Debtors
“I
am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the
foolish,” says Paul.
This is a really incredible thing to say, actually, but I’ll
get to that in a minute. First, we need a one-minute reminder about Paul. This
is the guy who was killing Christians in the name of the hard-and-fast temple
law of the day, and this is the guy who was blinded on the road to Emmaus,
became a follower of Jesus, and then wrote a good portion of the New Testament.
All of this we need to know when Paul says he is indebted to Greeks and
barbarians, the wise and the foolish, because it takes an awareness of his
history to get there.
I
suspect all of us are OK with saying we are indebted to teachers, to parents,
to coaches, to people we like, who inspire us, and who make us look good. We
like to tell that story. But how often do we stand up and say we are indebted
to people we don’t like? Indebted to sinners? Indebted to non-believers, and
criminals, and people who have wronged us? Those people? That’s a much tougher
story.
If we hear that story at all, it’s usually in the context
of somebody saying, “I owe it to my haters, because they pushed me to be
better.” But what Paul is saying in Romans 1 is more radical than that. He’s
saying he owes the foolish; he owes those who are wrong; he owes everybody.
Paul starts here in his letter to the church in Rome to make it abundantly
clear what sin looks like—it is not just bad choices, which Paul certainly made
in the past, but, more importantly, it is an indelible part of our character,
and all of us are debtors because of it.
In the alternative version of the Lord’s Prayer most
often said in Presbyterian and Reformed churches, there is that line “forgive
us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Lutherans tend to use trespasses, while
others use “sins.” In some ways, all of these are trying to describe something
we often fail to understand. Our debt, trespasses, and sin are not just things
we do but a condition in which we live, which is precisely why we need
forgiveness so desperately. We can’t simply refrain from doing bad—it is part
and parcel of who we are.
So, we are debtors—debtors to people we like and don’t
like. This gets particularly messy when we talk about abuse, because surely we
cannot owe people who have committed abuse against us. Practically speaking,
victims don’t owe perpetrators anything, so let’s be clear about that, but
underneath it all is a reality where each of us are bound to one another, and
the fabric of the universe was once and forever broken by sin so that abusers
exist and those abused face the Sauls of the world without any recourse. There
should be no abusers; there should be no people abused, but there are: Paul was
an abuser—an abuser of the early Christians. He knows what he owes; he knows he
can’t repay the debt caused by murder. What could repayment possibly look like?
No reparations are enough.
The story of Saul’s conversion, becoming Paul, is not one
of a bad dude becoming a hero. He’s still a guy who did bad things. The only
difference is that after his conversion he knows it, and he’s trying to pick up
the pieces of a broken life, seeking forgiveness, and finally understanding the
place from which forgiveness and, with it, true power comes.
The Gospel
The conversion does not make Paul righteous by his own
effort. Instead, it made him a preacher. He became one of the first to write
down things about this God we know in Jesus Christ. When Paul wrote Romans, none
of the Gospels we know today yet existed. Mark was still a decade away, Matthew
and Luke thereafter, and John long after that. That’s not immediately obvious
reading your Bible, but when Paul wrote this letter, the words of Jesus were part
of an oral tradition passed on around campfires or in house churches, or
perhaps they were part of earlier texts now lost to us. This matters, because
when we think of Saul prior to conversion, I think we tend to imagine a guy who
had all the information and chose not to believe in Jesus. Yet, in many ways,
this letter to Rome had no scriptural precedent. Paul didn’t have Jesus’ words;
he wasn’t writing an accompaniment to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
What
he had was an experience, and it was that experience that put everything in stark
relief. This is a tough one for those of us in the Lutheran church, which was founded
largely on this idea of sola scriptura—scripture alone—and in the day of Martin
Luther this made sense, raging against the popes who made up their own laws apart
from scripture. But nowadays, it feels as if Christians worship the Bible sometimes
more than they do Jesus. Like so many things, the Bible—being one of the next
most important things—is easy to mistake for the most important thing.
