover.
They are people who know suffering, which is why Paul encourages them with his words about how “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
This is not a natural or automatic trajectory, as we know. Suffering can produce despair, endurance can produce cynicism. Character, if we even get that far, can produce self-righteousness. And instead of hope we can end up with wishful thinking, irrational optimism, or just plain denial.
It is only through our trust in Jesus Christ, and our participation in his suffering and death through baptism, the eucharist, and confession, that these challenges get turned into ways of growth and transformation. It is only through the gathering of people who share with each other and with God their pain, their sadness, their feelings of guilt and failure, along with the joy, healing, forgiveness, and peace they experience together, that suffering becomes not only bearable, but productive because it leads somewhere. It can lead to life. And where there is life there is hope.
The hope that followers of Jesus share is not empty but we have a sign of its validity here and now in the love we have for each other, love that is proof of the Holy Spirit’s work among us. Because despite all the barriers and obstacles, all the leaders and media stoking our fear and anger, all the impulses driving us to selfishness and exclusion, we still gather together in mutual love. We still extend ourselves in service to anyone in need.
In our time, when we are faced with the politics of division, tempted to hate, fear, and be angry at our neighbors who are Muslim, Gay, Trans, or immigrants, when we are faced as well with a widening gap between the very rich and everyone else, we need Jesus’ politics of love and inclusion, of unity and peace, of forgiveness and acceptance more than ever.
III.
Paul then explains how this beloved community is founded on the love of God revealed in the way Jesus Christ died for us, his enemies. For all, especially those in Rome whose daily work necessarily served to prop up and support the Empire, facilitating its predatory regime around the world, have sinned. That is, we all participate in systems that are designed to do violence and perpetuate injustice, and are very efficient and effective at accomplishing this. None of us is exempt or pure.
He has just got done explaining why keeping to the letter of the Torah does not necessarily create real justice, indeed can even work against it by making us think it is enough… while we maintain the same hostility and separation, and sustain the brutal mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism.
Rather, he says it is our faith, exemplified by Abraham, that is, our trust and obedience of Jesus Christ that does create justice. For he turns upside down the decadent, depraved, and disgraceful values of Rome and, instead of inventing and killing enemies, Christ requires that we love them and even give our lives for them as he does. That is the transfiguring power of faith which trusts in and follows the crucified Jewish Messiah, Jesus. In him there are no more enemies, just other humans, made in God’s Image, people for whom Christ also died, giving his life that we may have his life of reconciliation and peace.
That’s what led the early Christians to stay in cities afflicted with plague, ministering to victims even at risk of their own lives. While everyone else, especially the rich who could afford it, headed for the hills to save their own skins, followers of Jesus attended to the sick and dying, and some certainly became sick and died themselves. No doubt some of those they served were the same Roman police officers who had harassed them, and maybe even executed some of their friends.
That’s why we need to make sure, in our own time of plague with this coronavirus, we do not hide just to save ourselves. We of course know about microbes, which the early church did not. We certainly don’t want to endanger anyone by our carelessness. Yet we do want to do what we can to provide health care, testing, paid sick-leave, and other kinds of support for people whose lives are being disrupted, like students, travelers, and health-care workers. And we need to resist, on the one hand the self-serving lies of those in power, and on the other hand our tendency to fall into panic, hoarding, and scapegoating.
For Christ’s blood, representing his life, given for the life of the world, binds us together, covering us, creating like a connecting membrane. For we are the enemies “reconciled to God by the death of his Son,” and we, having thus been reconciled and gathered into the beloved community, will “be saved by his life.” That is, by living together his life of compassion, service, forgiveness, healing, love, justice, and peace, we will be saved from the destruction that inevitably awaits all powers based on falsehood, injustice, evil, and violence.
IV.
We are “saved by his life,” says the apostle Paul. On the cross his life is given for us, and to us. By the power of his Spirit, may we live that life, realizing that if we have died with him, letting go of our old selves which enslaved us to ego and empire, we will also live with him, gaining our true selves, Christ in us, radiating God’s justice, peace, hope, and love.
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