Today’s second reading gave us some verses from Romans Chapter 5. Romans Chapter 5 is one of those texts people build their lives on. This is a passage with an inbuilt potential really to hit you between the eyes. Paul’s message is so thrilling that if you would only allow its impact to sink in, you’d be dancing about and singing.
Of course St. Paul’s text here is typically dense, its logic quite hard to follow, and it’s full of quite difficult terms Paul doesn’t explain, about each of which rivers of controversial ink have flowed, and whole libraries of books been written. And I should say are still being written, and will continue to be written!
For now: let me presume, as background to our passage, a silent question to which Paul is giving his answer. Can the great things God has promised really apply to me? Do I dare hope?? Can the love of God really be so great, as you say; can his forgiveness really be so deep? Can God really love and forgive even me?
In response St. Paul holds up, as God’s unsurpassable answer, Christ’s saving death. Christ’s death is definitive proof of God’s love for me to the end. Christ’s death is the unshakeable ground I stand on. In Christ’s blood all my sins are washed away, together with in principle all the sins of all human history. Christ’s death is limitlessly powerful: saving, redeeming, liberating, reconciling, forgiving, purifying, consecrating, sanctifying. He died for us, for me: he gave himself totally to the end: and in that I have assurance and life and joy that nothing whatever can break.
St. Paul doesn’t pause here to explain how this works: that’s not his purpose here. Here his theme is just the grounds for our hope and confidence: and these grounds are found to be of ultimate solidity.
Let me just mention here that, for Paul, sin is not just bad things we do. Sin is a sort of metaphysical reality. It’s a power, a force, and we are born as its slaves. Sin is a sort of stifling atmosphere we inhabit, a quality we cannot escape, a lethal disease that has infected us, a stinking mire which is pulling us in, and in which we are drowning. Unless someone from outside comes to our rescue, we are without hope. So for Paul salvation is like being plucked out of a whirlpool, just as we were about to be sucked under forever. Now the opposite of sin is righteousness. The two are utterly opposed, and can never be reconciled. God is perfectly righteous, and if we are ever to come to God, we have to be righteous too. So as in Christ we pass from death to life, so also in Christ we pass from sin to righteousness. In Pauline language, we have the grace of justification in his blood. Then when God looks on us, it’s as if he cries: behold my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!
What about all our still present sufferings and troubles, you cry? What about the sufferings of the whole world? What about the still inescapable reality of death? No: Paul would answer. Christ’s death shines a light on all that. See how in him all these things are not only relativised, but given meaning and purpose. And they are going somewhere. Through them, if anything, we are helped on our journey towards our destination, which is not here, but elsewhere.
Just to unpack Paul’s rhetoric a bit: our passage today begins with 4 short sentences, each ending in the word Death. Paul then weaves in 4 terms to describe the stark reality of our condition. We were weak, he says, we were ungodly, we were sinners, we were enemies of God. What can such people expect? Only the wrath of God: than which nothing could be more terrible. But no. Instead of that: divine love! Paul here gives us 4 parallel phrases. “Justified in his blood - Reconciled through his death. Saved from God’s wrath – Saved by his life.”
Then 4 times (4 times!! – in the wider passage) Paul gives us his argument in typically Jewish form: “a minori ad maius” – from the lesser to the greater; or as Hebrew would have it, from the light to the heavy. “If this, then how much more that!”
Here as it were the ceiling is blown off. Because escape from a terrible fate is cause enough for relief and rejoicing. But that’s just the start! If Christ’s death was so powerful for our good, what about his resurrection? If our salvation from punishment is so wonderful, what shall we say about our eternal glory?
And then, just as you thought it could get no better, Paul rounds off: “Not only that!” he cries. “Even now we boast or rejoice…” So: please don’t think our salvation in Christ is all in the past or all in the future. Oh no! Even now in him we are united with God and we bathe in God’s love. Even now we are raised up to share in Christ’s life, Christ’s victory, Christ’s joy, Christ’s glory. And even now the gift of reconciliation is ours: to possess, to proclaim, to share, to rejoice in.
Somebody really ought to set all this to music. I suppose you’d have to start rather quietly, a bit darkly, maybe in a minor key. Then a gradual crescendo, as themes are woven in and out, recapitulated, and set on different degrees of the scale. For the punch word “death” you’d probably need violent percussion. For recurring words like “saved” or “justified” you’d need trumpets. For God’ love, surely only a free violin cadenza will do. But through it all, inexorable crescendo, until at the end the music lets rip with full orchestra, full organ and full Choir: all together belting out the triumphant conclusion.
Dear people: I say all this because I think we need to hear it. Especially we modern people need to hear it. We live in a world without reference points or standards or certainties about anything whatever. And in this world most people live with a certain radical lack of confidence in themselves, in the meaning of their life, in what is the point of anything. So many people nowadays feel they are worthless, and all they do is inadequate, and they find it impossible to believe that they can be loved; or that there can be such a thing as total, unconditional love. Well, says St. Paul, and say we all: there is. The proof of it is Christ’s death. And the outcome of it is life, in eternal glory.