Romans 4:13-25 Commentary

This week’s Epistolary Lesson draws those who follow it back to the theme of, among other things, hope. It does so, however, not long after we contemplated it in an earlier commentary. While that may seem repetitive, any “reading” of 21^st century culture suggests that hope remains in short supply. In fact, one might argue that despair continues to be far more common than hope. So those who wish to preach the gospel’s riches preach often about hope.

But we always do so with a proper understanding of Christian hope. The historian Christopher Lasch (The True and Only Heaven, W.W. Norton, 1991) once wrote, “Hope is not the naïve thought that tomorrow will be better. Hope has braced itself, and is thus prepared to cope if tomorrow isn’t better. It may take some time. And hope doesn’t depend on you and me getting our act together and fixing things, like optimism does.”

Lasch’s insight helps explain why hope is an endangered species in the 21^st century. If, after all, hope is little more than optimism that tomorrow will somehow be better, then tomorrow’s disappointments easily dash it. If hope depends on people getting our act together enough to somehow fix what’s wrong with us, then major wrongs that defy fixing naturally crush it.

The Abraham about whom Paul writes in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson certainly had no reason for a naïve wish for a better tomorrow. In verse 19 the apostle says that the patriarch “faced the fact (katanoesen) that his body was as good as dead (ede nenekromenon).

The Message paraphrases Abraham as recognizing that “everything was hopeless.” He, after all, had no reason to be optimistic that Sarah and he would ever parent a child together. The patriarch had no reason to believe that he could get his act together enough to continue his family line by fathering a son with his wife.

Abraham couldn’t, in fact, patch the child-sized hole in his family because he was already approximately one hundred years old (19). What’s more, even were he still somehow virile enough to father a child, Sarah’s “womb was also dead” (nekrosin). So as much as they wished to have a child, they simply had no hope that they would bear any children together. In fact, their culture, as well as Abraham and Sarah themselves considered them to be “walking corpses.”

Paul, in fact, speaks a lot about death in Romans 4:13-25. In some cases, he merely alludes to it. In verse 14, for example, the apostle says that “if those who live by law are heirs [of God’s rich promises], faith has no value and the promise is worthless, because law brings wrath.” In other words, it’s as if Paul is insisting that both the law and any efforts to save ourselves by obeying it have deadly consequences. They, after all, bring not life, but “wrath” (orgen).

In other places in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, Paul is more explicit about death and the hopelessness it easily engenders. In verse 17, for example, he talks about the God “who gives life (zoopoiountos) to the dead (nekrous).” That profession’s context suggests that the death of which the apostle speaks is the kind of spiritual death that is alienation from God and our neighbor.

In verse 24-25 Paul goes on to speak of the physical death that Jesus endured. God, says the apostle there, “raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (ek nekron). Jesus, he adds, “was delivered over (paradothe) to death for our sins.” As he anticipated his suffering and death, Jesus repeatedly expressed his hope that God would raise him from the dead.

But his hope wasn’t based on anything he would do. It was also more than mere optimism. After all, Jesus couldn’t raise himself from the dead any more than any human being can. For Jesus to rise from the dead, he needed Someone to raise him.

That’s a reason why genuine “hope,” as Lasch writes, “depends on God, not us.” In fact, in verse 18 Paul rejoices how “against all hope (par alpida), Abraham in hope (ep elpidi) believed (episteusen).” This is an assertion that requires some careful parsing. Paul, after all, uses derivatives of the same root word elpo to describe what seem to be two at least slightly different kinds of hope here.

It appears that the hope about which the apostle speaks first is the kind of human hope about which Lasch and many others have written. It’s the kind of naïve wish for things to somehow get better. By what Paul refers to as hoping against such hope, Abraham was rejecting the hope that arises from human efforts to fix what’s wrong with humanity. He was, quite simply, rejecting the hope that’s a wish for or optimism about better tomorrows.

Against all such hope for human improvement of his circumstances, Abraham anchored his hope in the living God of heaven and earth. In that light, it is striking to note subtle shift in emphases between verses 16 and 17. In verses 13-16 Paul spends much time talking about Abraham and his “offspring” in the faith. But while he continues to talk about the patriarch in verses 17 and following, God is the chief subject of nearly all of those verses’ verbs.

In some ways, verse 20 forms the heart of Paul’s exploration of God’s people’s hope. Abraham did not, he writes in verse 20 “waver (diekrethe) through unbelief (apistia) regarding the promise of God (epangelian tou Theou).” He did not, in other words, cave in to despair about his childlessness. The patriarch, instead, anchored his hope in God’s promise. He believed that because God had promised to give him a son, God would keep God’s promise.

Abraham was, after all, according to verse 21, “fully persuaded (plerophoretheis) that God had the power to do what he promised.” He could trust that God would give Sarah and him the son God had promised because God has the power to keep God’s promises. That’s, in fact, the anchor of all Christian hope: God doesn’t just make promises. God also keeps all of God’s promises. God does whatever God promises to do.

Of course, it seems as though Abraham sometimes let go of that anchor. He appeared to waver in his faith. God, after all, took what seemed to him such a long time to keep God’s promises that the patriarch decided to try to create his own hope. His faith in God’s promises actually weakened so much that he tried to have a son by being intimate with Sarah’s slave. Hagar and Abraham, in fact, parented a child named Ishmael.

Preachers can be honest about the fragility of Abraham’s confidence in God’s promises. Paul isn’t, after all, emphasizing the strength of the patriarch’s hope in God. He isn’t, in fact, calling his readers to imitate Abraham. The apostle is, instead, stressing God’s power to keep God’s promises. Human hope doesn’t lie in our imitation of Abraham’s faithfulness. It lies, instead, in God’s faithfulness.

Illustration

In “Hope Is More Than Happiness,” in Children’s Books, Katherine Patterson writes, Christians “are not optimists as the common definition goes, because we, like Moses, must be realistic about the world in which we find ourselves. And this world looked at squarely does not allow optimism to flourish. Hope for us cannot simply be wishful thinking, nor can it only be only the desire to grow up and take control over our own lives.

“Hope is a yearning, rooted in reality, that pulls us toward the radical biblical vision of a world where truth and justice and peace do prevail, a time in which the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, a scene which finds humanity living in harmony with nature, all nations beating their swords into plowshares and walking together by the light of God’s glory. Now there’s a happy ending for you. The only purely happy ending I know.”