Romans 5 and 6: Wrath and Grace

A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians

Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay Press, a Friends publishing house

Lesson 4

Romans 5:1-8, 12-14, 18-19

Jesus identified with us by joining us in the death our sins earned, and God identifies us with Jesus in putting all of us right through the resurrection. This is a mystery of our faith, which we trust in without entirely understanding. Because we know now that we are at peace with God, one with God, we move into all we should be. No more fear. So we no longer see hard times as punishments but as chances to endure and be faithful to God, opportunities for God’s love to pour into our hearts.

Charles Williams noticed that Job complains to God about his undeserved hard times, and God shows up and says, “Have you considered the hippopotamus?” Though God does not explain, the beautiful thing is that God shows up. Several times as I have honestly expressed my own negative feelings to God, God has shown up. God doesn’t explain why I am going through trials, nor does God say how much better a person I will be for them. God’s presence does not answer my questions, but it satisfies my hunger for justice and mercy. It’s so clear God is someone we can trust.

Paul reminds us that we don’t earn this kind of relationship with God. Jesus has made it possible for us to be at peace with God. Jesus showed confidence in God and put his life on the line for us. Hidden in the word reconciliation is a metaphor of exchanging currency. Jesus set us free by exchanging himself to death for us, and now his resurrected life keeps us safe and sound from wrath, from agitation of soul.

NRSV adds “of God” to wrath, though the Greek doesn’t have it. Julian of Norwich said that she acknowledged that Holy Church teaches the wrath of God, but that she never saw it in any of her openings. Certainly God loves us so much. But when we stubbornly refuse to enter the Kingdom through the door provided by Jesus, God looks to us like wrath.

Lesson 5

Romans 6:1-14

Paul always walks the fine line between celebrating grace as our doorway to relationship with God and warning that grace does not mean license. This relates so well to the early preaching of Friends. George Fox spoke constantly against “crying up sin” as if Jesus could not really set people free. Fox insisted that dying with Jesus and rising with Jesus actually makes us innocent and able to choose obediently, rather than to make the same habitual selfish, harmful choices.

Jesus said we cannot serve two masters, particularly God and “mammon.“ The issue hidden in the word “mammon” is trust: where do we place our trust?  This returns us to the universal sin of Romans 1, which is to place the created thing in the place of the creator. Such a disposition means we covet, envy, murder, fight, deceive, gossip, slander, defy authority, boast, fool around, hurt, and betray other people.

George Fox refused to take his hat off to social superiors, and their angry and often violent response was evidence to him that their Christianity was hardly even skin deep. This contributed to his understanding that true baptism was spiritual rather than physical, since almost everyone he met had been baptized. Today’s Quakers need to ask whether they have indeed undergone spiritual baptism and understand that we are joined with Jesus in death and resurrection. And we need to ask what in our own lives shows others that our Christianity has not gone deep, that we think we can serve two masters?

Clearly, living under grace is not effortless. We exercise our wills to do what we know is right, what God is telling us each day to do. God washes us, clothes us with new garments, gives us a job to do, and we choose, as slaves of God, to do that job faithfully.

Romans 2 and 3: God in Us, Moving toward Us, Resting on Us

A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians

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Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay Press, a Friends publishing house

Lesson 2

Romans 1:18-23; 3:9-12, 19-20

Quakers have a view of the human heart that includes both the bent toward evil and the yearning toward good. The light of God enlightens every person (John 1) as well as the need for people to turn from their own error and idolatry to worship the true God. George Fox frequently pointed out how the churchgoers of his day placed the building and the hierarchy in the place of God, who dwells in each believer as a temple and who meets with congregations of believers to teach them in spirit and in truth.

Paul says that each person has an internal witness to truth and that the wicked in every culture ignore that witness. That witness calls us to accountability for our actions. Instead, we prefer to place creation before the creator, and we sacrifice to things that have no eternal worth.

I was startled into awareness of my own early departure from that witness within. I was reading Becky Pippert’s Out of the Saltshaker, and she referred to the myth of innocence we carry when we try to justify ourselves, to make it ok that we have violated our inner witness. I remembered a cruel exclusion of another child when I was very young. It came back to me so clearly and convicted me that I was not innocent; my meanness had scarred me, even though I was so young. Paul points out that none of us has a place to stand that makes us qualified to judge others. This is both humbling and a big relief.

Even grownup Christians can violate their instincts to do good, can disobey the light within, can ignore what the law requires, namely to love our God wholly and love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Romans 13:8-9). As Fox would have put it, we need to “possess what we profess.” When God points out a gap between what we say we believe and what we do, we need to be ready to turn around and go God’s way.

Lesson 3

Romans 3:21-31

Paul asserts that the law, the prophets, and the faith exhibited by Jesus all reveal the trustworthiness of God. The faith of Jesus in God our Father helps us understand the law and the prophets. We understand the whole Bible through Jesus.

George Fox wrote that the scripture was given forth by the Spirit of God and all people must first come to the Spirit of God in themselves by which they might know God and Christ of whom the prophets and the apostles learned; and by the same Spirit they might know the holy scriptures and the Spirit which was in them that gave them forth, the spirit of God. He told his countrymen that they did not know the word of God but only the letter.

In his search for truth, George Fox met Jesus personally: “There is one,” he heard, “even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition.” This transformed him from a heartsick seeker to a jubilant and determined sharer of the good news that Jesus Christ is present today to teach his people himself. Just as the inner witness of God was universal, the nearness, the presence of the Kingdom is universal also. Jesus ransoms all from slavery to sin. In our present time, God is just what God should be, right and good, and God makes us just as we should be. We can trust God to do this because Jesus did.

