Romans 2.1-6, 12-26
I became a Christian when Jesus hijacked my life not long before I graduated from high school whereupon I set out as an undergraduate eager to learn more about the faith that had seized me. My college advisor was a jolly, whiskey complected Jesuit priest named Father Fogarty. Trying to determine my courses for the spring semester of my first year, I met with Father Fogarty one morning before Christmas.
“Father Fogarty, help me out” I said, laying my course catalog on his desk, “This isn’t about my major. It’s personal. I’ve read the four Gospels several times. My pastor gave me some Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis to read and they’ve been illuminating. But other than individual verses and passages, I can’t make heads or tails of Paul’s epistles. No sooner do I start reading his one of his letters than I get lost in his long logic chains.”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Father Fogarty laughed, sipped his tea, and looked anxiously at his open door, “There’s an entire cabal of biblical scholars who I’m convinced don’t understand Paul either.”
And then he laughed at his own joke.
“Is there a course I could take that would help me understand Paul?”
He reflected on my question for a moment, and then he turned my course catalog a couple of pages and with a red pen circled a listing.
“Register for Willie Wilson’s course on Flannery O’Connor,” he said, “there’s no better guide to help you grasp Paul’s radical message.”
“Flannery O’Connor?” I replied, “I read her in high school— that’s fiction; that’s not theology.”
“Trust me, my boy.”
So I did.
The spring course started with Flannery O’Connor’s grim, gothic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” wherein a self-righteous, southern grandmother, who lives with her son Bailey and his family, accompanies them on a road trip from Georgia to Florida. Unsuccessfully, the old lady lobbies Bailey to visit family in Tennessee instead, telling her son that she’s spooked by the news reports of an escaped convict called the Misfit who was embarked on a violent, random killing spree through Florida. At the grandmother’s prodding, the family takes a detour down a dirt road in search of a plantation the old lady remembers having once visited. The grandmother’s stowaway cat causes Bailey to drive into a gulch, flipping the family car. With the car wrecked, the family waits and attempts to flag passersby for help.
Eventually a “big black hearse-like automobile” pulls up slowly to the site of the crash. The car stops and, for “some minutes,” the three men inside stare at them, expressionless. They’re neither neighbors nor policemen but the Misfit and his gang, whom the grandmother has been dreading and decrying during the entire road trip.
One by one, the Misfit sends family members into the roadside woods to be murdered by his accomplices.
Bailey.
His wife.
And their children— John Wesley and June Star and a nursing infant.
Watching her son disappear into the woods, the panicked grandmother pleads for the Misfit’s mercy, saying, “I just know you’re a good man.”
“Nome, I ain’t a good man,” the Misfit says after a second, as if he had considered the statement carefully, “But I ain’t the worst in the world either.”
Her family all murdered, the old lady desperately tries to escape her doom. Since the specter of Jesus apparently offends the Misfit, she goes so far as to suggest that maybe Jesus didn’t raise the dead after all. Delirious with fear, the old lady collapses in the ditch with her legs twisted underneath her. She looks up from the dirt at the Misfit and her head clears for an instant. “Why you’re one my babies,” she says to him, “You’re one of my own children.”
The old lady reaches out to him and grasps him on the shoulder.
He recoils from her touch, “as if a snake had bitten him.”
And immediately he shoots her three times through the chest.
The Misfit then instructs his accomplices to throw her body in the woods with their other victims.
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” one of them comments to the Misfit.
And the Misfit replies, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“There’s no better guide to help you grasp Paul’s radical message,” the priest had promised me.
In his account of Christianity in America, the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr summarized the vague sentimentality of mainline Protestantism. He did so with a brutal and incisive critique:
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
H. Richard Niebuhr offered that appraisal almost one hundred years ago, and its enduring accuracy can account for why the mainline churches more often than not preach a Jesus kerygma rather than a Christ kerygma. That is, liberal Protestantism typically proclaims Jesus the human teacher, prophet, and example instead of Christ the incarnate, fully divine deliverer from sin.
This privileging of the Jesus kerygma over the Christ kerygma is precisely what has made it difficult for mainline Protestants to make sense of the apostle Paul.
All the words Niebuhr said we are without are unavoidably present with this epistle; in fact, they are all packed into this passage.
Wrath.
Sin.
Judgment.
Meanwhile, the fourth word we are without— the Cross— is the revelation of the other three. The negative complement of the gospel, Paul announced in his thesis statement, is the unveiling of God’s wrath. Just so, the gospel is the apocalypse of God's judgment upon humanity’s sin.
