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.

Romans 1 Radical Equality

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 1

Romans 1:1-6, 14-17

The theme of slavery and freedom runs throughout Romans. Even the word “Lord” can mean “Owner.” Paul is the slave of Jesus, sent out with a message, a gift for the outsiders of his world, the Gentiles. This message is the good news about God that Jesus taught and lived. When this good news moves us to faith, to trust in the character and power and love of God, we are also slaves sent out with a message. We act on behalf of our owner, Jesus, and we share the good news with our own version of outsiders.

This necessity to take the good news to others moved George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers), in the mid-1600s. He wrote in his Journal that the Lord let him see a great people to be gathered (Ch. 6). “When the Lord God and His Son Jesus Christ sent me forth into the world to preach His everlasting gospel and kingdom, I was glad that I was commanded to turn people to that inward Light, Spirit, and Grace, by which all might know their salvation and their way to God; even that Divine Spirit which would lead them into all truth…”(Ch. 2). We can hear in “commanded” the same sense of obligation that moved Paul.

Also like Paul, Fox shared the good news with all levels of society, from nobility to beggar. He made no difference between social classes, so he took off his hat to no one, which witnessed to the essential equality of all before God. Though it is difficult for Paul to say, he does affirm that the good news is as much for the Gentiles, the Greeks and the barbarians, as it is for the Jews.

Why might Paul—or we—be ashamed of the good news?  For one thing, it removes our own class or status. Everyone who believes it becomes a slave of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t belong to any one group. It is common. It strips everyone down to essentials, like being born again. The good news is the energy of God, the strength of God that pushes all who believe God towards deliverance, freedom, salvation.

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