Hilton Head Island, SC –September 5, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Romans 5:1-11; Romans 5:12-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8 (RSV)
Roughly sixty percent of each of the four Gospels focus on events in the ministry and on the teachings of Jesus, and the last forty percent in each Gospel is devoted to events that occurred over a period of eight days and their aftermath: from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday. In those eight days, about forty percent in each Gospel is devoted to what happened on Good Friday through Easter.
Surprisingly, in his own ministry the apostle Paul referred almost never to anything Jesus ever said or did. In fact, he quotes Jesus only twice, in statements that Jesus made during the Last Supper. The two verses are quoted in the eleventh chapter of First Corinthians. There Paul gave instructions on how the first Christians were to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. On that auspicious and ominous occasion in the Upper Room, Paul said that Jesus took bread, and he said to the twelve disciples, “Take, eat; this is my body, which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of me” (11:24). Then Jesus took a cup of wine, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; drink of it, all of you, in remembrance of me” (11:25). Those two verses are the only two times Paul ever repeated anything that Jesus had said, nor did he recollect any of the events that had occurred during Jesus’ three-year ministry, except for the crucifixion and resurrection.
Why? Why didn’t Paul say more about the life of Jesus? Why did he focus almost exclusively on Jesus’ death and resurrection?
In this series of sermons on Paul (and there will be one more next week), I have been doing some speculating about the man who, next to Jesus himself, was the second-most important individual in the foundation of Christianity and the New Testament Church. To be precise, there are far more words written by Paul in his thirteen letters than words which were written in the four Gospels that Jesus was reported to have said. But again, Paul was nearly completely silent about what Jesus said or did until he was crucified and then God raised him from the dead. What explains that silence?
It was apparently because Paul either knew nothing specifically about the life and teachings of Jesus or else he chose to emphasize only the crucifixion and resurrection. Most biblical scholars believe that all of Paul’s letters were written before any of the four Gospels was written. Therefore he had no opportunity to read what the Gospels reported about the brief but crucial ministry of Jesus in the Galilee. Surely Paul had heard some of that from Peter and other disciples, though. The most influential event in Paul’s life was the appearance of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul had been a zealous opponent of the followers of Jesus up to that time, and he was headed to Damascus to try to disrupt the community of early Jewish Christians who lived there. When Jesus himself appeared in a vision before Paul, it transformed his life via a never-to-be-forgotten conversion experience. But it was Jesus the crucified and resurrected Messiah who changed Paul forever; it was not the earthly proclaimer of the Kingdom of God and the great teacher who turned Saul of Tarsus into the apostle Paul.
Paul had been a Pharisee. The Pharisees were one of the leading groups of Jewish scholars whose interpretations of the Hebrew Bible were highly influential in first-century Judaism. For Paul to become a Christian would be as radical a transformation as when John Henry Newman in nineteenth century Britain left the Anglican priesthood to become a Roman Catholic priest and ultimately a cardinal. His conversion was a very big event in its own time. In the twentieth century, another such radical conversion occurred when the famous Oxford atheist professor, C.S. Lewis, had a similar conversion, and became one of the most quoted and beloved Christians in the middle of the last century. Those who have radical conversion experiences sometimes have a more profound effect within the worldwide Christian community than other leaders who simply grew up in the faith and never experienced such a life-transforming occasion. The radically converted are usually more zealous because of that unique metamorphosis than those who always perceived themselves to be Christians.
As a Pharisee, Paul was very aware of the importance of sacrifice in Judaism. People arranged for the priests in the temple to sacrifice animals on their behalf in order to symbolize that their sins were forgiven. During the Wilderness Wandering in Sinai, on the religious holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Moses ordered the sacrifice of a lamb on an altar, and then a scapegoat was driven out into the desert to symbolize that their sins for the previous year were all carried away by the ostracized animal. On the religious holiday of Passover, every Jewish family sacrificed a lamb to remind them how God had saved their ancestors who had been slaves in Egypt, as Moses led them out of captivity and on their way to the Promised Land. Sacrifice was a major element in Judaism. Without it Judaism would have been a very different religion.
With all that background as an essential part of Paul’s belief system, he came to see the death of Jesus on the cross as the essential element of Christianity. Paul believed that by Jesus’ self-sacrifice on the cross, he saved all Christians, present and future, from the fires of hell. Eleven hundred years later a man named Anselm postulated the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. It means that though each of us deserved to die on a cross for our own sins, Jesus voluntarily substituted himself on our behalf. Thus Jesus’ death on the cross became the single necessary event in the salvation of all Christians. However, for Jesus to be willing to sacrifice himself on our behalf, Paul believed it was also necessary for us to trust in his sacrificial death as the only way to be saved. That conviction was powerfully validated for Paul by what happened on the road to Damascus.
What we now call “evangelical Christianity” (in quotes) had its origins in movements which occurred in Europe, Britain, and the Americas in the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The Puritans who came over on the Mayflower and other ships in the sixteen-hundreds, the Baptists and Methodists of the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds, and the Pentecostals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries all promoted worship that was intended to lead parishioners to confess their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Altar calls were --and in some churches still are -- one of the visible means of promoting such conversion experiences.