A God without wrath brought people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the work of a Jesus without a cross. If the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, then the assimilation of the church to the world— a world that does not want to hear words like sin, judgment, and wrath— silences her witness. Therefore, the apostle’s argument demands attention, perhaps most especially Paul’s diatribe which begins chapter one and extends through chapter three.
First—
Understand that Paul reasons from solution to plight, from deliverance to dilemma, from Golgotha back to the Garden.
The news that Israel’s Messiah had come would not itself have forced Paul to reassess his Jewish beliefs. The news even that God had raised a dead messiah from the grave would not itself have forced Paul to rethink his convictions, resurrection being a Jewish belief.
It is the crucified Jesus encountering him that compels Paul to reevaluate his received beliefs about sin, the law, and even the narrative thread upon which scripture hangs together. If the crucifixion of Mary’s boy was not, as Saul was taught to believe, a sign of God’s curse, if the crucifixion of God’s Son was instead required to redeem humanity, then the sinfulness of humankind must be both radical in itself and beyond the capacity of existing (and less drastic) measures to overcome it.
As Karl Barth comments on the passage:
“From the verdict of the Father, we learn what God knows about us and therefore how it really is with us…For only the revelation of salvation can throw light on the state of alienation. It is at the cross of Christ that the justified man [or woman] measures the significance of human sin.”
From solution to plight.
Paul’s diatribe begins from this point of post-conversion reevaluation of our plight. The depth of our dilemma shapes his diatribe. Notice, as Paul transitions from his all-encompassing indictment of humanity at the end of chapter one to the beginning of chapter two, he shifts from the third person plural (they) to the second person singular:
“Therefore— you there— you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”
What things?
The opening word dio (therefore) signals that what follows draws out implications from the previous section.
Thus:
“They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, selfish ambition, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die.“Therefore— you there— you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”
The hardest people for Christ to win are those who think they need him not.
Therefore, Paul proceeds to unpack who is included in that you.
And Paul does so methodically in chapter two in order to destabilize assumptions about who might be exempt from God’s judgment and who might be immune from his wrath.
To the Gentiles, who might presume that they are not liable to indictment under the Jewish law, Paul insists that they cannot plead ignorance. They know God’s moral will just as well as Jews do. The law merely tells it like it is; the law does not make it so. Moses knew murder was wrong long before God gave him the commandments on Mt. Sinai. Just so, God will judge each and every unbeliever according to their obedience to the law that is written not on tablets of stone but on their hearts.
And to the Jews, who might rest assured that their election as God’s people safeguards them from condemnation, Paul subverts the stability of Jewish identity in the bluntest, crudest manner imaginable. In verse twenty-five, Paul literally says that a circumcised male who does not keep the commandments grows a foreskin. It was difficult for me not to title the sermon, “How to Grow a Foreskin.”
“God shows no partiality,” Paul writes, sweeping everyone up behind the defendant’s table, “All who have sinned apart from the law will perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.”
The logic chain is inexorable and exhaustive so that the claim is explicit.
Namely, all other differences notwithstanding, the religious and the irreligious share one common fact; they are all on the very same footing before Almighty God.
Or, as Karl Barth writes:
“God alone is the Merchant who can pay in the currency of eternity,” and he alone “will judge the secret thoughts of all.”
We might be good men and women…
If we had someone to shoot us every minute of our lives.
Francis Schaeffer was a philosopher and theologian who wrote extensively on Christianity’s engagement with secular culture. In his book The Church at the End of the 20th Century, Schaeffer sought to convey the logic of Paul’s gospel to readers for whom words like wrath, sin, and judgment might sound archaic.
Imagine, Schaeffer writes:
“If every little baby that was ever born anywhere in the world had an invisible recorder hung about its neck, and if the recorder only recorded the moral judgments with which this child as he or she grew bound other people, the moral precepts might be much lower than the biblical law, but they would still be moral judgments.
Eventually each person comes to that great moment when he or she stands before God as judge. Suppose, then, that God simply touched the recorder's button and each man or woman heard played out in his or her own words all those statements by which he or she had bound others in moral judgment [every instance of him or her saying ought, should, or must to another person]/ She or he could hear it going on for years—thousands and thousands of moral judgments made against other people and moral exhortations given to other people.
Then God would simply say to the person, though he had never head the Bible, now where do you stand in the light of your own moral judgments? Every last person would have to acknowledge that they have deliberately done those things which they knew to be wrong. Nobody could deny it.
