By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Tuesday
It's God who justifies
Romans 3: 21-27
Of all the epistles of Paul, Romans comes closest to giving us the author's theological thought. The Church at Rome was not one of Paul's congregations. The letter appears to be a means Paul uses to introduce himself by providing a systematic expression of his theology. Romans has been called "The Gospel according to Paul ". I find that five of the readings I selected for this Lenten study are from Romans. Martin Luther and Karl Barth are only two of a number of theologians who rediscovered the gospel for the church of their time by undertaking a study of Romans.
Today's passage is the first of several little summaries of the Christian message in this tract. Paul has been discussing two classic human procedures for living the full life. First he discusses the life that seeks to satisfy desire, and then the life that seeks to order itself correctly by obeying rules. The first procedure degenerates into more and more bizarre behaviour as the person seeks to stimulate an increasingly jaded desire. The second procedure is cursed with a load of guilt as the person fails to fulfil all the requirements.
I find this a very telling analysis of everybody's predicament. I recall that when I first came across Sigmund Freud's analysis of the human predicament, I thought, "My goodness! It sounds like Romans." Freud was pessimistic about the human condition. According to him, the life that is lived for the satisfaction of desire endures so much pain that it desires to end desire. Living that way turns into a death wish. The life that is lived under the rule of conscience is driven by a bad conscience into anti-social behaviour-another kind of death wish. What makes Freud's analysis interesting to me is his claim that we are all caught up in both procedures. What makes both Paul's and Sigmund's analyses interesting to me is that I recognize myself in them.
- If these are accurate analyses of the human condition, what in the world can put it right? Such a radical predicament requires a radical cure.
- At this point Paul announces,
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.
A most helpful key to understanding Paul's God-talk is this word righteousness. It is the same Greek word that is sometimes translated justification. When Paul speaks of God's righteousness, he is speaking of God's justification, of God's method of putting right.
And his big news is that Christ Jesus shows us God's way of putting right. We are put right by God's grace as a gift. That's the righteousness of God to which the law and the prophets bear witness. We have been studying some of these prophets. I think they have borne witness to it.
Petition
Gracious God,
Our souls have need of you and for them we pray.
The living of our lives overwhelms us. We want to love and be loved. What else makes life worth living? But all kinds of things go wrong with our loving. We risk letting someone else matter to us and that puts us at their mercy. We come to matter to someone else and that starts to feel like entrapment. Our loving gets infected with the need to possess. Our caring grows weak when it encounters pain, and bitter when it encounters rejection. We know a little about loving sinners but it fades in us like the morning mist.
Refine our loving with the fire of your fierce love so that our caring will keep strong and without manipulation.
We want the work of our hands to accomplish good. But all kinds of things go wrong with our work. We long for work that will justify our existence, work that will make life better on the earth. But there is no work that is not contaminated, and we are overwhelmed by all that is left to be done. On every hand there are battles to join, wrongs to be put right, needs to be met. We fuss and sweat and toil and mess up and quit.
We need to get right with you so that our work is an instrument of our will. We need your justification so that we don't manage the world as we try to justify ourselves.
Loving God,- Reconcile the world to yourself. If your arms are beneath us
- we can go in peace,
care with compassion, and - take up our task in courage.
Amen