Sixth Sunday after Pentecost; 9 July 2023; Proper 9A (RCL); Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:11-18; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.
We abbreviate the story of Abraham’s servant and Rebekah for the sake of liturgical reading, but it is one of the most complete novellas in the Old Testament. And after reading it, can there be any doubt that John is copying the plot of this standard story in the episode of the Samaritan woman at the well? It is interesting, however, that after the events of last Sunday’s lection (call it the Sacrifice of Isaac, or the Obedience of Abraham, or what you will) that Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the story.
But then we come to the reading from Romans. This passage has troubled commentators from the beginning. Is Paul speaking of his own experience, or the experience of a normal Christian, or something else. Psychologizing interpretations of this passage suggest that we all (normal Christians) do what we know is wrong, and Wesleyan holiness movements suggest that, thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, we can arrive at a state of entire sanctification, in which we no longer experience between pulled in both directions.
I used to think along these line, but reading the whole letter to the Romans, I have become convinced that Paul is not doing what Augustine and Luther thought he was doing — that is arguing for individual justification by grace through (individual) faith in Jesus. Paul is doing instead what he is doing in his entire corpus — showing that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ fulfill God’s purposes for Israel and the whole creation, that this new righteous community of Jew and Gentile is what God had in mind from the beginning of creation.
In that case, in the context of Paul discursus on the law in chapter 7 and how the law functioned in creating the covenant between God and God’s people, and how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection have renewed and expanded that covenant, it makes sense that the “I” in this passage is Israel under the law (see N. T. Wright’s commentary in The New Interpreter’s Bible). In the Psalms, especially the psalms of lament, it is a common trope to have Israel speak in the first person singular. This passage certainly has the form of a psalm of complaint or lament.
Overall, in chapter 7, Paul is saying that the law, weakened by the flesh, failed to accomplish God’s purpose in creating a righteous community. Recall that for Paul, the flesh is the arena in which we draw distinctions (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile). Israel, in Paul’s mind, used the law to do exactly the opposite of God’s intention — it used the law to draw distinctions between those outside the law and those under the law.
Reading the law (and Paul means the more expansive understanding of Torah — instruction, which includes all the narrative aspects of the Pentateuch, as well as its legislative aspects), one can catch the vision of God’s intention (the law, in itself, is good). Provisions for care of the poor and the alien guard the righteousness of the human community. The same could apply to the law today — read in the abstract, it shows us what a just community could look like. But wretched humans that we are, we use it to draw distinctions, to secure individual rights rather than building just community. That is the the law of death that lives in our members. The body of death is the body of flesh that we draw that privileges those “under the law (citizens)” over against those outside the law.
In Jesus Christ, according to Paul, God has drawn all the sinfulness of distinction into one place in the flesh of Jesus and put sin to death in the flesh. And, in baptism, we have died to that life of sin and flesh, and been raised into the new community making its way through the wilderness to God’s renewed promise.
I think the passage in Matthew can be read in the same light. John the Baptist tried to recall Israel to God’s purposes by raising their consciousness of where they had fallen short of God’s intention, while Jesus tried to incarnate the new humanity with the parties he threw and attended, drawing everyone together in the new Kingdom. He invites everyone living under the burden of keeping the law (as if it were a set of rules to be followed) to come and take their rest and relax into the new righteousness of God.