Monday, April 11

Jeremiah 24:1-10
Psalms 31, 35
Romans 9:19-33
John 9:1-17

Righteousness, faith, and works. Paul deals with all three in the passage we read today from Romans. As inheritors of the English reformation, we might be inclined to read this part of Paul in a very Protestant way – When he says that we (Gentiles) have received righteousness based on faith, we might think that he means that we are getting into heaven because we believe in Jesus. When he says about the Jews that they strove for the righteousness that comes through the law, and did not achieve it because their striving was based on “works” rather than on faith, we might be inclined to buy into that old Protestant caricature of Judaism as a “works-righteousness” religion. We might imagine that Paul is faulting the Jews (his own people) for “trying too hard to be good,” and not believing in Jesus instead. Such a reading would be gravely in error.

In this context, the word “righteousness,” really means “innocence” in the sense we use that word at a court hearing. When someone is declared “innocent,” no matter whether they have committed the crime in question or not, they are given a status which frees them from the consequences that would follow from the crime they supposedly committed. Paul isn’t saying that we have received VIRTUE because we have faith, but that we have been declared INNOCENT by God because we have believed that God is at work in Jesus (the definition of faith). Conversely, when Paul is speaking about the mistakes of his own people, the Jews, he is saying that they clung to the works of the law, meaning the kosher laws, ethnic purity, and the rules about sacrifice, in order to be declared innocent by God, rather than seeking places in the world where God actually seems to be moving – a search which would have led them to Jesus.

The lesson for us is clear – we cannot count on our privileged status as Christians to keep us safe before God. We must be continually seeking his face, looking for places where he is moving in the world, and then throwing ourselves into the work He has thrown himself into. Only through this kind of faith will we find the God who has declared us innocent or righteous in Jesus.

Fr. Patrick Hall