The Cross as the Unwrathing of God ~ Romans 5:6-11

 

Romans 5 is a text that has shaped you whether you recognize it or not. And while I’d love to begin with a clever story or a funny analogy, I simply don’t have time. There’s too much important ground to cover on a topic that demands our careful attention, a wakeful mind, and a willing spirit. Today we are going to confront the question of God’s wrath in the story of the crucifixion and discover 1) that God’s wrath is not central to the story of the cross in the Gospels (the wrath of people is), 2) God’s wrath is not the source of our salvation – it’s God’s love, 3) and finally we’re going to discover how Paul reworks the concept of God’s wrath in a loving way (it's not God's punishment but God giving us the freedom to experience the natural consequences of our sin). There’s a lot to cover. I’m running out of time and yet that’s precisely where Paul will begin.

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Because we often move so quickly to theories about how God saves us from our sins through Jesus, we often dehistoricize the actual story, the “right time” that Paul mentions, and forget that Jesus Christ suffered wrath, violence, rejection, and death at the hands of human beings on the cross. All four Gospels repeatedly reveal scheming, plotting, betrayal, and attempts at actual violence toward Jesus from stranger and friend alike. The church’s earliest preaching of the gospel – the good news of God’s salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – is oddly historically centered and theory free. When the evangelists in the book of Acts went preaching, whether through Peter, Stephen, or Paul, and regardless of audience, they often followed the same basic storyline:

·       God sent Jesus into the world to announce the good news and save us.

·       Jesus was crucified by “wicked men” who “put him to death by nailing him to the cross” (2:23); Stephen will actually use the word “murdered” (7:52)

·       God raised him from the dead.

·       Jesus is Lord and Savior and is making all things new.

·       So turn to Jesus, entrust your life to him.

The crucifixion, in other words, is what actually happened in space-time history with people before it’s ever described in its more cosmic realities. And the earliest preaching was largely devoid of clever theories or analogies. What the early church was not doing, in other words, was offering so much a theory of atonement but a real story, bound in time, in which a flesh and blood Jesus, the messiah, the son of God, gave his life and suffered at the hands of other human beings and rose again. That’s the why the earliest creed of the church outside of Scripture, the Apostles’ creed, states those realities while offering no mention of the mechanics as to how. The cross is history first before it is ever theology or theory. One of the most significant elements of our worship is the recounting and remembering of Jesus’ death as a historical event in the form of communion.

The origin, the purpose, the energy of God’s reconciliation with us, Paul says, is enemy-love.

For Paul, the extent of God’s love is shown by Jesus’ bizarre behavior, humanly speaking. From a human perspective, Paul admits, people have been willing to sacrifice themselves for a loved one, for a child, for a “good person.” But that’s not what God does. No, God willingly dies to demonstrate love toward “enemies,” the irreligious, and sinners. He loves those who cheered and sneered at his death.

“Sinners” here is not merely a statement about the things we have done. Paul is preparing to launch into a full-scale exposition of the state of the cosmos as being enslaved to sin and to death. We are, he says tragically, in vs. 6, “powerless.” “Sinners” are those who are held captive and conscripted against God in the cosmic conflict of good versus evil, of life versus death. For Paul, sin is more than transgressing the law; and demands more than expunging guilt. Sin is a power that enslaves people to be at war with God, to see the God of love as an enemy. Humans caught in sin are like child soldiers who are twisted to fight against their own people. They are captives conscripted to be against God.

However, God’s love was demonstrated, Paul tells us in vs. 8, which literally in the Greek means to “stand with or on,” by dying for enemies in order to make us free from sin (righteous), standing rightly with God (justified), and no longer seeing God as the enemy (reconciled). We are liberated and recruited to God’s side not because God fights back but because God refuses to harm us in return.  We have this peace not because we bravely decided to change sides in this cosmic conflict but because God determined to be at peace with us and love us any way. We get to be in God’s camp, if you will, because Christ has brought us there.

Friends, Paul’s point is not to be missed God is at work in Jesus and God loves us like Jesus. God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness. And God’s own love is demonstrated in God’s willingness to suffer and die at the hands of enemies. So the cross mirrors Jesus’ own teaching about nonviolent resistance to opponents and God’s equitable love toward the evil and the good (Matt. 5:43-48). The cross is the consistent reality of Jesus living out his teachings in the face of human evil and destruction. The life that saves us is the resurrection of the one who lived out the good news of God’s enemy-love even to his own death. In other words, Jesus’ real death, which entailed forgiving enemies, actually explains how and why he died.

