Romans 15:4-13 Commentary

My wife and I recently accepted our friends’ invitation to join them in their home for supper on Friday night. At first glance, little seems to be unusual about that. We have, after all, joined our friends for no fewer than 10 meals over the course of our 10-year friendship. We are very comfortable in each other’s presence. When I think of Paul’s call to “Accept [proslambanesthe*] one another” (7), I think of Susan and Michelle’s “welcome” (the perhaps more literal meaning of proslambano) of us.

But close scrutiny shows this welcome and the friendship from which it arises to be actually quite extraordinary. Susan and Michelle, after all, seem to have little in common with my wife and me. They are married to each other. Our friends are also far more politically progressive than we are.

But as much as anything, what separates Susan and Michelle from my wife and me is the radically different way we think of Jesus Christ. They are, for lack of a better term, observant Jews. Susan and Michelle take the Torah very seriously, seeking to live out their relationship with God through faithful observance of God’s commandments. They’ve not yet recognized Jesus as the Messiah for whose coming they so deeply long.

So when I think of Paul’s call to “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you,” Susan and Michelle’s “welcome” of us continues to surprise me. After all, since they’ve not yet received Christ’s welcome with their faith in him, they don’t model their welcome of us on Christ’s welcome. What’s more, we have found Susan and Michelle’s welcome of us to be warmer than that of some of our friends in Jesus Christ.

Yet at one level, our faithful Jewish friends’ welcome of us doesn’t surprise us. After all, the living God graciously welcomed God’s Israelite people into God’s loving care. What’s more, God’s call to God’s Israelite people to welcome marginalized people was a prominent and consistent part of God’s call to love their neighbors.

But, of course, Jesus’ followers profess that we’ve seen God’s welcome of us most clearly in Jesus Christ. He graciously came into our world to be born, live, die, rise again and ascend to the heavenly realm in order to rescue us from slavery to Satan, sin and death. In doing so, God graciously welcomed God’s people into God’s family by adopting us as God’s dearly beloved children.

This forms part of the background of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson that again, frankly, starts in a mysterious place. After all, it doesn’t just start in the middle of English translations’ paragraph. This Lesson also begins in the middle of what’s essentially one Greek thought.

“For [gar] everything that was written [proegraphe] in the past was written to teach [didaskalian] us,” Paul begins this Lesson by asserting in verse 4, “so that through the endurance [hypomones] taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement [parakleseos] they provide we might have hope [elpida].”

Gar (“for”), of course, links that verse to what the apostle has just written (but the Lectionary excludes). What Paul has just written in verses 2 and 3 is: “Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ himself did not please himself but, as it is written: ‘The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me’.”

So it’s as if Paul teaches Rome’s Christians that the Spirit inspired the Scripture’s writers to include both calls to self-sacrifice and examples of Christ’s self-sacrifice in order to deepen his followers’ hope by both fortifying and encouraging us. This theme of elipda (“hope”) is one to which the apostle returns at this Lesson’s end, making it a kind of literary bookend.

Paul goes on to link verse 5 to what he has just written in verse 4 by praying, “May the God who gives endurance [hypomones] and encouragement [parakleseos] give you the same attitude of mind [auto phronein] that Christ Jesus had.” The incarnate Son of God refused to please himself, taking on, instead, what The Message paraphrases as “the troubles of the troubled.” Christ’s interests were, in some ways, always neighbor- rather than self-centered.

Yet this attitude is, of course, radically counter-cultural. We naturally choose to both promote and indulge our personal, familial and communal self-interest. When we think of our neighbors at all, we naturally think of how they can benefit us. Today’s Epistolary Lesson’s Paul summons God’s dearly beloved people to a more Christ-like way. The apostle invites us to self-sacrificially love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.

After all, the result is nothing less than a unified, communal song of praise to God. Paul summons Jesus’ friends to let the Spirit empower us to imitate the self-sacrificial Christ “so that with one mind [homothymadon] and one voice [heni stomati] you may glorify [doxazete] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (6).

