Standing Under the Scriptures
July 13, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

Romans 8.9-17: Paul explains how it is the Spirit of God within us that enables us to do those right things which we could never do by ourselves, thereby tying in with our discussion last Sunday (see below).

Matthew 13.1-23 (intervening verses will be omitted in the services): Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower, in which he himself may be taken to be the sower, the seed, the good ground, and the abundant harvest which comes out of it.

As for last Sunday, we found our first passage (Romans 7.14-25a) required some wrestling with. To some it could seem stark, even shocking. For here was Paul saying, “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (verses 14 and 15). And again, “”For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (verse 19). This might be taken as showing that he was divided within himself and generally in a bad way. Indeed it has been so taken, as an acknowledgement that he had bouts of despair and even that uncertainty about what he was doing underlay his tremendous missionary outreach. Hannah Arendt, the secular Jewish philosopher, for her part considered that the passage marked Paul’s discovery of the unconscious some 2,000 years ahead of Freud. I however submitted that it was none of these things. It would not have been possible for Paul either to carry out his missionary journeys or to write as he did had he been plagued by such inner divisions. As for his discovery of the unconscious, that notion represents the application of a modern concept in a very different context---out of modernity’s conceit about its own wisdom. The term would have been meaningless for him. Had it been explained to him, I am confident that he would have rejected it as quite irrelevant to his concerns. And despite the brashness of my assertions, nobody caught me up on them.

Regarding what the passage is actually about, I said that Paul was instead illustrating the fallen human condition, speaking in the first person so that his readers might see him as identifying with them. But it was not just the human condition as such that he was concerned with. Instead it was with that condition as it worked out under the Jewish Law--- which made clear what is right but failed to confer the power to do it. Thus he contrasts the mind, which understands what ought to be done, with the will, which is effectively powerless. “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self. But I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin” (verse 20). And it is out of this agonizing dilemma, this deep bind, that he gives voice to the cry, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” (verse 24). But the answer comes in the very next verse: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Regarding whether the will is free or not, the passage does indeed bear on the question. Obviously it is not free for fallen humanity. But that is not the end of the story, for in Christ our will is free, free to serve God. And that is the only true freedom, not just because Karl Barth said so but because it is inherent in the nature of things. Using our freedom to follow after anything else, including our own whims and desires, can only result in our enslavement to them.

A class member did however ask how Christ delivers us from the above bind, so as to make us truly free. And another class member pointed out that chapter 8, the following chapter, dealt with this question, as indeed Paul does, implicitly and explicitly, throughout his writings. In chapter 8 it is not only a matter of there being no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (verse 1). The chapter continues, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. Sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh” (verses 3 and 4). Involved here is Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice, whereby he took the powerlessness of our wills upon himself, making them powerful, though their power is in him not in us. And here we have the conjoining of sanctification with justification, the amendment of our life as well as the forgiveness of our sins, from which as we have been saying it ought never to be separated.

In our second reading (Matthew 11.16-19), Jesus by contrasting the receptions accorded John the Baptist and himself (“we piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”), brings out how people find ways to dismiss the truth no matter how it is presented to them. In terms of our Romans passage this may be regarded as an aspect of our unfreedom in our fallen condition. But here again Jesus frees us, so that rather than continuing to dismiss the truth we are able to accept it, even when from a worldly standpoint it is unpalatable.

Our Matthew passage came at the end of considerable discussion by Jesus of John the Baptist, prompted by John’s sending his disciples to ask, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” In the course of it Jesus remarks, “Among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” When we came across this once before, we had some difficulty in understanding John’s exclusion from the kingdom. But in the light of our Romans passage we could see how John, while calling to repentance, was unable to perform the function that Paul attributes to Jesus, namely enabling us not only to will but to do what is right, by making good the deficiency in our wills.

Some verses following our Matthew reading are relevant to the Romans passage too. In them Jesus declares, in the fashion of John’s Gospel but quite untypically for the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke), “All things have been delivered to me by my Father. And no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” And this declaration, known among scholars as the Johannine thunderbolt in the cloudless Synoptic sky, is not just for Jesus’ exaltation. It is for our sake. For he continues, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”---rest from the enslavement of our souls in their fallenness and freedom to serve only him.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted