Romans 7.11-24
What seals the death of Jesus Christ is neither his temple tantrum nor his profligate violations of the holiness codes. What dooms Jesus is the fact that he raised his friend from the dead. Just as the Word worked creation ex nihilo, the Lord Jesus had commanded his friend no longer to be dead, “Lazarus, come out!”
Had Jesus done the deed in the dark he might have lived.
But there were spectators.
After Jesus has returned his dead friend to his sisters, John reports that a crowd of Jews, having witnessed Jesus speak Lazarus forth from the dead, began “believing into Jesus.” Some of these bystanders, John says, went and snitched on Jesus to the Pharisees and the Pharisees went and tattled to the chief priests and the chief priests went and squealed to the Head Priest, Caiphas. How does Caiphas respond to news of Jesus’s power over the power of Death?
Caiphas worries:
“If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe into him, and the Romans will come and destroy our nation.”
At this point in the Gospel narrative, Caiphas is in no way a villain. To interpret his response as anything other than a straightforward observation and sincere fear for his people is an imposition upon the text. When Caiphas hears Christ can raise the dead, he immediately worries about the fragility of the status quo. After all, a violent imperial army occupies his people whose tiny nation has been riven by foreign invaders for generations.
“If we let him go on like this…the Romans will come and destroy our nation.” This is nothing other than an honest and reasonable concern from the person appointed to be the intermediary between his people and their captors. As soon as Jesus summoned Lazarus out of his tomb in Bethany, the chief priests call an emergency council meeting in Jerusalem where Caiphas proffers a straightforward solution, “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”
It is certainly a cold and cruel utilitarian proposition. Just so, it is true. It is better for one person to die than for all the people to die. And so, after Jesus wields his power over the power of Death, the chief priests set in motion a plot whereby Mary’s boy will become Pilate’s victim.
Again, it is an imposition on the text to impute villainy to Caiphas.
Straightforwardly, Caiphas is trying to do the good.
But through him, the power of Sin will crucify God.
The author of the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer, famously distilled Protestant anthropology with the phrase, “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” William Faulkner registered a similar observation in his Nobel Prize speech, insisting that the most compelling theme in literature is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Ironically, Faulkner later admitted that he had been drunk during his address.
Likewise, over the centuries interpreters have often read this portion of the Epistle to the Romans as an autobiographical digression, identifying the tortured “I” of these verses as the apostle Paul divulging his own post-conversation conflicted will. Thus Luther found in the letter’s seventh chapter a basis for his formula simul justus et peccator; the baptized believer is always simultaneously justified and a sinner. Four hundred years after Luther, Karl Barth commented on this passage by saying, “I am always still bound in a two-fold manner.” “When Paul looks at himself and takes stock,” Barth writes, “he finds that Saul is very much alive.” Having recently celebrated my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, I could supply you with ample examples of how I also “do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Frankly, I worry about anyone who does not identify with such self-assessment.
Nevertheless!
As my teacher Beverly Gaventa notes in her commentary, the epistle’s chapter divisions are not only a later addition to the text, they are in fact misleading.
Paul intended the Christians in Rome to hear his letter in a single sitting. When read not piecemeal but from start to finish, it becomes obvious that this passage is not about Paul (or, you and me) but the final spiral in Paul’s argument about the universal grasp of the powers of Sin and Death and their overturning by God in Jesus Christ. The vexed “I” in chapter seven is not a jarring autobiographical digression but part of the overall rhetoric of Romans.
The “I” in this passage is not Paul looking at himself and taking stock.
The “I” in this passage is the final step in Paul’s diagnosis of Sin and Death.
Hence—
Paul begins his letter by unfurling a long indictment against a nameless “they.” “They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice,” Paul writes in chapter one, “Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, and God-haters.”
From a nameless they, Paul then moves to assert Sin’s reign over the whole of humanity. This is his argument Romans 3.9-20 and again in Romans 5.12-21.
From the whole of humanity, Paul brings the argument closer to home, writing that “we” too were once slaves under the dominion of Sin— that’s Romans 6.1-7.6.
Before breaking out with the good news of the absence of condemnation, Paul mounts the final movement of his argument about the reach of Sin’s grasp with the singular “I” in the balance of chapter seven.
From they to we to me.
It’s one long argument that spiral downs to this “I.”
Therefore, this is not a bit of autobiography from Paul; this is the final examination of the workings of Sin. Paul has already put the law on the same side of the line as the anti-God powers, and now in chapter seven he posits that Sin’s voracious power was strong enough to colonize even the law; such that, even someone who sought the Good could instead be doing the work of God’s Enemy.
