Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter

by Tom Wright

Paul’s question, ‘Who is going to condemn?’ is answered implicitly, No-one – because there is Jesus, standing at the father’s right hand, saying ‘Father, have mercy on this, my younger sister, my younger brother.’ (In Psalm 110 and Daniel 7, and elsewhere in the New Testament, he is sitting at God’s right hand. But, as in Stephen’s vision in Acts 7.55–6, he is here standing to intercede.) This picture of father and son is the reality that shows up the caricature in those mediaeval paintings where, tragically, you have a stern and angry father and a rather wet and feeble-looking son. No: as in verse 32, the father gave the son for this very purpose, and the son and the father are now working together. Jesus is the true, image-bearing human, reflecting the praises, prayers and urgent needs of his human family into the father’s heart, and reflecting back to his people the rescuing and protective love of the father. He is not trying to persuade the father to act against his own nature or purpose. He is there to implement that nature and purpose, which was always self-giving love.

As I said in the previous chapter, the final five verses don’t have many tell-tale connecting words. The alla at the start of verse 37 indicates that, contrary to what verse 35 might have implied, these troubles are not merely unpleasant things we have to get through, but actually the setting for a greater victory than we could have imagined – just as the Messiah’s cross was not simply a ghastly event to be bravely borne, but actually his royal victory over all the powers. Yes, says verse 36, this is a deeply unpleasant place to be, but – alla – in all these things we are more than conquerors. That greater victory, in which all opposition is not just defeated but swept off the board, is then explained with the gar at the start of verse 38. Verse 37, the super-victory, may seem counter-intuitive. But it is based on the unbreakable love of God himself, of which Paul has become utterly persuaded.

Verses 31–9, in fact, draw together the whole scripture, all human experience, the whole hostile world, and the whole victorious gospel. The point is that none of these things – whether events, as in 35, or forces and powers as in 38 and 39 – can separate ‘us’ from God’s Messiah-shaped love. Again, the ‘us’ here is those ‘in the Messiah’, the people in whose hearts the spirit witnesses that they are God’s children, and groans with their pain at the world’s dark depths. And Paul at last makes it explicit – for the first time since 5.6–10 – that this is all about love. I suspect we don’t sufficiently ponder what this means. Those who regularly preach, or listen to, ‘normal’ evangelistic addresses know very well that ‘God so loved the world’. There is always a danger that we both take this for granted and reduce the ‘love’ to a general sense of benevolence. We need to rattle that cage a bit.

many in Paul’s day believed that the city of Rome had a secret name. Nobody was supposed to utter it, in case the city, its secret being revealed, might be exposed to hostile attack. That may sound like something out of ‘Harry Potter’; but actually quite a bit of Harry Potter, not least the spells, is rooted in the classical world. There is good evidence that many not only assumed that Rome had a secret name but believed that the name in question was in fact ‘Rome’ backwards. Rome in Latin is Roma: so, spelled backwards, it is Amor. And Amor is the Latin for ‘love’. You see, the Romans believed (well, this is what they told themselves from time to time – how many actually believed it it’s hard to know) that they were descended from Aeneas, who escaped from the sack of Troy, as in Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid. And Aeneas was reputedly the son of Venus, the love-goddess. So it’s quite possible that Paul, reaching the height of his theological rhetoric, writing to people fluent in both Latin and Greek, would want to reclaim Love, agapē in Greek, Amor in Latin, not as the secret name of the pagan city but as the deepest truth about the creator God. Remember the subversive way in which Paul opens the letter. He speaks of God’s gospel, the ‘good news’ – and ‘good news’ was a word associated at the time with the achievements of Caesar Augustus, hailed as the son of the divine Julius, the kyrios, the Lord. But this good news is the real thing; and it has come about through the real ‘...

So what exactly is this ‘love’ of which Paul speaks so passionately? People used to say that the word agapē referred to a special ‘Christian’ kind of love. Not so. The Septuagint uses the word for everything from God’s love for Israel to Amnon’s destructive lust for Tamar.3 So why do the early Christians focus on agapē in the way they do, picking up the theme (rather than the linguistic phenomenon) of the Hebrew hesed in particular (‘mercy’, ‘loving kindness’, ‘generosity’ and so on)? They – John and Paul in particular – use the word to indicate the biblical theme of gratuitous divine love, God’s faithfulness to his covenant, his determination to see the covenant purpose through for the sake of the world – and their strong sense that this purpose had been fulfilled in Jesus.

The Greek machaira, translated here as ‘sword’, refers to the short sword used for executions rather than the longer sword (the xiphos) used in military operations. Facing the ‘sword’ in this case means being killed, not randomly in battle but deliberately by the official executioner.

We perhaps need to stress, as we draw together the threads of Paul’s argument, that he is persuaded of all this, and we must be too, because of the resurrection of the crucified son of God. Some have tried to make everything depend on the cross. This was partly because an older liberalism didn’t want to have the resurrection in the picture. It was also, I fear, because some preachers and teachers had a kind of tunnel-vision focus on a particular doctrine of atonement, for which the resurrection sometimes seemed barely necessary. But, as we’ve seen, it is the resurrection which declares that the cross was a victory – indeed, the victory. It is the resurrection in which the creator God declared publicly that the crucified and risen Jesus really was his son, Israel’s Messiah and the world’s lord.