Proper 12, Year A: Romans 8:26-39
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
July 26, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 22:15 in, in case the link doesn’t drop you in the right place).
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” – Romans 8:28
Back in seminary I took a class about preaching “difficult texts.” We were supposed to focus on Bible passages that tend to be controversial in our day, things like Paul talking about slaves needing to be obedient to their masters or where women are treated as property, as in today’s Hebrew Bible story of Jacob marrying the sisters Leah and Rachel, who also happened to be his cousins. Because the Bible often simply tells the story, without offering a clear stance on the morality of the behavior, we’re often left with the feeling of silent assent, of the perpetuation and support of inequitable and abusive ancient social structures. And while stories like these—stories about the sexual trafficking of Hagar, Zilpah, and Bilhah by other, more powerful women—may have been sadly normal in ancient times, we can safely condemn those traditions today as we continue to strive to follow the Gospel in recognizing and celebrating the full humanity of each person we encounter.
Strangely enough, though, I didn’t really spend much time on the obviously controversial passages. I tended to focus more on portions of the Bible that people had used to minimize and manipulate me. Today’s epistle, of all things, happens to be one of those passages.
Growing up, I frequently heard the phrase, “All things work together for good.” People tended to use it as a sort of emotional band-aid. Every incident from scraping your knee to the tragedies of abuse or death drew the same response. Some people would maliciously goad others by quoting a little bit more of the verse: “All things work together for good for those who love God.” As time moved on and the normal events of life continued to wear on me, the verse became a mocking drone that it seemed like only I could hear.
Still, my distaste never removed either this verse or any other passage from the Bible. There it still sits, right in the middle of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It was written long before I was born, and it will surely last long after I’m dead. With the opportunity my difficult texts class offered, I thought it would be good to try to make some peace with this popular saying. As it turns out, “all things work together for good” isn’t just a pithy phrase, a platitude that allows us to ignore the pain in our or others’ lives. If we’re willing to pay attention, it’s directing us toward a communal calling as icons of Christ.
To get there, though, we need to do a little work on understanding the passage within its social context. We Americans have a very weird way of viewing the world. “Rugged individualism” is normal to us, but it’s a fairly recent philosophical development in the grand scheme of history. Because our society tends to focus on every person as an individual, we often think of statements we read in the Bible as applying to each one of us personally. But that’s not the way people understood life when the Bible was written.
One of the first things we need to remember when approaching any Biblical text is that it comes from a communal, not individualist, culture. When we hear this passage about all things working together for good, we in the United States tend to think something along the lines of “God is working all things together for my good.” But that’s not how Paul would have thought about what he was writing, nor would his audience have understood what he said in that way. We can see this communal aspect most easily in the pronouns used in our translation. Paul’s address is always plural: “us,” “we,” and “our.” [1] The only time a singular pronoun appears is in reference to God or Christ. So we need to look at this passage not as a word to me as an individual but as a proclamation to a particular group. “We know that all things work together for good.”
In the second half of our verse, the part that gets left out of most quotes, we see that “[all things work together for good] for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Here we see what looks like two descriptions of Paul’s community. First, he tells us the community is “those who love God.” In English we use the word “love” a lot of ways, but in this case Paul is referring to genuine devotion—the ideal kind of committed, unselfish love that always seeks the good of the other. It’s the kind of active love you might see in a couple who’s been married more than fifty years, a love that endures even though you may not like your partner very much at times.
Paul’s second description of the community sounds like a sort of intensifier or restriction: these people are not just “those who love God” but specifically those “who are called according to [God’s] purpose.” Christians have been debating what this “calling” means since at least the Reformation, and the rest of our passage has been at the center of the debate, with its talk of predestination, foreknowledge, and election. We don’t have time to get into that discussion, much less to solve an intellectual argument that’s vexed minds for 500 years. But when we approach the text from a communal standpoint, we find that the whole predestination problem isn’t even relevant to what the apostle is saying.
A communal worldview wouldn’t look at the text to figure out “what’s in it for me” as an individual or to wonder how I could know for certain that this statement applies to my life in isolation from everyone else. The communal mind first thinks about the group, and here Paul seems to be moving toward inclusion, not exclusion. His language isn’t restricting this particular community of those who will receive the “good” to some subgroup within a body of people committed to loving God. If anything, he’s expanding that body.
The “call” isn’t some magical thing for a special group of individuals. It isn’t a command that someone is required to obey. Another translation for the word “called” here is actually “invited,” which to me suggests the community Paul is addressing may be well-nigh universal: everyone who loves God, including everyone God has ever invited to join that community of devoted love.
