Sermon preached The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough, Eighth Sunday After Pentecost (July 6, 2008 )
Readings: Gen 24:34-38, 42-49, 68-67; S of S 2:8-13; Rom 7:15-25a; Mt 11:16-19, 25-30.
“Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Rom 7:24-5
What a jumble of conflicting feelings we human beings have, and how artfully are they on display in today’s readings! The coldly contracted marriage between Isaac and Rebekah contrasts with the romantic love poem of the Song of Solomon. The courageous freedom counselled by Jesus has its counterpoint in Paul’s earnest self-reproach. This emotional range speaks to us in our human condition – constraint and freedom; love and guilt; divine initiative and human choice.
I want to concentrate on Paul, though, whose own skill in expressing the range of his own emotion has made him both famous and infamous. Now, I myself experience ambivalence in my reactions to Paul. On the one hand, I’m always moved by the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Paul’s hymn of praise to the perfect gift of love. But on the other hand, we have passages like this: “I know that nothing good dwells within me,” he says, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” And concerning the evil Paul does commit, he says, “it is [not] I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” And he ends this section with the lament, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer, of course, is Jesus Christ.
What Paul is this? It is not the sublime, transcendental Paul who said that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” It is not the bold, confident Paul who asserts, “The trumpet shall sound…and we shall be changed.” This is not even the angry, hurt, and scolding Paul of Second Corinthians and Galatians. No, this seems to be another Paul – a Paul who loathes himself, one who cannot or will not take responsibility for his actions – “It is not I, but sin that dwells within me!” Wallowing in self-pity and self-recrimination, Paul’s internal judge and jury has found him guilty of being possessed of no good thing, of occupying a body of death.
Unfortunately, this has become the dominant idea of Paul in the Church. Karl Barth, in his definitive 1921 commentary on Romans, wrote: “Conflict and distress, sin and death, the devil and hell, make up the reality of religion. So far from releasing men from guilt and destiny, it brings men under their sway. Religion is the misfortune which every human being has to endure, though it is, in the majority of cases, a hidden suffering.” “Well, this is not a very useful preaching help,” I sadly conclude.
But I think exploring Barth’s interpretation is important, because it still resonates in the Church, and in how Paul is understood – incorrectly understood. It is an understanding of Pauline theology that has nurtured a kind of Pharisaic legalism in many Christians – a sense that we are inveterate no-goodniks, crippled by evil impulses, yet saved through the grace of God nonetheless. We’re helpless, suffering bystanders, watching as sin and Spirit wage war on the battlefield of our bodies.
This is a profound misunderstanding of Paul’s anthropology. Just as my caricature of Paul as a self-loathing, helpless whiner is a little over the top. Confronted with the passage we heard from Paul’s letter to the community in Rome, we can’t help but be struck by the personal, confidential tone of Paul’s confession. So smitten are we by this little autobiographical gem, this insight into the psychology of the great, last apostle, we cannot see the real story behind the rhetoric. For what we have here is not an emotionally wracked Paul, but Paul in the role of author and missionary, deploying his fine skill as a master of diatribe. And while this passage does give us insight into Paul’s psychology, it is not the personal, intimate portrait we have long assumed.
Many commentators have suggested that this passage is one of the most important in Romans, and one of the most controversial. In an important article entitled “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Krister Stendahl zeroes in on it. He notes that the passage is not primarily concerned with Paul’s own predicament, or even that of humanity. Rather, Paul is here engaged in an argument about Torah, the law. This is really the story behind the story in the whole letter. Paul is eager to defend the law as, in his own words, “holy, just, and good.” His means of doing so is to distinguish between it – the law which is spiritual – and the realm of sin, which leads to fatality. “It is not I who do evil, but the sin which dwells within me.” This distinction allows Paul to blame sin and flesh, and to rescue law – Torah – as a good gift of God.
This rather trivial observation, that we all know there is a difference between what we ought to do and what we actually do, has morphed into the common view that Paul has rendered a penetrating insight into the nature of human beings. The real purpose of the passage – the nature and intention of God’s law – has been lost.
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this misunderstanding is that many Christians have turned Paul into a Gnostic, much like they themselves are. Like the Gnostics, they see the human condition as one of pure spirit trapped in evil matter. This clearly denies the full humanity of our Lord, who, in his earthly ministry, was as flesh and blood as you or me. Jesus had hopes, fears, loves, temptations – all on display for us in the biographies of him written by his followers. Moreover, such an interpretation contradicts Paul’s own views – he who said that the body is God’s temple, and that the Spirit of God dwells within it. Note – not imprisoned in your body, but dwelling in it.
The insight that this passage and much of Romans offers into Paul’s psychology is that of his dualism. He sees reality divided into two spiritual realms – one of God and grace; the other of sin and death. For Paul, these are real powers, real principalities. He speaks repeatedly about sin having exercised dominion, of Christ’s victory over it through his death, and our access into the divine realm of grace and true life through his resurrection. “We know,” Paul says, “that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and that we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”
According to Stendahl, what dominates this chapter is the awareness that there is a positive solution available here and now by the Holy Spirit, about which Paul speaks in the next chapter of Romans. Stendahl says, and I quote, “We should not read a trembling and introspective conscience into a text which is so anxious to put the blame on Sin, and that in such a way that not only the Law but the will and mind of man are declared good and found to be on the side of God.”
A day doesn’t go by that I don’t regret something I’ve done. Perhaps the most regrettable things are the self-recriminations and self-disgust over what sort of person I could possibly be to do those things which I regret. When we understand the fundamental goodness, the sacredness of our being, of who and how we are created, we will see that making ourselves small and ugly in our own minds is to yield to the realm of sin. We are created in the image of God – the face of Jesus shines in the face of every human being – in you, in me, in the first person you see when you walk out that door. Let us yield to the realm of the Spirit. Let us, with Paul, offer our thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2008.