Of all St. Paul’s Letters, Romans is the longest, richest, densest, most difficult, most rewarding, most challenging, most perplexing, most commented on, most thoroughly Jewish, most obscurely Rabbinical, most radically universal in its all-embracing theological vision. The Lectionary offers us a series of sixteen short passages from Romans as a second reading, from the 9th to the 24th Sundays of this Year. With today’s passage we are about half way through the Letter, yet we have reached a triumphant and justly celebrated climax to the argument set out so far. As always one feels the need to apologise for our Jerusalem Bible translation, which so frequently seems to soften, or miss, or even change the force of Paul’s burning words.
We begin today with Paul implicitly defining his readers as “those who love God”. He might otherwise have said: those who are in Christ Jesus; those who are driven, or inhabited by the Spirit. For such people, Paul says, with trumpet-like confidence, we know that all things work together for good. How so? Because we know God’s purposes will be fulfilled. God has all things in hand. God is not a passive spectator. His purpose in Creation has not been frustrated by human sin. His promises made to Israel were not made in vain.
Paul is supremely confident, because the ground of all our hope is God, not ourselves. God’s goodness, not ours. God’s sovereign power; God’s mercy; God’s love: shown forth in Christ Jesus our Lord. The ultimate good towards which all things conspire to lead us is our final conformity to Christ; our share in his divine Sonship; our participation in his risen life. Paul’s use of the word “image” here evokes Chapter 1 of Genesis, where we read that God made man in his own image. But that image was lost in the first man Adam. Considering Adam in the light of Christ, Paul teaches that through his sin there came into the world condemnation and death. In the early Chapters of Romans Paul spares no one in setting out just how dire is the resulting situation of the human race. But in Christ, and by the power of his Spirit, the defaced image is restored, and more than restored. For us, this is the difference between death and life, between slavery and freedom, between poverty and wealth, between abject misery and invincible joy.
How do we regain our lost inheritance? How do we come to receive this supreme good? Through sheer free gift. Through divine grace, divine generosity, divine gift, in Christ. What God gives is in principle beyond human power to achieve, and certainly beyond human power to deserve. And it’s ours, not as if by an after-thought, or by accident, but because of what God has known and planned from all eternity.
Paul here allows himself a little bit of rhetoric, as he sets out in five steps what God has done for us, with five verbs, in the aorist tense. Each of these verbs represents a new free gift, and in each one the initiative rests wholly with God. Those he foreknew, them also he predestined... Those he predestined, them also he called. Those he called, them also he justified. And those he justified, them also he glorified.
Nowadays people get nervous about any language of fore-knowledge and predestination. Harsh doctrines taught by Calvinists or Jansenists loom uneasily into the consciousness. And a hornet’s nest of difficulties is immediately then stirred up. How to reconcile all this with human free will, or merit? How not to make God’s saving will seem merely arbitrary? How to account for those who appear not to be so predestined? All these questions have been seriously and sometimes helpfully discussed by theologians and commentators and apologists through the ages, without ever, of course, solving what must remain an imponderable mystery. For now, though, we need to grapple with what St. Paul actually teaches here. That is: our destiny to eternal life in Christ has been in the mind of God from before the foundation of the world. God did not want us to remain ignorant of it, so he called us: in the first place through the Apostolic preaching. God would not allow our sins to stand in the way of this destiny, so by the power of Christ’s blood he removed them, conferring on us the gift of being made righteous in his sight. Finally, he did for us what he did for Jesus crucified; he glorified us.
That final verb once appeared once before in Romans, in Chapter 1, where Paul spoke of how fallen humanity did not glorify God (1:21). Of course those who are baptised into Christ and who possess the Holy Spirit do now efficaciously glorify God. But St. Paul’s point here is not that. It’s that God has superabundantly completed his work on their behalf, by glorifying them.
All of this applies to all of us, and to the whole mystery of human life. Whatever our circumstances, whether for good or ill; whatever the apparent success or failure of our enterprises: our lives have a direction; they are going somewhere; in God’s hands nothing is wasted, nothing merely pointless, and at the end we will see that in Divine Providence it has all been a preparation for something utterly wonderful.
Just to get a bit personal for now. I’m trying, without the slightest success, to get my head around what has happened to the last 25 years since I was ordained a Priest. How on earth did I get there, and what am I supposed to do next? In today’s reading from Romans St. Paul teaches very strongly that behind it all stands God’s will, his purpose, his love, his call. God’s call continues also to beckon from ahead, from heaven. All that matters for me now then is to become ever more conformed to the image which is Christ. Paul would say that we do that above all by conformity to his sufferings and death, in order to be conformed also to his resurrection (cf. e.g. 8:17). Then: simply by my life to give God glory. To praise and thank him endlessly for what he has done, and for what he is. To stand ready to receive his gifts, to receive Himself, in his Son and in his Spirit; in order to share his glory, in endless gratitude and endless joy.