Into the Heart of Romans, page 15
The suffering here is deeply personal, even intimate. Paul isn’t here simply talking about outward persecution, beatings or imprisonment, or indeed poverty, sickness, shipwreck or anything so tangible, though no doubt those all create the outward conditions for what he’s saying here. Paul writes in this passage – with 2 Corinthians in recent memory, with all its extraordinary catalogue of personal trauma – about the deepest, most incomprehensible groanings that emerge from the innermost depths of our own being.
This isn’t just about ‘going through a rough time’. Nor is it simply ‘something we occasionally have to put up with’. Paul is talking about our vocation not just to get through difficult times but to stand in prayer where the world is in pain so that God’s own spirit may be present, and intercede, right there. This is one of the most revolutionary and innovative moments in the whole letter. Paul here fills out both his Trinitarian theology of new creation and his pastoral understanding of the depths of the Christian heart, and joins them together. God’s spirit comes to dwell in the midst of his world, in the persons of Jesus’ faithful followers; but that world is in great pain. The spirit inhabits that pain, and calls out to the father from its darkest depths, by means of God’s people being in prayer, spirit-inspired prayer, at that place.
This painful vocation is at the heart of God’s rescuing plan for the whole creation. Because this is so unexpected to so many readers, verses 26 and 27 have often been treated as a detached little statement, and a puzzling one at that, about praying when we don’t know what to pray for, and the spirit groaning within us. What, people might ask, has that to do with the main theme of the chapter? The normal readings of Romans 8 would be thinking of the pathway to our own salvation, with this strange mention of prayer as at best an aside. But if we follow through what we’ve already said about the meaning of ‘glory’, with Psalm 8 in mind in terms of God’s plan for humans to bring his wise order into the world, and with the promise in verse 22 that the glorification of human beings will be the key to God’s rescue of his whole creation from its slavery to corruption, then this whole passage, verses 23 to 27, makes sense as a whole, with the two verses about prayer not as a footnote but as the climax. Verses 26 and 27, then, are not a strange add-on to a chapter about something else.
This makes sense if we think for a moment about how the chapter works rhetorically. Paul doesn’t just toss extraneous ideas into the flow of a discourse about something else. He is building to a deliberate, sustained and indeed spectacular climax. The last thing he would do at such a point would be to add a strange and irrelevant little aside.
So how does it all work out? As we have said, God’s plan is not to rescue humans from creation, to go and be with him somewhere else, but to come in person to dwell with his image-bearing creatures, so that together he and they may bring his rescuing, ordering wisdom to bear upon the world, ‘on earth as in heaven’. This is the key to early Christology: God himself comes into his world as the truly human rescuer and ruler. In this passage we see that it is also the key to pneumatology, to understanding the holy spirit: God himself comes into his world, into the hearts and lives of puzzled and frightened believers who don’t know what to pray for as they ought, so that precisely in their prayer of unknowing, their prayer from within the darkness of their own lives and of the world around them, God himself will be at work, interceding from within his creation. As we shall see in verse 28, this means that God is working with these praying-in-the-dark people for the wider good of his world. And in that verse, too, Paul speaks of these people as ‘those who love him’. To speak of humans loving God is not, for Paul, primarily about people having wonderful mystical experiences of being caught up in a kind of heavenly bliss, though no doubt he would say that such things happen and it’s wonderful when they do. When he speaks here of ‘those who love God’ he is referring to those who, precisely at the point where they are at the end of their mental, emotional and spiritual tether, find within themselves the deep sorrow of all the world, as it were concentrated into one place, and find at that moment that they are part of the dialogue of love between the father and the spirit. This, he says, is what we are called to do and be.
Just as the glory of Jesus was fully revealed on the cross, so the spirit-given glory of Jesus’ followers is fully present at that moment. Like Jesus in Gethsemane, where he prayed the Abba-prayer that Paul invokes in verse 15, God’s suffering people ask in perplexity whether there might not be another way. Like Jesus on the cross, God’s people feel as though they have been forsaken entirely. At such points we are to discover that what we deeply want to say has already been said by Jesus himself, drawing on one of the great prayers in the scriptures.
This passage, then, is about the Christian vocation. (Paul seems to think this is true for all Christians; but how much more is it true for those called to minister in the church, called to organize and lead public worship, to be pastors and teachers, to shape communities within which this spirit-led intercession will take place.) This moment is the climax of what has been said about the spirit through the whole chapter. In verses 5 to 8, the spirit directs our mind; in verses 9 to 11, the indwelling spirit will raise us from the dead; in verses 15 and 16, the spirit assures us that we are God’s children and leads us towards our inheritance, even as we pray the Abba-prayer. Now, in verses 22–7, in the midst of a world in pain, God’s own spirit shares and bears that pain through God’s people sharing it themselves.
Paul here seems to be radically applying the theology of the cross to the work of the spirit in the church. We might suppose – and the whole charismatic movement which has so transformed many churches in the last generation would bear this out – that being filled with the spirit means celebration, excitement, being empowered. That is indeed often the case. But the holy spirit is the spirit of the creator God, who grieves over his world gone wrong. The holy spirit is the spirit of Jesus who went to the cross to defeat the powers of evil by bearing our sin and death. This passage is, as I hinted just now, a kind of spirit-equivalent to Jesus’ terrible cry, ‘My God, my God, why did you abandon me?’
