Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
It has been said that life is enriched not so much by good answers as it is good questions. As a seminarian I was given such a question by Prof. Gerhard Forde when he asked: “Now that you don’t have to do anything to be saved, what are you going to do?”
It was a question that captured the essence of Easter. A question that would take a life time to answer. A question that lead me to Paul’s letter to the Romans, since it was Paul who said, “a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Rom. 3:28). His answer is found most explicitly in Romans 12-15, where Paul gives specific directives concerning Christian behavior.
For the first 11 chapters Paul lays out a vision of God’s righteousness: Jesus Christ. This new vision of righteousness has many facets. Christ is the righteous one, the one who God has vindicated, the one who has prevailed (sounds like Easter to me). Christ, as the new word of God’s righteousness, is encountered as both law and gospel, with both vertical and horizontal implications. In relation to God (vertical implication), we are made righteous through faith in the righteous one, Jesus Christ (Rom. 26). Our life in this world (horizontal implication) is empowered by our connection to this righteous one in baptism. Through faith and baptism, we “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4).
Romans 12-15 is about this “new walk”. Through faith in Christ, we are made righteous for righteousness sake, justified to do justice. Paul’s exhortation “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1) is a logical response to this new vision of God’s righteousness. A righteousness most clearly revealed in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for our sake, It is not a sacrifice of self denial, but of self-giving. A sacrifice in Paul’s day was not only a burnt offering for sin but also a feast to celebrate God’s goodness. In this sense, a living sacrifice would be a body given for the world to feast upon. Not only does this sound like Holy Communion (congratulations to the fifth grader who now joins us at the table) were Christ gives us the sacrifice of his body and blood for us sinners to eat and drink.
Luther called this the happy exchange in which we trade our sin for Christ’s righteousness. But God gets more than sin out of the deal, God also gets bodies, for bodies are the place where the righteousness of God will be worked out in the world. Paul has a wholly positive view of the human body, he can describe our activities as “holy, acceptable, good, and perfect” (Rom 12:1-2) without fear of works righteousness, because what is being expressed is God’s righteousness in Christ through our bodies.
To reinforce this notion, Paul employs the image of of a body, the body of Christ. Out of the sacrifice of many bodies is made one body, each member with equal status and worth. Each and every Christian ought to think as highly about his or her task in the body of Christ as Paul did of his-but not too highly, for every other task is equally vital to the life and work of the church.
Not thinking too highly about oneself, submitting to the rule of governing authorities in order to avoid anarchy, and welcoming one another with respect, accepting one another without judgment are three ways of being in the world that do not condone evil, but unmask it. It is an ethic that does not insist on its superiority over the world, that does not force its way into the world, but welcomes the world as it is, witnessing to the righteousness of God revealed in Christ Jesus on the cross.
We might call the ethics of Paul “body politics”: God’s uses our bodies to show his way in the world, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you”
(2 Cor. 4:7-12).
Happy Easter as you live into the resurrected body to which you are called.
Pastor Dan