Hope and the Spirit
Proper 11, Year A; Rom 8:12-25
I’ve recently focussed on Gospel passages while letting the readings from Paul to the Romans go by unremarked. Here’s where I develop more sympathy for my colleagues who complain about the amount of scripture provided in the new lectionaries. Romans is among the richest and most important works in scripture, but it’s hard to digest, and harder to do justice to as a side dish. The Roman Catholic version of the lectionary takes the view that smaller pieces of Romans may be more digestible (this week it’s only 8:26-27 for them) and I am almost tempted to agree. What Romans needs however is a series, or a bible study. Yet this week Paul gets to a remarkable high point that I can’t let go past.
In this Letter, his great manifesto or testament, Paul is laying out the Gospel; why do we have it, what is it for? He has pondered the place of the Law, and how it functions for Jews and Gentiles (chs. 2-3); he has claimed Abraham as model of faith and hope (and hence of Gospel), rather than as either physical ancestor or upright person (4), and hence Christ as a sort of new Abraham as well as new Adam, the one through whose righteousness and whose death we are brought into a new state of being (5-7).
Romans 8, which we are reading across three weeks, focusses on the place of the Spirit. Although chapter divisions are not original to the text, the medieval scholars got this one just right, discerning these verses as a distinct framing by Paul of the work of the Spirit as the experience of hope.
Anglicans went from a traditional lack of interest in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and even more so from suspicion of vivid religious experience, to absorbing a sort of hyper-personalized idea of the Spirit’s work under the influence of the Charismatic movement in the 1970s and after. Learning the personal and immediate relevance of religious experience was not a small thing, but its aftermath weighs heavily on us. We now hear the “Spirit” used and abused as a synonym for feelings, for wishes, for good vibes, and for hunches about Churchy stuff at conventions. It’s all about us, and thus a long way from what Paul has in mind.
For Paul the Spirit is not about our own experience projected outward to God, but about God’s action projected into us, and not just to individuals or even to humankind as a whole, but to creation itself. In last Sunday’s reading (v. 1-11), life in the Spirit is contrasted with life in the flesh—the contrast isn’t about fervent religious experience versus lukewarm piety, it’s about the ethical form that life in the Spirit takes. “Flesh” refers in Paul to everything unworthy and unjust, such as all that gets dressed up as personal or national interest over against the needs of all, or anything that prevents us from being fully human—human in that sense we now perceive humanity differently, in the light of Christ’s true humanity.
This Spirit which provides an alternative way to live is both the Spirit of God and Spirit of Christ (v.9). The Spirit is not merely some notion of spiritual presence, but is how God re-makes us into the image of the one through whom we are saved, raised to new life like him (v.11). This Spirit is going to turn us upside down.
That recognition is where our Epistle this week begins, although the text in some printed lectionaries removes Paul’s connector, “so” or “therefore”; the point is that because of that opposition between flesh and spirit, and because the Spirit lives in us, we are not subject to the flesh as debtors (vv.12-14)—the reference to economic dependence or even oppression is not accidental—but are free and transformed people who are part of God’s family and so cry “Abba, Father” (v.15).
This freedom isn’t quite unconditional affirmation of our free selves in modern pop-psych terms, but recognition of a dual identity that points to freedom: our concrete present selves as we struggle for fulfillment on the one hand, and also our being now “in Christ,” which is why we call out “Abba” with Christ, in him. This tension between the now and the God-given reality which is coming Paul names as suffering and glory (vv. 16-17).
Of course the “Abba” question will give pause for thought on gender, but the intended point here isn’t gender, it’s intimacy with God, both Jesus’ and our own. The “Abba” reference is how Paul emphasizes that: being caught up in the Spirit of Jesus, we speak to God just as Jesus does, in him, to God as intimate source of our being. Yet this is surely an unsettling thing, a clear indication that life must be different, we must be different, if we speak with such boldness and intimacy to God.
This leads to Paul’s striking account of humanity and creation itself struggling and suffering (vv.19-23). Common views of the Spirit I have alluded to tend to confuse the promised joy with euphoria, and so are tripped up by Paul’s assertion that our experiences of suffering and struggle, and those we witness in creation itself, are not just meaningless aberrations but evidence of this transformation we are undergoing in Christ. He doesn’t mean though that (e.g.) cruelty or climate change are divinely-driven; he means that our spirit-given perception of the gap between our present reality and God’s promised future is as extraordinary and as fruitful as birth-pangs. Just as Jesus’ passage to glory was hard won, ours may be too.
This experience of living between the now of our existence and the future of God’s promise is what Paul calls hope (vv.24-25)—hope is this availing struggle, this place where the Spirit works to make us completely new. And if that is really what is happening, it’s unlikely to be easy. As clearly as anywhere in scripture, Paul points here to the reality that the religious experience characteristic of the Christian, which we can call the presence of the Holy Spirit, is not a buzz or a vibe, but sense of living between worlds. This hope, like birth-pangs, is not an escape from suffering but a new perspective on what is being achieved in us and in the world, despite how things may appear. There is joy in the Spirit—a true joy which enables the world and ourselves to appear, and to become, what they may yet be.