“I am a debtor both to
Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish,” says Paul.
Grace
to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I have this working thesis about human
behavior that we’re OK with admitting we are indebted, but only when we are
indebted to people who we like, who inspire us, and who make us look good. And
I think this is because we are reflective creatures and we are always crafting stories
in our head about who we are and where we fit into the universe, and, when we
do that, we decide that if we owe anybody anything at all it is only to people
we like and people who improve the story I’m telling. So I owe my teachers, I
owe my parents, I owe my pastor, I owe reputable community members A, B, and C.
I don’t owe anything to the people who disrespected me, or who were mean to me,
or the people who scared me. They owe me (absolutely!) but I don’t owe them a
thing.
Paul
is that rare breed of person who doesn’t think this way. He doesn’t care to sift
through the people that he owes and tell tales of the wise and the prosperous;
he owes them all—wise and foolish—and to understand why this is the case = we
need to understand Paul, a person who made that dramatic change from killer to
preacher. Paul understands that tabulating who owes him is folly compared to
the impossible debts he has run up himself. He may have been familiar with that
parable Jesus told in Matthew’s Gospel about the slave with the massive debt,
freed by his master, who then went out and held a pittance of that debt against
another slave down the line. Or if Paul wasn’t familiar he at least got the
gist of it from his life experience. Unlike the slave from the parable, Paul understands
that he is forgiven such a ridiculous debt that doing his own accounting of
others’ debts is just stupid. Paul comes to the radical realization that he
cannot be righteous because of the things he has done; that even his ardent
beliefs originate not in some good part of his soul still remaining but that
they are given to him by God, lest his belief itself become a good work that
gets in the way of faith. Instead, Paul comes to understand that he is
completely dependent on the grace of God for the salvation that is the only
thing that matters.
And,
crazy enough, Paul is no different from us. Now, I hear you thinking, I’ve never gone around killing people
who disagree with me! I have never done something so terrible as Paul!
Who are you to say that I’m anything like him?
I
hear that. I understand that. Yes, it’s good you have never crucified somebody
because of their beliefs, but if you’re so excited to be set apart as “better
than Paul” we had better turn to Martin Luther’s explanation of the Fifth
Commandment, “You shall not murder” and see how we all stack up. Luther writes:
“We are to fear and love God, so that we neither endanger nor harm the lives of
our neighbors, but instead help and support them in all life’s needs.”
Is
that good news? Sure, if you do it. Not just once, not just occasionally, but
always. It’s good news for the person helped and supported by us, but terrible
news for those of us who fail to live up to the standard set by God.
Maybe
you haven’t always helped and
supported people you know. And, if that’s the case, Luther suggests you are in
violation of the fifth commandment as surely as a person who shoots somebody in
cold blood. If occasionally you’ve decided that others weren’t worthy of your
help and support; that they needed to work at it harder themselves; that you
just don’t have time for them. I know I’ve
decided that. If you’ve done any of those things it means you’re just as guilty
of killing as Paul, because the standard of the law laid down by Jesus Christ
is not to be pretty good, or even really good, or to have a good heart; the
standard set by Jesus Christ is perfection. “You must be perfect, like your
Father in heaven is perfect,” Jesus says (cf. Matthew 5:8). So, you and me and
Paul are all subject to violating the fifth commandment, and pretty much all
the other ones, too—even on a good day. Honor the Sabbath? Not when there’s
football on! Honor your father and mother? Oh sure, just they get on my nerves
sometimes, you know? Do not commit adultery? Hey, I’ve never done that! (you might say) Except for the seventeen
million thoughts you’ve had that will, mercifully, not come to the light of
day. Let’s not even start with the coveting, or the stealing, and we’re not
going to touch the “You shall have no other gods before me” with a ten foot
pole. You all should feel bad enough already.
All
of us are unquestionably indebted to those we have failed to help in their
every need—both the wise and the foolish. Yes, they are indebted to us, too,
but the very fact that we seem to want to point that out so badly shows how
little we want to be accountable for our own imperfection, always shifting the
blame to somebody else. We are even in debt to those who do not care to acknowledge
they are in debt to us, which is patently unfair, but the standard was never
about what is fair. It’s about being perfect. This is what Jesus expects of his
disciples. Part of this Christ-follower gig is that we repay debts that others
don’t even know we have, and we do it without any expectation of repayment or,
for that matter, that others even know the debt they owe in return.
And
lest you are confused about where the limits of this indebtedness lie Paul is
pretty clear. He is indebted to barbarians—a word we don’t use much these days,
but it brings to mind half-wit, uncultured, Cretans from the edges of the map.
So, if it applies to them it applies to all the people we think are below us as
well. In fact, it especially applies
to them.
That’s
the bad news. But it’s the honest news, and the great thing about honest news
is that, in a world where Jesus Christ came claiming to be “truth-incarnate”
(cf. John 14:6), all things honest will always point to God. So, if we are
honest with ourselves that we owe many people for many things that we can never
repay, then that honesty will tell us something. It will tell us that we are
sinners in need of redemption, and the only way we’re getting there is with a
man dying on a cross for us. There is no such thing a self-made person.
Everybody is born to a mother and father whom we can never repay for that
initial gift of life, and that mother and father are indebted to their parents
and so on and so forth back to Adam and Eve and to the God who created them. We
start out being born with a debt, and we don’t need to even begin to get into
the theological mumbo-jumbo about where sin begins to see that by the time we
are born the debt is already insurmountable.
But
this is only bad news if we’re hiding from it. If we shine a light on our need
for a power greater than ourselves then we can discover, perhaps for the first
time, that such a power exists, and when we discover that Jesus Christ came for
you and me we are freed from the playing the characters we pretend to play; the
perfect people who never make mistakes. Not only are none of us perfect; we are
all capable of terrible things. This is why Paul writes the letter to the
church in Rome; this letter we call “Romans.” He needs to make it abundantly
clear that he is not worthy of God’s salvation by his own merit, and that he no
longer needs to fret about the terrible person he once was, because none of us can repay our debts—none of
us can go back and make things better. The terrible person he once was is dead
in Christ, and, better still, when he continues to sin and fall short of God’s
glory, even in the present, he is saved from himself again and against. None of
his debts—past, present, even future—hold a candle to the grace of God.
This
is what we need to hear, because so many of you still think that so-and-so is
beyond redemption, or that you, yourself, are a pretty good person, or (on the
other hand) that you, yourself, are a terrible person who must live in constant
fear of God’s coming judgment. If you believe any of those things, stop it.
Nobody is beyond the grace of God—they can’t be—because the standard of
perfection remains, and it has to be that way because otherwise we are merely
climbing a spiritual ladder and certain people who won’t get high enough will
just be cast away into darkness. That is not
the good news of Jesus Christ. That is precisely what Paul is writing against.
His letter to Rome tells tale of a whole new ballgame. This is radical grace;
radical good news. That your debts are obliterated by Jesus Christ.
It
takes understanding how little you can do to understand how important it is
that Christ has done it for you. Some of us need to hear that message every
day. Maybe today it will sink in.
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