Romans 5.1-8
What does it take to change the world? Because it was New Year a newspaper once published 100 ways to slightly improve your life without even trying. That’s an attractive proposition, isn't it - making things better for ourselves and the world around us with very little effort?
Here’s a sample of the suggestions.
For instance, the article says that if we want to get fit we should aim to exercise on a Monday night ‘because nothing fun ever happens on a Monday night’, so we won’t be missing out on anything. And if we want to avoid unnecessary arguments it advises us ‘not to be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.’ It says that ‘we should always be willing to miss the next train,’ we should always ‘ask questions and then take care to listen to the answers.’ For foodies, it advises that ‘we should eat salted butter, because life’s too short to waste on the unsalted sort.’
And more seriously, we should try to ‘buy secondhand’, we should write to our MP whenever something in the world makes us angry, we should say ‘hello’ to our neighbours, repair our clothes, make something from scratch that we would normally buy, volunteer for one charity and set up an affordable standing order for another, and stop saving things for best but get the use out of them instead, and take care to show respect to younger people. There’s lots more in the same vein.
Today’s passage from the Letter to the Romans offers Paul’s recipe for changing the world for the better, but it comes with a health warning. There really is no way of making things better with very little effort. Istead, it takes considerable guts.
The passage begins with 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.’ Paul goes on to say that 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 reminded us that people do die for one another, often without knowing those they put their own life at risk to save. I think, for example, of countless doctors who came out of retirement to work with coronavirus patients. Some of those doctors then died, and all of them put their lives at risk at a time when the disease was not very well known and the treatments were uncertain and often ineffective. Perhaps it’s not after all as rare as Paul imagined for a righteous person to dare to die for someone else whose goodness they do not even know, but this way of living and dying exemplifies how God loves us.
Paul enlarges on this idea when he warns that discipleship, following the way of Christ, certainly isn’t trouble free. Quite the reverse. He says that 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 life’s not all in vain, and Paul says 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 translation of the ‘New Testament’, the Greek scholar 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.’ So do we have that kind of guts? Because that’s what making a covenant with God is all about.
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