  

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Prepositions are so tricky in every translation, and the ones in this phrase from verse 22, “unto all and upon all” (KJV), are telescoped into “for all” (NRSV). However, the dual sense of how we can now know that God is just as God should be is a little lost in “for all.”  This conviction about God is both moving toward and into us and resting on us. The combined sense of movement and rest shows up in the next story of Abraham (Romans 4) whose confidence in God made him right with God and helped him hope that God’s promise would be fulfilled despite his not seeing how it could be accomplished.

The Myth of Innocence

Years ago, my Sunday school class read a book by Rebecca Manley Pippert called Out of the Salt Shaker and into the World, in which she referred to the myth of innocence. (Turns out she got this idea from reading The Fall by Albert Camus—a good thing for an English teacher to hear.) This was a very useful concept to me and helped me experience the grace of God, so I want to share it with you.

I’ll start with the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. After disobeying God, Adam and Eve covered their shame with fig leaves and went into the woods to hide from God. There is something deeply sad about their wanting to hide from the divine lover. All their previous relationship of trust and dependence dissipates into fear and shame. But who can win a game of hide and seek with omniscience? The first principle to remember is that God already knows.

Second, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. It was not my fault, it was the fault of something else. Specifically, God, it was the fault of something or someone else YOU made. Implicitly, it is God’s fault. He, she, or it, is to blame for what I did; and ultimately You, God, are to blame. God doesn’t argue with any of these, just goes over the consequences. "Here’s what the world is like when you don’t trust God’s love enough to obey." The world becomes inhospitable and painful, and hostility and power mar every relationship. The second principle is that blaming other people poisons our lives.

Now I want to jump to the story in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Embodied love in Jesus meets a woman with a checkered past. Also, she is used to being socially snubbed by the Jews, and expects the same from Jesus. In fact, when Jesus asks her for water, she says, “Why are you even talking to me? You’re a Jew.” Jesus said, “You have no idea who I am because if you did, you’d ask me for living water.” She replies, “Really? You don’t even have a cup to collect water in. You act like you’re greater than our founder Jacob who dug this well.” (Don’t be deceived by the “sir.”) Jesus replies to her, “And will this water satisfy your deepest thirst? No, of course not, it only temporarily satisfies your superficial thirst. But if you, for example, were to drink of the water I offer, you will be satisfied and a source of living water yourself.” She says, “Ok, then, give some of this to me, so I won’t have to come here to the well.”

Put into Eden’s terms, God in human form shows up to a woman hiding in broad daylight. She fences with him until she finally admits she is thirsty. The third principle is to admit that our defences have trapped us and we actually would like some freedom.

Then Jesus challenges her with a form of the question God asked in Eden, “Why are you hiding?” He says, “Go get your husband and bring him back with you.” “I don’t have a husband,” she says, and it’s true. Jesus adds to the truth: “In fact, you’ve had five husbands, and now you are not even married to the man you’re with.” An aside here—one contextual bit of information: divorce was hotly debated at Jesus’s time and widely practiced; in one school of thought, a man who was dissatisfied with a wife for any reason could write her a certificate of divorce and put her out of his house. The other view was that divorce required some conditions, namely neglect, abandonment, abuse, and unfaithfulness, and Moses set it up to protect women as much as men. Though it is comfortable to view her as a victim, it just may be that she was a part of the problem.

She certainly doesn’t cave, just because she’s been slapped with fact. She diverts the discussion onto theology: What about the right place to worship, o prophet.

Jesus tells her, “The place isn’t important; what’s important is worship in spirit and truth.” Ma’am, with all due respect, you need to get more right than the place in order to worship.

Her last gasp: “The Messiah will tell us what is correct.”

And Jesus: “I am Messiah—I’m telling you.”

She went back to her village and said, “Come see this man who told me everything I’ve ever done. Can he be the one we’ve been waiting for?”

She stays in hiding until the gracious person of Jesus helps her face the truth—the truth about herself and the Truth in physical form. Look at me, Jesus says, I am Truth. You can be true, too, you can tell truth and know truth.

Interestingly, it is the exposure of her own personal history that tips her over into belief and evangelistic zeal. She does not confess in any obvious sense, but she admits that Jesus knows everything she has ever done, her shame and her sin. Even if she is a victim, she is not innocent, and she doesn’t say Jesus knows everything people have done to me.

The story of the woman taken in adultery has a similar moment. She certainly has no need to confess, since she was taken in the act, and the preservation of her life depends on Jesus facing her accusers with their own personal truth—they have sinned also, they also are ashamed, and likely their shame fuels their anger at her. And Jesus says to her, “Go and sin no more.” She is both victim and sinner.

The myth of innocence for me went like a Life in Hell (Matt Groening)comic strip: I’m innocent for 11 frames, and then finally, ok, I’m guilty as hell. The protestations of innocence were accurate enough for a particular set of events that victimized me, but I was not without sin myself. Even as a small child, I knew enough to recognize that I was deliberately unkind to someone smaller and weaker than myself. For some reason, admitting my own sin against a weaker person helped set me free from needing to insist on being a victim.

The fourth principle is this: Admit it. Let the consciousness of what you have done against conscience or truth see the light of day—maybe just to God, maybe to a spiritual friend and to God. Let Jesus tell you everything you’ve ever done. It isn’t easy, but it is the way grace breaks through our fence, our defence. And sets us free. The truth sets us free, and the spirit of God guides us into all truth.