Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-february-8-2024
Romans 12:9-21
Love in Action
9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 13 Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. 20 On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
The writings of the apostle Paul focus less than lots of people would think on the subject of ‘how to get saved.’ He was generally writing to people who had already committed their lives to following Jesus, so his letters focused a lot more on the question of what a Christian life should look like.
I guess you could say that his overall theme was the significance of Jesus – what God was doing when he came into the world in human form. Paul devoted nearly all of his letters to explaining what the life and death and resurrection of Jesus means to the world, and especially to those of us who are trying to follow him. That’s why the teachings of Jesus in the gospels and the teachings of Paul in his letters complement each other so well as a guide to the Christian life.
In fact, sometimes the two sound a lot alike. Take this passage – it reads like Paul could have been quoting from the teachings of Jesus. To me, that seems to say two things. First of all, that even though Paul left it to others to pass along Jesus’ teachings in the gospels, he still had a good understanding of what those teachings said. And second, that the vast majority of what Jesus taught can be found in the scriptures of the Hebrew people. Paul was an expert on the Hebrew scriptures, and Jesus had a genius for distilling and presenting what God had been saying to his people for centuries.
This particular passage from Romans might be the most concise description in the whole New Testament of what the life of a follower of Jesus is supposed to look like.
The passage opens by stressing the importance of love within the body of believers. (And remember, New Testament love is agape, the commitment to advancing the interests of another – not affection.) Paul urges us to hate evil and cling to the good. We tend to see that mention of ‘hating evil,’ and our minds go to whatever kind of evil bothers us most. It could be racism or sexism or greed or oppression or sexual immorality. But in this case, Paul seems to be talking about good and evil in the context of relationships among followers of Jesus.
The “good” Paul is talking about seems to be the love among believers – the joyful spirit, the willingness to share each other’s joys and burdens, and to offer hospitality. And when the word “hospitality” appears in the New Testament, it means a willingness to offer help and comfort to the suffering, including the sick and the needy. This is the sense of the word that gives us the word “hospital” – it’s not about Martha Stewart-style entertainment. It has more to do with the traditional role of deacons in the church.
So the bottom line of this first part of the reading is that followers of Jesus are to honor and support one another. Throughout his letters, Paul condemns behaviors like quarreling and back-stabbing and gossip in the church as very serious sins against the body of Jesus. We’re meant to be committed to fostering love and unity instead.
The second theme in the passage is that we’re supposed to extend that kind of New Testament hospitality even to those who persecute and mistreat us. We are to be instruments of God’s love, even in the lives of those we might not like. When our enemies are hungry, we are commanded to feed them. When they are thirsty, we’re commanded to give them a drink. Paul writes that doing good to those who abuse us will ultimately overcome the evil they might do to us.
There are a couple of other really interesting points in this passage, ones that you could easily skip over. For one thing, Paul says that we are to live in peace with others “as far as it depends on” us. The truth is that some people just won’t live at peace with us, no matter how much we might try to show them the love Jesus commands.
That doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of ‘loving’ our enemies – of being committed to their welfare. But it expresses the reality that we will have enemies in this world – in spite of our best efforts. And as Jesus suggested in his teaching that we are to wipe off the dust of our failures and go on, Paul makes the point that even the most faithful discipleship doesn’t work every time. So we don’t have to carry around the burden of guilt for our past failures.
Paul also quotes from a passage in the 25th chapter of Proverbs to reinforce another point that Jesus makes in his own teachings – that doing the right thing, that demonstrating love toward our enemies, will “heap burning coals on their head.” I can’t help getting a kick out of that. It seems clear that Jesus recognizes that we have an instinctive desire to bother those who dislike us. So Jesus and Paul both point back to this passage in Proverbs, which offers us the only kind of vengeance we’re permitted to take on those who abuse us: as the saying goes, to “kill them with kindness.”
As in yesterday’s reading, there’s a lot to think about in this short passage. Paul has done a great job of sketching out the kind of life he understands Jesus to have in mind for all of his followers.
Let’s pray. Lord, breathe your Spirit into us more and more each day, so that we come to show the love of Jesus to all those who see us interacting with other believers, and even with those who abuse and reject us. Help us to turn aside from seeking any kind of revenge except the revenge that comes from overcoming evil with good. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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