Proper 6, Year A | Romans 5:1-8
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
June 18, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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It can be a little tricky knowing where to start when addressing a text written by the Apostle Paul. People have used portions of his letters to defend a variety of positions that most of modern American society finds to be problematic, if not outright offensive. Today it’s his apparent glorification of suffering for suffering’s sake, but that’s probably one of his least controversial ideas. From his bossy know-it-all-ness to misogyny to homophobia to defending slavery to promoting genocide, it sometimes seems pointless to keep digging for anything positive under the centuries of negativity that have entombed these letters.
Sadly, I suspect much of that negativity has less to do with what Paul said or who he was than with how people have buried his messages under mountains of their own words. If we make the effort to approach what Paul has actually written—not what we’ve been told he says—we meet a much different person than the one we might have heard about. Liberated from the weight of everyone else’s theological assumptions and conclusions, Paul’s initial popularity and charisma begin to make a lot more sense. But to get to that point, there are a few things we need to know as we begin our search for the “real” Paul.
One of the first things we need to recognize is that the Apostle Paul’s letters and activity pre-date most of the rest of the New Testament, including the Gospels. Paul appears to have been active in the 50’s to mid-60’s CE. While tales of Jesus’ life and teachings had spread through oral tradition, no one appears to have written any of them down until around the time Paul died. Mark was that first one. Matthew and Luke didn’t show up on the scene for roughly two more decades, and John likely took another 40 years or so after that. So Paul, in all his travel and writing, was working under a major disadvantage compared to us, having, at best, limited portions of what we know about Jesus. That means his letters were, very literally, pioneering efforts to figure out what all of this incarnation/death/resurrection/ascension stuff meant.
Secondly, not all of Paul’s letters appear to have been written by Paul, at least not in the way we would understand that concept. The idea of authorship in the ancient world was a lot more hazy than our own. While the earliest epistles appear to have come from the same person, internal stylistic and theological considerations suggest different authors for others. That doesn’t, however, mean that the letters are “lying.” Back in that era, students would gather under particular teachers to form a “school of thought.” After a long enough apprenticeship—and generally after their teacher died—certain of those students might write further works under that teacher’s name, extending their thought into new areas. Again, no one thought of this as lying—it’s just the way things were.
This idea can cause problems for a lot of people. We look from our modern perspective and think that if the “author” wasn’t actually the author, the works are lies or forgeries and have no value. But that isn’t what’s going on. The Pauline Epistles—those collected under Paul’s “school”—are part of New Testament canon. Nothing we do or learn is going to change that. The Early Church selected these writings as important enough to preserve throughout the generations. Our responsibility today is to take what they say and apply them as well as we can to our own contexts.
Lastly—and I’m not sure it’s possible to emphasize this enough—we need to recognize that Paul was not writing theological treatises. Every single one of Paul’s letters is pastoral—he’s writing either to answer questions from a particular group or to address troubling rumors that had somehow reached his ears from across the Roman Empire. He isn’t trying to lay the groundwork for a new religion. He isn’t writing textbooks on systematic theology. He isn’t even attempting to write a Christian behavior manual. He’s doing his best to help culturally and geographically diverse groups of Christians understand what it might look like to follow Christ where and when they lived. The writings themselves leave room for flexibility and adaptation, and we need to allow for the same.
All that said—and finally getting back to the text—this morning’s passage from Romans seems to be a celebration of suffering. People have used these verses in a variety of ways over the centuries, everything from applying a sort of spiritual band-aid to the wounds of everyday life to condoning self-mutilation and even authorizing torture as a way to speed up someone else’s spiritual growth. If we just take a quick read or approach with a particular agenda in mind, it isn’t necessarily hard to where someone might get those ideas—although, sadly, we still need to be clear that harming someone else for the sake of “spiritual” good is never in line with what God (or Paul) would want us to do.
On the surface, what Paul’s saying appears simple enough: God loves us, but God either allows or gives us suffering. If God has given us suffering out of love—and to develop positive character—the trials themselves are good things—gifts, even. If we receive a gift from God, we should celebrate it. Since suffering is a gift from God, we ought to “boast in” that suffering, whatever it may be.
Now if this kind of idea supports you in difficult times, if it helps you to remain faithful under trying circumstances, I don’t necessarily want you to get rid of it. But I do want us to consider that that might not be what Paul is actually trying to say here.
As I kept reading this passage throughout the week, I got less and less a sense of combining suffering with boasting and more and more of a feeling that Paul is trying to contrast what we might view as trials, difficulties, or pressures in life with acceptance. It’s not so much the idea of boasting or bragging about suffering but the concept that it isn’t something we need to hide, that it’s okay to talk about it.
In the ancient world, people understood life’s problems to be a sign that someone had offended the gods. Lost your job? You must have ticked off the god of wealth. Depressed? You must have done something to offend the god of joy. Child born with a disability? The parents were surely at fault of something against someone. Since everyone assumed life’s problems were the result of sin, it wasn’t really okay to talk about them in public. To do so wasn’t simply being honest about one’s circumstances; it was to expose or “glory in” one’s shame.
But look at where Paul is heading here: “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”[1] God doesn’t behave the way we expect. God doesn’t approach us out of wrath or offense or disgust. God isn’t sitting around, finger twitching above the “smite” button, just waiting for someone to do something wrong. God’s stance toward humanity is love—not just the emotional kind of love, but love that actively seeks the other’s good; love that shows up in support and guidance and mercy. Love that acts on its own and continues acting on its own whether or not the recipient ever even notices.
If this is who God is, the God of Love, then there’s no need to feel shame about the troubles life throws at us. They aren’t some kind of punishment or discipline or even a tacit demand to get ourselves in line. Difficulties, hardships, and struggles often have nothing to do with your moral character. They aren’t a reflection or revelation of any sort of eternal standing. They’re just part of being alive, of being human.
That being the case, we don’t need to hide these things from one another. We don’t need to play into that innate sense of isolation and shame we’ve kept falling under from the time of Adam and Eve. What happens in life is not judgment. It isn’t karma coming to get you. It’s the same sort of thing we all face and that we all pointlessly try to hide from each other and even our selves. Bad things happen. We don’t have to “boast” about them, but it’s certainly okay to bring them to light. Openness about difficulties—allowing others to help with our personal burdens—is one of the gifts that Christ has given us. We don’t need to hide. We don’t need to be ashamed. It’s okay to talk about it.
[1] Romans 5:8 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.