I grew up immersed in the gospel of Romans. Raised in a
Protestant church by Sunday school teachers who knew Paul’s dictum of grace backwards
and forwards, I knew how to answer the question “faith or works?” We are
justified by faith—of course! The old system of works-based righteousness was
broken and incomplete—so the teaching goes. You can’t get to heaven by works.
Only faith will get you there.
But the lines between grace and faith got so blurred by an
anti-works polemic, that I don’t think I ever appreciated what it means to have
faith. That sounds easy. But it only sounds easy because it’s held out to me as
the opposite of works. Ask a seven year old what he would rather do—carry a
50-pound sack of corn up a steep hill or just take my word for it that it’s
heavy—and the answer is easy. Give me faith over works anytime. But faith isn’t
easy. In fact, I think works are easier. Faith is hard.
Today’s epistle lesson (Romans 4:1-12) is the crown jewel of
the grace vs. law dichotomy. Like Paul, many Protestant preachers (including
me) have chosen Abraham as our preferred OT figure. Paul needed a patriarch in
the Jewish tradition onto whom he could fasten his gospel of grace, and Abraham
fit the description perfectly. Remarkable faith leads to justification. That he
was the father of circumcision (the symbol of the old covenant) was quickly and
resolutely addressed by Paul: “That came after he was justified; go back and
read Genesis.” And Paul’s treatment of the Abraham story makes Romans 4 one of
the most powerful passages in the New Testament.
But what Paul couldn’t have realized is that, by the time we
get to the twenty-first century, Christianity has spread so far that “believing”
in Jesus isn’t all that hard—at least on the surface. In fact, growing up in
Alabama as an anything-but-Christian is probably much harder than professing the
lordship of Jesus Christ. That’s the opposite of Paul’s world. Back when Paul
was writing, believing that God’s promises had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ
and staking one’s life to that claim was physically dangerous and culturally
difficult. We have no idea.
Kathy Grieb’s 2002 book The
Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness helped me make
the connection. Although she says it with scholarly integrity in way I cannot,
for Paul being justified by faith meant having faith like Abraham. He was old
and his wife was reproductively even older. She was unable to have children,
yet, when God told Abraham that Sarah would conceive and bear a son, Abraham
believed God, and his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. That’s the
model of faith we are called to follow. If our faith is going to justify us, we
have to have crazy, makes-no-sense, are-you-kidding-me faith.
Paul wrote in Romans 4:5, “But to one who without works
trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.”
In other words, if you’re going to give up on works (and we do), then you must
have the kind of faith that enables you to stand naked and sinful in front of
almighty God and trust that he won’t condemn you. You have to put all of your
heaven-bound eggs in one basket and trust that you’ve got it right. If not, you’re
in big trouble. If God isn’t a God of grace, then you’re in for a rude and
quite unpleasant surprise that will last for the rest of eternity. Even in
those moments when God’s salvation seems so far away, you must cling to it with
all you’ve got. It can be the only thing that matters. Anything less isn’t real
faith, and half-hearted belief isn’t what gets reckoned as righteousness.
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