Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-march-20-2025
Romans 2:1-11
God’s Righteous Judgment
You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. 2 Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. 3 So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? 4 Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
5 But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. 6 God “will repay each person according to what they have done.” 7 To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. 8 But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. 9 There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; 10 but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 11 For God does not show favoritism.
We resolved at the start of this year that each time the lectionary switched to a different New Testament letter — which the Bible scholars call “epistles” — we would stop and say a few words about that particular epistle in general. This week, the listed epistle readings started coming from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which is regarded as one of the most important books of the New Testament. In fact, as far as some Bible scholars are concerned, the letter to the Romans ranks just behind the four gospels in terms of its importance to the Christian faith.
Many of the leading New Testament scholars believe that Paul wrote his letter to the Romans because he planned to do mission work in Spain, and to stop on the way to Spain to spend some time helping to build up the church in Rome. Romans is the longest of Paul’s letters, it includes the most comprehensive explanation of his understanding of the Christian faith.
This letter is especially important to followers of Jesus from the Protestant tradition. That’s because it was in Romans that the reformer Martin Luther came across the idea that we are not saved by being personally righteous or by performing religious rituals, but rather through our faith in Jesus which rises in our hearts as a gift given out of the gracious love of God.
And it’s important to stop and think for a moment about how Paul understood the idea of faith. In his mind, faith wasn’t simply believing that certain religious propositions were true. Instead, Paul understood faith to be a commitment to living by the teachings of Jesus – living by those teachings so that they actually govern how you live your life. It’s not just a matter of ‘doing good’ so you’re saved. It’s more that when you really make Jesus the center and Lord of your life, when you are living a new life by your faith in him, you find yourself wanting do things that please God as an expression of your thanks for that new life.
Now having said that, this passage we’re thinking about today might seem a little confusing, because it’s talking about God’s judgment and wrath. But that’s because of where this passage falls in the flow of Paul’s argument in the letter to the Romans. So we need to take a look at the context of this passage.
By the time Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, the church in that city was like many of the churches Paul had founded, in that it included a mixture of followers of Jesus who were Jewish and others who had been raised as gentiles. That made life in the church complicated, since Jesus himself had been Jewish and understood himself to be the fulfillment of the story of the covenant people as it appears in the Hebrew scriptures. So some of the members of the Roman church thought of themselves as more ‘legitimate’ followers of Jesus, since they were Jews as he had been. But the members of the church who had been gentiles thought they were the more ‘legitimate’ followers of the Jesus, since it was Jews who had rejected Jesus and insisted on his crucifixion.
Given this mixture of Jewish and gentile Christians in the Roman church, one of the main themes of this letter was the importance of resolving the ‘Jews vs. gentiles’ question so all of the believers could get along and serve Jesus together.
In the part of the letter that we’re thinking about today, Paul is writing mostly to the Jewish members of the church. They had been raised with the customary Jewish attitude that you had to please God by keeping the law of Moses, more-or-less earning God’s love. And if that’s the way you think about your relationship with God, then you’re bound to look down on gentiles as morally inferior because they don’t keep that law.
But Paul says that if the Jewish Christians regard themselves as morally superior, then they’re just deceiving themselves, because people of Jewish descent are just as likely to sin against God as the gentiles are.
Later on in the letter, Paul will explain that followers of Jesus are saved by the grace of God through the death of Jesus on the cross. But in our reading for today, he hasn’t gotten to that point in his argument yet. In today’s reading, Paul is making the point that sin is a universal stain on us, and that all of us face judgment for our own sins. And since we’re all sinners, none of us has room to think of ourselves as morally and spiritually superior to others.
Paul seems to regard it as at least a theoretical possibility that we might live a life that pleases God. That seems significant to me, because it seems to prevent us from adopting the attitude that we shouldn’t be judged for our sins, because living a good life is impossible. I think Paul would regard that as a ‘cop-out.’
But later in the letter, he makes it clear that we’re all so compromised by our sinful nature that hardly anybody achieves the level of godliness that lets us ‘persist in doing good’ and earn God’s reward of “glory, honor and peace.” And clearly Paul doesn’t believe he has personally achieved that level of virtue – later in the letter he will agonize over his own sinfulness.
In this passage, Paul wants to get three important points across. First, that all people, whatever our religious background, sin and fall short of God’s standards. Second, that since we all sin, none of us has the right to consider ourselves superior to others. And third, that all of us are held accountable by God for our own sins.
Later in the letter, Paul will deliver the good news of new life in Jesus. But in today’s reading, he wants to set up that good news by making sure we realize how badly we need that new life in Jesus.
Let’s pray. Lord, we acknowledge that each of us has sinned in many ways against you and against other people. We admit that one of the ways we have sinned is by judging and condemning others and considering ourselves superior to them. We ask your forgiveness, and we ask the help of your Holy Spirit to get rid of the stain of sin in ourselves and to be more accepting and encouraging toward others. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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