Eve Fairbanks is a former political journalist who released her first book in 2022. The Inheritors is a detailed portrait of South Africa’s racial reckoning after the end of apartheid. In conducting interviews and investigative research, Fairbanks reports she was surprised to discover that, thirty years later, many white, progressive Afrikaners who had advocated for and welcomed the end of apartheid now harbor racial resentments and racist attitudes.
In an Atlantic article entitled “When Racial Progress Comes for White Liberals,” Fairbanks writes:
“Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by South Africa’s white minority, particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. For being such a tragedy, apartheid seemed to have a miraculous conclusion—a rapid and peaceful end that spared even the defeated oppressors…
Unexpectedly, white people benefited materially from the end of apartheid. Thanks in part to the lifting of foreign sanctions, the average income of white households increased 15 percent during Nelson Mandela’s presidency, far more than Black incomes did.…And for the many white progressives who had opposed apartheid, South African society moved far closer to their ideal of racial equality…
Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent…In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged forgiveness [according to God’s commandment]. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes…But as time wore on, a startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer.”
What accounted for this reversal in those who had once taken risks to fight against evil?
Fairbanks writes that it was black obedience to the law— specifically to the command to forgive— that fomented racism in those who once had been anti-racist.
“Black forgiveness,” Fairbanks heard over and over again, “felt like a slap on the face. White people rarely articulated these feelings publicly. But in private, with friends and acquaintances, I encountered them over and over.”
A fellow journalist, an Afrikaner, confessed to Fairbanks, “This hate now lurks even in a bleeding-heart liberal like myself.”
“I agree that the law is good, but I perceive that I am no longer the actor. Sin is.”
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insists that “No one can serve two masters.” “Either you will hate the one and love the other,” Jesus preaches, “or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” But in his Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul asserts something far alarming, what Karl Barth called the “impossible possibility."
Two masters live within the “I” who speaks in chapter seven.
“I delight in the law of God,” Paul writes, “But I see…another law waging war and making me captive to the law of sin.”
The New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann said that, for Paul, “anthropology is cosmology in concreto.” That is, the cosmic conflict between God and the anti-God powers— Sin, Death, and the Devil— is experienced concretely in the ordinary, daily lives of believers. For all its density, the progression of Paul’s argument is threefold.
Sin is at war with God.
Humanity is caught in the conflict.
Sin targets victims through the very commandments God gave to humanity.
This is Paul’s line of thinking in the first seven chapters of his epistle. This cosmic conflict that catches us up through the commandments explains Paul’s word choice in verses seventeen and twenty. Elsewhere when Paul affirms that Christ “lives” in us, the word he uses is zao and applies to Christ’s own life. By sharp contrast, when Paul says that Sin “lives in me” he chooses an altogether different verb, oikeo, which refers to the occupation of a space.
In other words, the “I” who speaks in chapter seven has been colonized by an intruder.
And it’s not simply Paul’s word choice that highlights his theme of cosmic conflict, it’s his word count:
Across all of his letters, Paul uses the word sin (hamartia) eighty-one times.
Of those eighty-one occurrences, sixty appear in this epistle.
Over two-thirds fall in Romans 5-7.
The word sin occurs five more times in chapter eight.
Paul is not the subject of this passage.
“Sin is.”
One historian told the journalist Eve Fairbanks that he thought that what dogged white progressives after apartheid ended was a feeling of irrelevance. Under apartheid, many of them felt they belonged to a vanguard. They expected the aftermath of apartheid to be an exciting time, full of the same thrilling work he had done to help build a democratic, multiracial future for the country.
They now resent the result of their good intentions.
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, told Fairbanks that, “by most measures, apartheid's aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated.
Fairbanks writes:
“A few years after the end of apartheid, Malan moved to an upscale Cape Town neighborhood. Most mornings, he drank macchiatos at an upscale seaside café—the kind of cosmopolitan place that, thanks to sanctions, had hardly existed under apartheid. “The sea is warm and the figs are ripe,” he wrote. He also described this existence as “unbearable.”
He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”
Black South Africans had intended the Good in forgiving Afrikaners like Rian Malan, but through their work of forgiveness something else was willed.
The word sin appears sixty times in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Almost all instances occur in these three chapters. And as in chapters five and six, Sin is the subject of a string verbs in the seventh chapter:
v.8: “Sin, by staking out its base of operations…produced.”
v.9: “Sin sprang to life.”
v.11: “Sin, staking out its base of operations…deceived me and even killed me.”
v.13: “Sin…produced death for me, so that Sin…might grow sinful.”
v.17: “Sin lives in me.”
v.20: Sin lives in me.”
Sin is not only the subject of all these verbs, in many ways Sin is the subject of the first half of Paul’s letter. Sin is the antagonist occupying center stage.
Sin is the main character in Paul’s dramatis personnae.