We sin two kinds of sin. We sin one kind as though we trip off the curb, and it overtakes us by surprise. We sin a second kind of sin when we deliberately set ourselves up to fall. And no one can say he does not sin in the latter sense. Paul’s comment is not just theoretical and abstract, but addressed to the individual— any person without the Bible, as well as the person with the Bible…
God is completely just.
A person is judged and found wanting on the same basis on which he or she has judged others.”
As much as his encounter with the Risen Jesus forces him to reassess many of his received beliefs, Paul’s understanding of God’s judgment is not different from Saul’s understanding of it.
This is a common misperception of Paul’s message.
The gospel promise of the New Testament does not supersede the Old Testament’s principle of law.
Law and gospel are two distinct words of God, but the latter does not supplant the former.
When Paul writes that no one can be justified by works of the law, Paul is not attacking good works or the law. Throughout the Old Testament, the Lord promises that he will execute his righteous judgment according to each person’s deeds. Simply, God will reward those who do good and punish those do wrong. “He will come again,” the creed confesses, “to judge the quick and the dead.”
As the Lord attests to Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy:
“If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today…then you shall live. But if your heart turns away and you do not I declare to you today that you shall perish…I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.”
Paul makes the very same claim in verse thirteen, “The doers of the law will be justified.” This is neither a distortion in Paul’s logic nor a contradiction of his gospel.
God will find righteous any one who keeps all the law’s commands.
God will find righteous any one who does no wrong under the law.
The dilemma is that there are no such good people.
If only we had someone to shoot us every minute of our lives.
As I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story in college, I remembered my high school English teacher telling our class that the short story was about hypocrisy, that ultimately every religious person is a phony who will do whatever they can— even renounce God— to save their skin.
I offered this summary in class when we discussed “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
“Your high school teacher must not have been a Christian,” the Professor replied, “Because it’s not just a story about religious hypocrites. Of course we’re all hypocrites. But the story’s about Paul’s gospel. It’s a parable of God invading our world in word and sacrament to reach out and draw sinners back to him, despite our resistance.”
“I don’t see it.”
“When the grandmother falls down at the end,” he explained, “Flannery says that “her head cleared for an instant.” Then she looks at the Misfit, calls him one of her babies, one of her own children, and then she reaches out to touch him. It’s an instance of grace. In that moment, she finally saw the Misfit and herself as alike under sin, as members of the same fallen family.”
“Then why does the Misfit react like he’s been snake bit and shoot her?” a classmate asked.
“Because,” he said, “if you don’t think you need it, then you recoil at a mercy that lumps all of us together in our need.”
Really, Paul’s long, complex diatribe is reducible to a syllogism:
Since no human beings can be righteous in God’s sight by works of the law.
And since the works of the law amount to the good God does require for righteousness.
It therefore follows that no human can be righteous by the deeds they do.
Of course, you can always nevertheless try.
Go for it!
God’s word abides.
What the Lord promised to Moses still holds.
God will find righteous any one who keeps all the law’s commands.
God will find righteous any one who does no wrong.
Such a one will live and perish not.
The dilemma is that there are no such good people.
Or rather, there was one.
There was one.
And he didn’t need a gun to his head.
He was obedient even unto a cross.
And that’s why the Father raised him from the dead.
As the Misfit says to the old lady before her murder, “Jesus was the only One that ever raised from the dead, and he shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance.”
A God with wrath brings men and women with sin into a Kingdom with judgment through the work of Christ with his cross. Jesus has thrown everything off balance.
God’s word abides.
God’s word abides unalterably.
The Lord will find righteous any one who keeps the law.
That one will live.
Just so, the gospel, according to Paul in verse sixteen, unveils to all a choice— a choice made possible by Jesus having thrown everything off balance.
On the one hand, you can seek righteousness by keeping all the law’s commands, both in act and intention.
Or, on the other hand, you can receive righteousness by obeying the law of faith.
That is, on Judgement Day you can ask God to review your resume vis a vis the commandments, or, you can stand, alongside a whole lot of misfits, under the umbrella of Jesus Christ’s obedience.
The law still stands.
Grace is the choice.
As it turns out, Father Fogarty was telling the truth. Flannery O’Connor was a good guide to grasp Paul’s gospel. Only, the title of her story is wrong. A good man isn’t that hard to find.
You have just heard from him.
And he’s told you where to find him.
So come to the table.
Reach out and grasp him.
A Good Man is Hard to Find