Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
How do you feel about the book of Romans? Whether you were raised in dominant American Christianity or just absorbed it through osmosis, it is very hard to open Paul’s letter to the church in Rome and not hear it in the voice of modern evangelicalism, contrasting “faith” and “works” and proclaiming a Jesus who “frees us from ‘the law.’” The supersessionist replacement theology of Paul the American Christian would be confusing to Paul the 1st-Century Jew, and to his Gentile and Jewish audience.
Thankfully, in recent decades there has been an abundance of scholarship asking, in essence, “What if Paul wasn’t a self-hating Jew?” At the risk of summarizing an entire academic library in a few sentences, this new perspective argues that for Paul, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus acts to welcome Gentiles into God’s family without replacing or reducing the Chosen-ness of the Jewish people. And this happens, crucially, not because of our own “righteousness” in faith (as the NRSV translates this passage), but because of God’s righteous commitment to us. Our faith doesn’t “save” us Gentiles, God’s love has already redeemed us. God leaves no one behind.
We can continue to debate this, but for me this reading helps us see and understand Paul the incarcerated organizer. Here, God does not ordain punishment—human or divine—for our unbelief or our bad works. If all people are now inheritors of God’s Chosen-ness, we all “inherit the world” through the righteousness of God’s belief in us. Whether or not we keep the faith or behave well, God has faith in us. God is rooting for all of us, collectively as a species. As Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales writes,
This time we’re tied at the ankles.
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.