We might think of Paul’s invitation in this rather homespun way: selfish Christians may make decent “soloists.” But we don’t make good “choir members.” Self-interested friends of Jesus will always find ourselves out of tune and synch with at least part of the rest of Jesus’ friends. Members of good choirs don’t just concentrate on the quality of our own singing. We also listen for ways to blend in with our fellow chorus members so that we can sing with “one mind and one voice.”

In verse 7b Paul returns to the theme of dokeo (a form of which this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson variously translates as “glorify” or “praise”) to God. However, he offers a slightly different “route” to that praise. “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you,” the apostle writes there, “in order to bring praise [doxan] to God.”

This suggests that Jesus’ friends who have the same mind toward each other as Christ Jesus did (5) “receive” each other. Christians who wish to glorify God, in fact, look for ways to welcome our neighbors into the cosmic chorus that’s even now offering its harmonious praise to God.

Yet when I hear the modern chorus that’s Christ’s Body, its praise sometimes seems more dissonant than harmonious. Individuals, churches, and denominations generally welcome fellow Christians with whom we politically and theologically agree. But we naturally struggle to welcome those whose political and theological viewpoints differ from ours.

This might offer preachers an opportunity to reclaim and explore Romans 15:8-12. It, after all, describes some of the ways Christ Jesus “received” and “welcomed” his adopted Jewish and Gentile siblings. In verse 8 Paul asserts, “Christ has become a servant [diakonon] of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth [aletheias] so that the promises [epangelias] made to the patriarchs [pateron] might be confirmed [bebaiosai].”

The incarnate Son of God became the Jews’ servant by caring for and teaching them, as well as inviting them into a relationship with God through him. He did so, says Paul in the words of The Message, “to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.” God had promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that the whole world would be blessed through their descendants. By serving those patriarchs’ descendants, the apostle insists their descendant Jesus Christ fulfilled that promise.

But, Paul goes on to add, the incarnate Son of God had a gracious eye on the gentiles as well as Jews. He insists Jesus became the Jews’ servant so “that the Gentiles might glorify [doxasai] God for his mercy [eleous]” (9). While this seems like a mysterious assertion, perhaps preachers need to say little more than this: when gentiles see God’s loving and persistent mercy toward even Jewish people who continue to reject Jesus Christ, we gladly join the cosmic chorus in glorifying and praising God.

After quoting some Old Testament Scripture passages to support this claim, Paul ends this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson with a benediction that he loads with hope. In verse 13 he prays: “May the God of hope [elpidos] fill [plerosai] you with all joy [charas] and peace [eirenes] as you trust [pisteuein] in him, so that you may overflow [perisseuein] with hope [elpidi] by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

This beautiful prayer draws together some of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s main themes. When in verse 13 Paul returns to the theme of “hope” he’s echoing verse 4’s “hope.” This may offer preachers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of hope that’s the complete confidence the Spirit inspires in God and God’s good purposes. Most basically, when we hope for God’s completion of God’s plans and purposes for the creation, including us, we are completely sure God will carry them out.

Verse 13’s eirenes (“peace”) echoes Paul’s earlier pleas to Rome’s Christians to imitate Christ’s receiving of us with our welcome of our fellow Christians. In fact, the apostle prays that God won’t just grace God’s adopted children with such peace. He begs God to fill us with that peace, not just with God, but also each other.

In a time when peace and hope seem to be on the “endangered species” list, Paul’s prayer for them is an amazing grace. He doesn’t, after all, ask God to give us just a little more peace and hope. The apostle pleads with God to fill us with so much peace and hope that it spills over from us – and onto our neighbors.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

When I was a student at Calvin College (now University) I was graced with opportunities to join its Oratorio Society in singing Handel’s Messiah. While many of the orchestra and choir members were Calvin students or members of the community, Calvin always brought in gifted soloists to help lead the presentation.

They were some of the finest soloists in North America, if not the world. But I was always amazed that at least some of them would join us “amateurs” in standing to sing “The Hallelujah Chorus.” What’s more, they managed to blend their highly trained and gifted voices in with the rest of the chorus to offer one united and harmonious response of praise and glory to God.