Romans 5.1-8
This passage is a beautiful explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. ‘While we were still weak… Christ died for the ungodly… Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person… but God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.’ Our covenant relationship with God is sealed when we have ‘faith’ in Jesus’ death, which gives us ‘access to this grace in which we stand’ and makes peace between us and God.
But is Paul right when he says, ‘Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die’? The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us that people do die for another, often without knowing those they put their own life at risk to save. I think, for example, of doctors who have come out of retirement to work with coronavirus patients, some of whom have died. Perhaps it’s not so rare as Paul imagined, but this way of living and dying exemplifies how God loves us.
Paul does capture this idea when he warns that discipleship, following the way of Christ, isn’t trouble free. Quite the reverse. If we’re following someone who suffered for us we should expect to suffer too and even take satisfaction in it! Suffering can be a test of our endurance, it can build character, it can lead us to hope that it’s not all in vain, and our hope will not be disappointed ‘because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.’
These could easily be cheap sentiments, shared from the comfort of Paul’s armchair. But we know that in fact he was immersed in suffering. He was imprisoned, flogged, shipwrecked, caught up in the epicentre of riots and - in all probability - martyred for his faith; and for many years he was also plagued by illness.
What about us? In his 'New Testament' Nicholas King has a particularly striking translation of verse 7. He replaces the New Revised Standard Version’s rather tame, ‘perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die’, with the more challenging, ‘perhaps a person might have the guts to die in a good cause.’ Do we have that kind of guts?
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