When I was a teenager, I was very involved in the Westminster Fellowship of the Presbyterian Church. I was active in our congregation’s Westminster Fellowship, and in the youth programs of our regional presbytery and our state-wide synod. One year I attended the National Assembly of the Westminster Fellowship at Grinnell College in Iowa. I remember a kindly old minister (he was probably in his forties or early fifties) taking me aside to speak to me after a discussion group in which he was the leader. I suppose on the basis of things I might have said he asked if I had ever confessed Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I told him that I had joined the church – twice – once in confirmation class when I was in fifth grade in Kansas and a second time when I joined the confirmation class in ninth grade in Wisconsin.
That wasn’t what he was talking about. He told me to think about Jesus on the cross, and to ponder hard just what that meant. For several minutes in silence I did the best I could, but nothing happened. He was disappointed, and I was somewhat mystified. I could tell he was a very fine man, and he earnestly wanted me to have an experience such as he told me he had had when he was my age. I had to admit to myself, but not to him, that nothing like that swept over me in our conversation, nor did it at any other time in my life. I think I understood what he wanted to transpire on my behalf, but I also knew it didn’t happen.
It is Jesus dying on the cross that is the transformational reality that leads many Christians to Jesus. For many others, however, it is the teachings of Jesus and his singular way of showing love for everyone that leads them to Jesus. Among the majority of Mainline Protestants and most Roman Catholics, we are Christians because we were born into the Church and were raised in the Church. Unless we rebelled at some point, we suppose ourselves always to have been Christians. Maybe you don’t see it that way for yourself, but that’s the way I see it for me. I guess I’m just too ordinary a person to have a bolt-from-the-blue conversion into Christianity or anything else. I just keep plodding along and thinking about everything, trying to fit it all together.
Saul of Tarsus didn’t have that kind of personality. He was too much of a leaper. He leaped from one thing to another, and then to another. But the leap of faith which changed him forever was when he saw the crucified and risen Christ somewhere on his way to the Syrian capital of Damascus. I have no doubt that he saw Jesus, and that vision propelled him to become the apostle to the Gentiles and thus the key to the phenomenal early growth of Christianity. But for me, and perhaps for you too, the death of Jesus on the cross was more important to Paul than it is for me and perhaps also for you. It’s the life of Jesus which you might find more compelling. Jesus did not try to avoid the cross, but I don’t think that he had a lifelong goal of dying on a cross, either.
In one way or another, what evolved into orthodox Christianity ultimately insisted that only the blood of Jesus can save us. Despite himself, Paul seems to refute that in his letter to the Romans, the most theological of all his thirteen letters. “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The New Revised Standard Version says that the cross “illustrates” God’s love for us. The cross doesn’t show Christ’s love; it shows God’s love. God couldn’t die on the cross, but Jesus did die there, and Paul says that Christ’s death on the cross illustrates God’s love for all of us. I’m not sure he meant to say that, but that’s what he said, and I enthusiastically endorse that concept.
Nicholas Kristof is an opinion writer for The New York Times who occasionally reminds his readers that he is a Christian. For the Easter edition of 2019 he published an interview with Serene Jones, who is the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Union is one of the most liberal and progressive seminaries in the country, and has been for a long time. The Rev. Dr. Jones has been its president for the past several years, and she is one very liberal, progressive, feminist Black woman.
In the interview, Dr. Jones said she couldn’t understand Easter without thinking first about the cross, about which she said, “The crucifixion was a first-century lynching. It couldn’t be more pertinent for our world today.” Very few white theologians would ever describe the crucifixion as a lynching, but when a Black female theologian says that, it puts the crucifixion in a whole new light. Dr. Jones went on, “Crucifixion is not something that God orchestrates from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sent his own kid to the cross so God can forgive people is nuts.”
Wow-ee! Those are words most of us have a hard time wrapping our minds around! I don’t recall ever hearing Jesus called “God’s kid,” nor can I remember having called any theology with which I strongly disagreed “nuts.” I might have thought that, but I never said it, and if I did, I think I would have regretted it afterward. However, this woman tells it like she sees it, and Nicholas Kristof printed it like she said it. Whatever else it may do, it prompts a new way of expressing old concepts that have long inserted themselves into our comfortable crania. Serene Jones may have given us a new insight about the cross. Perhaps it could indeed have been described as a lynching. Jesus’ enemies certainly wanted him dead, and as quickly as possible.
William Cowper was an eighteenth century evangelical English poet. He wrote the text for a hymn which is still a favorite in many kinds of conservative churches. “There is a fountain filled with blood/ Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;/ And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,/ Lose all their guilty stains./ …Dear Dying Lamb, Thy precious blood/ Shall never lose its power,/ till all the ransomed Church of God/ Be saved, to sin no more.”
That kind of imagery worked for several centuries, and it would have worked for Paul, but it doesn’t work for me, and it may not work for you either. In a phrase, it’s just too bloody awful. For Paul the cross seemed to be everything. For other Christians it is the primary thing, and for still others it was a pivotal event, but not The Primary Thing.
In this sermon I am speaking only for myself, and I am not declaring that what I believe you should believe. But it has been my growing conviction for several decades that Paul put too much emphasis on Jesus and on his crucifixion and resurrection, and too little emphasis on God. He “out-Jesused” Jesus, as did the writer of the Fourth Gospel. Nonetheless, I also think that if Paul and John had not done that, historically Christianity would never have come into existence. A Jesus Christ who was magnified by the apostles Paul and John more than Jesus magnified himself is the Christ who turned Christianity into numerically the largest religion the world has ever known.
As William Cowper also wrote, “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” Whether either God or Jesus would approve of what became traditional Christianity we may never know. But it is what it is, and in the providence of God it has all worked out wonderfully well. God does work in a mysterious way His wonders to perform!