Dear Friends,
Some of your bold and courageous fellow parishioners have been willing to walk with me during this Easter season as we study St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. It is a challenging piece of sacred scripture, which is not easy to understand in your first or even second reading. It is one of the most developed pieces of theology in the New Testament. Gaining a better understanding of what St. Paul is trying to tell us in this letter should help us to live more at peace in this world as we come know what Jesus does for us.
At the very beginning of the letter, St. Paul announces that the gospel is God’s power of salvation for all who believe, Jew and Gentile alike. Key to what Paul is proclaiming is what we celebrate during the Easter season – Jesus truly rose from the dead. Paul says that this changes everything. There were many people who had, over time, come to tell people how to live. There were many people who had tried to bring about a worldly peace, people with great charisma who could inspire the thousands through their preaching and teaching. None of them was the messiah. None of them rose from the dead after a horrible and public death.
When Paul talks about Easter he thinks about divine power. When he thinks of power he is thinking about the challenge which divine power offers to those in the present world who suppose they have a monopoly on power. With the totally unexpected event of Jesus’ own resurrection, the powers of this world have been confronted with a new reality – the vindication of the “son of man” after his suffering and death. This is for Paul not a freak occurrence but the beginning of something new – the resurrection of the dead for us as well.
Paul spends a lot of time in the letter to the Romans talking about Jesus’ death and resurrection and the impact that this event has on God’s relations with us and how we now stand before God – glorified – not because of anything we have done but solely because of what Jesus did. When Paul goes on to explore what that means for how we live, he is not presuming that we are incapable of responding appropriately. As Jesus was raised from the dead through the Father’s glory, so we are also to walk in newness of life. Paul is not saying that there are two ways to live, and you must choose between them. No, he says your old self has died. Behave like who you are now. Hear it from Paul himself: “but you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. If the Messiah is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
In a certain sense, Paul is retelling the Exodus story. Just as the Israelites found freedom from slavery in Egypt, so we Christians find freedom from slavery to sin through Jesus. We follow him through the waters of baptism to a new life where we must live in a wilderness (today’s worldliness) as a people with God in our midst. Paul asks, who can separate us from the love of God? “…neither death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor any other creature, will have power to separate us from God’s love in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian