August 27, 2023, Pentecost 13A
The Other Romans 13
I suppose it might be a surprise to some that the reading from Romans 13 given as today's Revised Common Lectionary epistle reading includes the last half of this brief chapter, but not the far more infamous first seven verses. Certain religious leaders have, over the centuries, tended to interpret those verses as a mandate that all Christians are to obey whatever government is put in authority over them, no matter what they do, and that such authority can basically do whatever they want.
Suffice to say that myriad problems lie in that interpretation. First of all, it's not at all a given that Paul is speaking here of governmental authorities; the Greek words Paul uses suggests he is referring to military leaders, not civilian. Others suggest Paul is referring to religious authorities - leaders of the synagogue, for example, for those Jewish converts among the church's number. Even more of a problem is that nowhere in this passage does Paul speak at all about what authority the leadership in question has; the passage contains no instruction to authority figures of any kind at all.
Furthermore, those religious types who do point to Romans 13 in such a manner are sometimes awfully selective about its usage - they aren't necessarily interested in enforcing that bit in verse 6 about paying taxes, or for that matter enforcing any of this if the government in power is one they don't like. An interesting very recent example of that latter phenomenon is the case of a Pennsylvania woman who was part of the mob that attacked the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Her interesting (to say the least) defense was that as an ambassador of Christ, she was immune to laws. The judge, apparently not ignorant about the Bible, apparently responded by citing - you guessed it - Romans 13:1, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities...". At least she got famous by being featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.[1]
In the bigger picture, though, one of the biggest problems with such an obsession with Romans 13:1-7 is that it tends to drown out the hard-hitting teaching of Romans 13:8-14. Continuing with the theme expressed so vividly in chapter 12, Paul charges his hearers with a devastatingly simple command: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
There it is. All of Paul’s wrangling about the law and its insufficiency to save us; about the power of sin in our lives and the needfulness of God’s grace to overcome it; about presenting ourselves as living offerings and being transformed by the renewing of our minds; and in the end, it comes down to loving one another, which of course echoes what Jesus had already said.
Remember Jesus’s words in Matthew 22:39 Paul rolls up instruction from the Ten Commandments into the mandate to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and caps the teaching with the powerful conclusion: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” In fact Jesus spoke something similar in the gospels of Mark 12:28-34, and in Luke 10:25-28 the same concept is quoted as well, this time by a lawyer in response to Jesus, and leads to Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan as an exposition on just who that neighbor might be. In other words, Paul had plenty of support for making this claim on his hearers and readers.
It still may catch us off-guard, though, after all the earlier parts of Paul's writing to the Romans about how the law can only show us our sinfulness, or about how the law "brings death," or about how the law "brings wrath" back in 4:15, or any number of other criticisms of it in the earlier chapters of this epistle. In fact, what is happening now in this discourse is that the law's benefit can be declared and received, now that love is understood to be "in charge," so to speak. To understand that "love is the fulfillment of the law" is to understand the law's place in the life of a follower of Christ at long last. The law, rather than being an instrument of wrath for the zealous enforcer, is an illustration of "what it looks like" to live in the grace of Jesus, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, to borrow that familiar blessing from Paul's earlier letter to the church at Corinth.
The portion that follows addresses something that hasn’t come up so much in Romans so far but is a consistent part of Paul’s thought. Among many other things, Paul’s faith is apocalyptic – not in the sense of unavoidable future disaster that tends to cling to the word these days but in the sense of expecting an imminent return of Christ. It didn’t work out that way for Paul, clearly, but his point still holds true: live like it could happen any time now. Live honorably, live in light, live in Christ. And of course, to live in such a way is inextricably bound in the love Paul has extolled in these chapters of this letter.
Now here's the really challenging thing about this love. It shows up everywhere, in everything we do. It shows up in our gathering for worship like this, yes, and one would hope it shows up in the mission or outreach we do in this community as well. But it also shows up in how we, say, conduct the business of the church, right down to writing the checks and paying the bills and all those mundane things that make my eyes glaze over. It shows up in how we do session meetings or committee meetings or any such thing, amongst ourselves or out in the community. If we're really living in this love that God so loved the world with, if we're really living in the love that animates so much of what Paul is writing about in this letter, it really does affect how we do anything we do. And it should be noted that while Paul is writing to the Roman church corporately, as one location of the body of Christ, it also filters down to how any individual member of that church, or any church, would or will conduct himself or herself. We'll see an example of that in the next chapter, in next week's reading, in which Paul needs to address one particular issue and how it changes how the people of the Roman churches conduct themselves towards one another It changes everything we do.
That love for one another is part of why we gather together like this, why we gather around this table to share bread and cup, why we give of our time and resources for those served by the CUFF meal, or those ravaged by Hurricane Hilary out in California or the Maui wildfires, facing years of recovery. It’s why we’re there for funerals and the receptions that follow, for weddings or baptisms or confirmation or the addition of new members; it’s why we don’t cut ourselves off from the community in which we live. It's even why we take special care in examining ourselves as a church and also the town in which we live, preparing ourselves as a church to seek out and call the right pastor to help us all the more live in and live out that love within the body of Christ and in the community around us.
“Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #203, Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love; #451, Open My Eyes, That I May See; #729, Lord, I Want to Be a Christian
[1] Numerous sources, cited in Christoph Heilig, The Apostle and the Empire: Paul's Implicit and Explicit Criticism of Rome (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 114-15.
It doesn't quite work like that, Linus...
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