On the Cross, we hear Jesus’ teachings about love given voice: “Father, forgive them!” (Luke 23:34). Brad Jersak, a theologian tells the story of a 9-year-old boy named Malachi who once grilled him on this text. He asked, “When Jesus prayed that prayer, do you think the Father answered?” Jersak turned the question on him and Mal concluded, “Yes, I think the Father answered with a yes, because the Father loved Jesus and Jesus always prayed in the will of his Father” (smart kid). He then asked, “Who did Jesus mean by them?” Again, Jersak deflected to Mal, who felt “them” included all the conspirators: the temple authorities and Sanhedrin, the crowds, Pilate and the Roman soldiers, both thieves and even Judas Iscariot. The cross is God in Jesus Christ forgiving and loving all of his enemies. That’s the why.

“the wrath” of . . .?

I want to quickly cut to the chase and ask, “What are we being saved from?” This may seem like a straight-forward question, but it isn’t and we find this struggle and ambiguity in different Christian traditions and the Bible itself, specifically vs. 9 where the NIV states: “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him.” In Romans 5, who is the agent of salvation? Whose love is at work? Who is forgiving and reconciling sinners? God! God is the agent of salvation through Christ. And what is God saving us from? Himself? No. I don’t’ think so. In Romans 5, does God say or even imply, “I love you so much that I will save you from myself?” No, is my answer. But that requires some explanation. What do we do with “wrath”?

First, while it doesn’t necessarily settle the problem, it is incredibly important to know that the word “God” in vs. 9, which modifies “wrath” is not in the Greek text or any Greek text. It’s been added by translators because A. grammatically, “wrath” appears in the genitive case which can imply an “of” though there are other instances where they don’t add it (Matt 3:7; Luke 3:7) B. a more obvious answer is due to a theology which comes out of the Reformation called Penal Substitionary atonement whereby these translators are making a theological assumption that it is God’s wrath that we must be saved from because God’s justice supposedly demands it. Personally, I think that there is enough grammatical evidence to at least imagine that the text says, “God’s wrath” though it is also true that a strong case could be made to translate it as the wrath of human beings or simply leave it as “the wrath.” I’d be in favor of the latter.

But, even if we believed that we should translate the Greek to say, “we will be saved by him from the wrath of God” we must do the interpretive work of understanding what that might mean. Is the “wrath of God” God’s active willingness to, apart from the death of Jesus, bring about our death for the sake of justice? This question is important for it’s asking, “What are we being saved from?” To this we must look at how Paul uses and reinterprets the concept of the “wrath of God.” [This could be a whole sermon in and of itself so I will focus on one main point]. The phrase appears over two hundred times in most English translations of the Bible. Paul himself is tapping into a growing Jewish reconstruction of the concept at the time and will use the term often metaphorically to reflect God’s willingness to allow for the natural consequences of our sinful choices. That is, God’s wrath is a metaphor for God allowing us to resist him for a time and the unfortunate consequences and fall out of those actions. Earlier in Romans 1 (1:24, 1:26-28; see also Isaiah 64:7), Paul will signal this reality three times by defining “wrath” as God “giving over” (God consenting to) rebellious people to their own self-destructive trajectories – even when our actions create collateral damage on others. So God’s wrath functions as the intrinsic consequences of our refusal to live in the mercies of God. The wrath of God might be illustrated by the metaphor of the addicted, chain smoker who eventually suffers from breathing trouble, followed by lung cancer but then, to his own horror, discovers that his non-smoking spouse also has lung cancer from second-hand smoke. Are these realities punishments of an angry God, is God giving just-desserts, or is this the painfully tragic reality of God offering the dignity of human freedom even with painful consequences? It’s not God’s punishment, it’s the reality of freedom in a sin-soaked world which God himself will suffer for the sake of enemies, remember?

SO we are not to infer that Jesus is saving us from God the Father, but freeing us from the ultimate wrath of the natural consequences of our sin, which are enslavement and death. In the very next chapter, Paul himself will once again make that plain when he clearly states: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our LORD” (Romans 6:23).

So what is Paul saying?

Who is rescuing us? God

What does God rescue us from? The wages (or consequences) of our sin.

What consequences does God rescue us from? Death

What don’t we receive from God? We do not receive the wages or consequences of sin from God.

What do we receive from God? We receive a free gift.

What free gift do we receive? Salvation. Justification. Reconciliation. Eternal Life

How? Through Jesus Christ

Paul is not envisioning a good cop / bad cop scenario. Jesus is not the nice guy, staying the angry hand of his dad. When Paul says that God saved us from “the wrath” (Rom. 5:9), he is speaking of the natural consequences of our sin which is death. This is “the wrath” that God in Christ saves us from.

“Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, “and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” (Heb. 2:14-15)

Why did Jesus die? Because of our wrath. And in the face of that wrath, we see the face of God—the final revelation and decisive act of God to love enemies. And friends, listen to Paul, look at the cross, and receive the insane, illogical, love of God that saves us from the wrath – the consequences of our own sinful choices our enslavement, our death. The Apostle Paul is inviting you celebrate and boast about the unwrathing of God.