But then— curiously— after the opening announcement of the next chapter, the word all but disappears.
Sin vanishes from the stage.
In Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation, Al Kimel begins by explaining his reason for writing the book.
“First and foremost, I am a preacher of the gospel. I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1980. I served as Curate in one congregation and pastored three others as Rector. Since 2011, I have been a priest (now retired) in the Eastern Orthodox Church and am addressed by my fellow Orthodox as “Fr Aidan.”
Ten years ago, on 15 June 2012, my second son Aaron died by suicide at the age of 32. He was brilliant and funny, articulate and eccentric. When he died, I was destroyed, as were my wife Christine and my other three children. Aaron was beloved and cherished by each of us. I was swallowed up in a fire of sorrow and grief that consumed everything inside of me.
I mean that quite literally. I quickly became an empty shell. I wept uncontrollably day after day for over a year. Four months after Aaron’s death, I decided to start a blog, which I named Eclectic Orthodoxy. My goal was simple—to hold onto that sliver of sanity I had left. I did so by determining to read the ancient Church Fathers and to summarize their thoughts.
Initially, my writing did not draw many visitors, but that was fine. I wasn’t doing it for anyone but myself. What drew me to the Church Fathers and their reading of the gospel was their profound conviction that God is absolute love. The Father of the Lord Jesus, the ancient Christians held, would never condemn his children to everlasting torment.
Destined for Joy contains what I judge to be the best of my articles written on God’s total overcoming of the power of Sin and accomplished reconciliation of all human beings to himself in Jesus Christ.”
In other words—
Faced with the suicide of his son and his fear for his boy’s condemnation, Father Aidan turned to the church’s ancient tradition, seized by the question of whether the Lord Jesus’s victory over Sin is already or not yet. That is, Father Aidan was gripped by this question of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Is the “I” who speaks in chapter seven describing the world after Easter or before Good Friday? Is Sin still so powerful that this “I” is speaking of his present life as a believer, or is this “I” looking back on his prior peril inhabiting the world that crucified God?
Is the power of Sin still so powerful so as to conscript and condemn you?
Admittedly, it’s difficult to read an account like Eve Fairbanks’s portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and answer otherwise but “Yes.”
Yes, Sin’s rule remains.
Yes, “there is a second law in my limbs.”
Yes, the power of Sin still is powerful to colonize and conscript you.
And, just so, condemn you.
Nevertheless! The Word of God utters an altogether different verdict.
Once again, as my teacher notes, the letter's chapter divisions are misleading. Paul did not write a “chapter seven” and a "chapter eight.”
Therefore:
The entire point of the question which ends “chapter seven” (“Who will deliver me from the body ruled by this Death?”) is that the question has an answer!
The whole point of asking the question is that it has an answer!
The answer has already been adjudicated.
And it’s a final answer.
The answer comes immediately in the next two verses which begin “chapter eight.”
“There is now no condemnation,” Paul answers the question, “for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
And this absence of condemnation, this disappearance of the word sin from the rest of the letter, this vanishing of the Enemy from the stage, Paul writes:
“That is because the law under the power of the Spirit that yields life in Christ Jesus freed you from the law under the power of Sin and Death.”
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
As much as we all might resonate with these verses, the “I” who speaks in Romans 7 is neither Paul nor you or me.
The “I” who speaks in seven is the Old Adam, and by our Lord Jesus he is dead— drown in the baptism of Christ’s death and resurrection.
As Karl Barth writes:
“The justification of the sinner in Jesus Christ cannot be overthrown or reversed. Rejection cannot again become the portion or affair of man. The exchange which took place on Golgotha, when God chose as His throne the malefactor’s cross, can never be reversed. There is no condemnation— literally none— for those that are in Christ Jesus. Faith just is, as such and per se, faith in the non-rejection of men.”
Faith just is belief in the impossibility of your condemnation.
In other words, in God’s gracious humor— despite the Enemy who took him as a base of operations— Caiphas was correct. It is better for that one man to die than for all to perish.
Father Kimel concludes his introduction of Destined for Glory with a prayer request, “Please pray for the soul of my beloved Aaron. To him this book is dedicated. He is present on every page of every essay, in every sentence on the scriptures, in every word of theology. May his memory be eternal!”
Of course we can accept his request and prayer for his dearly departed Aaron. But we can, just as assuredly, ask Aaron to pray for us.
Because the “I” is dead.
There is no condemnation— literally none.
Paul’s question and all that it implies have ceased to be. What was once true is true no longer. What was not true is now true. All at once, Barth writes, there is cause only to be thankful.”
Therefore—
There is no where else to go with this passage but to the table, to the mystery of loaf and cup, body and blood, which Paul calls eucharist.
Thanksgiving.
“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 2Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
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