Now that we know who our community is, we should explore what exactly this particular “good” is. We see the phrase “God’s purpose” at the end of the verse, and this “purpose” appears to be synonymous with the “good” we want to consider. However, that purpose isn’t defined within our verse. We’ll need to look just a little bit further to understand what this good purpose is. Going back to our passage, we read,
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.
And there we see it, God’s purpose for this community: that Christ might be the firstborn within a large family. The rest of the chapter with all its predestination talk is simply commentary on God’s goal and the certainty of its fulfillment.
But there’s another important phrase in what we just read: “to be conformed to the image of [God’s] Son.” That appears to be God’s method to build the family of Christ. We join the family, we find this singular good, by looking like Jesus? That seems kind of shallow. Someone’s appearance often has little to do with behavior or family relations. But this verse isn’t talking about something that’s only the same on the surface.
The word we see translated as “image” here is “eikōn,” the same word we use for a certain style of religious paintings[2] or the little graphics you click on your computer screen. But both of those are later applications of the word, arising hundreds or thousands of years after Paul wrote. So without reading the future definitions onto our text, what was he referring to?
The easiest place to get a sense of what Paul is talking about is the Gospels. There we find that “eikōn” is the same word Jesus uses when the religious leaders challenge him about whether or not to pay Roman taxes. He shows them a coin and, referencing the image of the emperor, asks, “Whose eikōn is this?” Paul is speaking similarly here: his words are a direct reference to the work of minting coins.
Minting coins during the Roman empire wasn’t a quick process. A team of three people could make about three coins per minute if they were working efficiently. Minting involved heating a premade metal disc, placing a die of the emperor’s image on it, and striking the die with a hammer before the metal got cold. This was a sweaty, noisy, even painful process. Since everything was done by hand, no two coins were ever exactly alike. But after going through all the flames and hammering, each coin would bear a definite similarity: a permanently embedded, three-dimensional image—an eikōn—proving it was currency of the empire. Each coin sat as a small reminder of the power of Rome and the authority the Emperor had over even the most mundane aspects of a person’s life.
Paul is telling us that God’s goal, the good purpose all things are working toward, is minting everyone invited to Christ’s family into an eikōn of Jesus.
We know that minting a coin is hard work for the laborer, but imagine what it’s like from the coin’s perspective. Now consider what that might look like in your own life.
Here we see, along with the apostle, that becoming a Christian, a true image of Christ, is likely to be a painful, life-long process. All things may be working together for good, but that does not mean life will be fun for any particular individual all the time. All things may be working together for good, but we’re going to pass through fire before we see it. All things may be working together for good, but we will need to endure the blows of what sometimes seems like unbearable pressure before that reality reveals itself in us.
In the midst of this Christian formation, this process of becoming Christ’s eikōn, it may feel like we’ll never recover. And in some ways we won’t. Just like a coin doesn’t ever bounce back to its original blank form, once we begin God’s minting process, we can’t either.
But remember, we are not alone. We are the Church being prepared for God’s kingdom. We, as a community God has invited, are being prepared for the service of Christ. As the family of Christ, we are being transformed together into ubiquitous reminders that God’s power is everywhere and that Jesus is the true king.
So when Paul says, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God,” it appears he does mean it. But once we’ve opened our eyes to what the text is saying, we can’t treat that phrase flippantly anymore. This is no emotional band-aid, and it is certainly not a tool for manipulation or abuse.
Paul isn’t ignorant of pain. He isn’t dismissive of fear or tragedy. He’s declaring a promise of God, but looked at carefully, it’s a promise couched in warning. “All things work together for good,” but getting to the good, fulfilling God’s purpose, is unlikely to be easy for any individual at any time. Everything the Father has promised the Son we, as Jesus’ body, will also receive. But to receive it, we must undergo the process of being turned into eikōns of Christ. We the Church all need be embossed with the fullness of his image—not just the exaltation of resurrection, though that is part of it, but the entirety of his life, his ministry, and his death. God promises us hope, but following in the footsteps of Christ, all of us will pass through flames to claim it. God promises us peace, but following in Christ’s path, we are bound to be beaten and crushed before we find rest. God promises us life, but just like Christ, to find it we will need to pass through death. Only by walking the path of the cross together as a community can we continue to follow the way of our Savior, being conformed to his image as we travel together. For
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
[1] Pronouns are, in fact, almost always plural throughout Paul’s writing and Jesus’ own teaching.
[2] I recognize that icons are technically “written,” not painted. However, that bit of semantics doesn’t exclude them from the broader category of paintings.