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These people, prayerful, humble, faithful, will be the answer, not to the question Why? But to the question What?
Yet Paul doesn’t go there. He simply refers to the one great sign: God is calling all people everywhere to repent through the events concerning Jesus. Jesus himself is the One Great Sign.
Just to be clear once more, the ‘inheritance’ here is not ‘heaven’, as many Christians have imagined. The ‘glory’ has nothing to do with going to heaven and shining like angels. The ‘inheritance’ is the whole renewed creation, the complete heaven-and-earth reality, renewed from top to bottom, as in Revelation 21, with corruption, death and decay abolished for ever.
Creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed. Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.
In other words: God always wanted to rule his world through human beings. That is part of what it means to be made in God’s image.
All those indwelt by the Spirit are, like Jesus, to be image-bearers, ‘shaped according to the model of the image of his son’, as Paul puts it in verse 29.
As we’ve seen, some are saying that the Church should be commenting from the sidelines: it’s because you’re all sinners! It’s because the End is near! We know what’s going on and we need to tell you! Yet that’s not what Paul says. Paul says that the followers of Jesus are caught up in the same ‘groaning’. We are painfully aware of a big gap between the people we are right now (weak, frail, muddled, corruptible) and the people we shall be (risen from the dead into a glorious, new and immortal physicality).
The thing above all which the Church should be doing at the present time is praying. But this is a strange prayer indeed. Here we are, at the heart of one of the most glorious chapters in Scripture, and here is Paul saying We don’t know what to pray for as we ought.
Yet that is the very moment when we are caught up in the inner, Triune life of God. Here is the dark mystery to which our present situation might alert us: the one thing we know from all this is that ‘not-knowing’ is itself the right place to be.
There is a pattern here. Those who have long pondered the story of Jesus will recognize it. We expect God to be, as we might say, ‘in charge’: taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend.
That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.
Dare we then say that God the creator, facing his world in melt-down, is himself in tears, even though he remains the God of ultimate Providence? That would be John’s answer, if the story of Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb is anything to go by.
At this point, of course, someone might quote the next verse. Romans 8.28 has often been translated something like, ‘All things work together for good to those who love God’.
The way forward is to challenge two regular assumptions about the sentence.
First, is ‘all things’ really the subject of the sentence?
No. It is in fact far more likely that ‘God’ is the subject.
Second, and even more important, why are we so sure that verse 28 speaks of God working all things for the benefit of those who love him?
The problem with this is that the verb doesn’t mean ‘to work for the benefit of’; it means ‘to work with’. The word here isn’t the normal word for ‘work’, ergazomai . It is synergeō, ‘work together’. The syn- at the start means ‘together’ or ‘with’; the erg- bit means ‘work’.
This would imply that if Paul is talking here about God being at work, he is saying that God is working with people, doing what he wants to do in the world, not all by himself, but through human agency.
So the encouragement and comfort here in Romans 8.28 doesn’t amount to a kind of Stoic resignation. It is a call to recognise the truth of what Paul says elsewhere: that we are called to hard work, knowing that God is at work in us.
I have urged that we should embrace lament as the vital initial Christian response to this pandemic.
Grief, after all, is part of love. Not to grieve, not to lament, is to slam the door on the same place in the innermost heart from which love itself comes. Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death.
Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the fear itself, frightened that even to name grief will be to collapse for ever.
I have argued that it is only with Jesus himself, and with the Spirit, that we really see and know what it means to say that God is ‘in control’ of his world.
That’s what the Western powers have done again and again at the political level. It’s what some apologists try to do on the intellectual level: ‘God is sovereign; he can do what he likes; therefore whatever happens must be what God wanted, so we must be able to say why.’ That wasn’t how God established his kingdom, and it isn’t how that kingdom now works. Think again of the Antioch church sending help to Jerusalem.
Many things, after all, actually bring grief to God. They shock him. Providence is Jesus-shaped: it isn’t an iron grip, relentlessly ‘controlling’ everything. In Genesis 6.6 God sees the wickedness of humans, and he doesn’t say, ‘Well, I have allowed that in order to do something with it’; it grieved him to his heart.