At this point we are near the heart of the early Christian answer to some of the deepest questions humans can ask. The philosophers, particularly following the Deism of the eighteenth century, have regularly asked a one-dimensional question which they have called ‘the problem of evil’. How can we believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God in the face of the terrible evil and suffering in the world? Paul, faced with the same phenomena, gives a three-dimensional answer. Work it out: if you start off with a picture of God as the great celestial CEO, or even the heavenly puppet-master pulling the strings to make things happen, of course you’re going to have problems. But if you start with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who grieves over the pain of the world and the failings of his own people, the God who in the end reveals himself in and as the crucified Messiah, the God who then sends the spirit into the hearts of his people so that God himself may, in and through his people, stand at the heart of the pain of the world so that the world may be healed – why then the whole question looks very different.
These verses, I suggest, explain and contextualize the present work of lament which anticipates the future promised work of the redemption of all creation. The New Testament looks back to the great laments of scripture: to Jeremiah’s lamentations, to the anguished prayers of Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9 and Daniel 9. Those laments – followed up by the centuries of prayerful, psalm-singing Judaeans between then and the coming of Jesus – lay the foundation, in humble worship and creational sorrow, for the eventual coming of Jesus. Simeon and Anna in Luke 1, and indeed Zechariah, Mary and Elizabeth too, are all part of that long lament, ‘looking for the consolation of Israel’, as Luke puts it. The two on the road to Emmaus say, ‘We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.’ The centuries of prayer and especially of lament formed and moistened the soil into which the good seed was sown. I am suggesting that Paul, by echoing Israel’s lament in this passage (Psalm 44 is echoed in verse 27, but the whole idea of groaning in slavery naturally sends the mind back to the children of Israel in Egypt), is placing the church in the present time in a similar position. We have hoped, and we go on hoping, that the spirit is the one through whom the world, creation itself, will be redeemed, given its freedom to be truly itself. Our calling is to go on with that hope even in the dark, even when hope seems dashed in war-torn and demolished cities of Syria and Ukraine, in the children’s graveyard after yet another school shooting, in the horrors and terrors of a world that thought it was enlightened but turned out to be still in the dark. And in this passage, Paul is sketching the map of how this hope works, what it feels like, and what, theologically speaking, is actually going on.
So, if the ‘glory’ in verses 18 to 21 refers to the wise rule of God’s image-bearing people over creation, the primary way that comes to expression in the present time is by prayer, particularly by lament. Particularly if you’re a minister of the gospel, but also for every Christian sooner or later, there will be times when, as Paul says here, things will be so bad that you won’t even know what to pray for. That does not mean you’ve gone off the rails somewhere (well, you might have done, but that would be a different issue). It could well mean that you are called to share, in the spirit, the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross itself, as part of the ongoing, spirit-led application of God’s strange work of taking the pain and sorrow of the world upon himself. Notice, by the way, that Jesus himself, at those moments, had the Psalms in mind. If the Psalms are not part of our bloodstream, how will we, and the people in our care, be Jesus-reflecting people of prayer and lament within the pain of the parish, of the city, of the world? I understand that some churches, eager to attract newcomers, have majored on happy, bouncy music. But without the biblical call to lament (which isn’t the same thing as dreary music!) we are failing in our calling. In any case, there must be many potential newcomers who would at once appreciate being drawn into genuine lament.
Romans 8.22 to 27 thus goes from one extreme to the other: from the broad sweep of the whole created order in verse 22 to the most intimate and painful longings of the human heart in verses 26 and 27. And at that latter point, extraordinarily, even God the holy spirit has no words for what’s going on, no words at least that we can understand. We who live at a time of groaning and perplexity about many issues in our global life – a pandemic, a climate crisis, a refugee crisis, various geopolitical crises whether in Afghanistan or eastern Europe or the South China Sea, and so on – well, it’s good to know that there are moments when even the holy spirit seems to be lost for words.
I was struck by this some years ago, preparing for Pentecost in Durham Cathedral. In the Church of England, we have had many creative and innovative liturgies, and one of these new liturgies proposed, for the feast of Pentecost, a response that involved the congregation repeating the words, ‘Alleluia! The Spirit of God fills the whole world.’ This was obviously meant to sound cheerful: ‘God is in everything, so let’s not be gloomy dualists.’ Look out at the world, the words seemed to say, and recognize the presence of God’s spirit in anything and everything. Well, I don’t like gloomy dualism either. But as Pentecost approached that year, I read the papers and watched the television news . . . and I found myself saying in my sermon that, if the spirit of God does indeed fill the whole world, then what the spirit is mostly doing right now is grieving. And groaning. The world was, and is, in a mess. There is no room for easy-going optimism. If you want to avoid cosmic dualism – as of course you must if you are a biblical Christian – the road to take is not to some kind of monism, a form of soft Stoicism with the divine impulse simply present within whatever happens to be going on in the world. In a world that still groans in travail, the way to avoid cosmic dualism is to lament, and in patience to pray; perhaps to speak prophetic truth to power; and to be ready for any and all ways of bringing God’s healing to his world, whether in the long or short term.1
This long introduction to our present passage is leading up to the double claim, first, that the ideas we find here in Romans 8.22–7 are unique in scripture, and second, that, so far from being an aside, this passage actually constitutes the very heart of the chapter and, as such, the heart of at least one major strand in the letter as a whole. We come to Romans 8 hoping, quite rightly, for assurance of salvation; but this chapter, while it does indeed provide that, focuses on vocation.
I am reminded of the wonderful scene in John 21 when Jesus interviews Peter, sounding him out after his triple denial. Three times he asks, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ Even though Peter can’t answer the question the way Jesus asks it – he uses a different word for ‘love’ – Jesus’ response is not to say ‘All right, you’re forgiven’ or ‘Well, we’ll draw a veil over what happened’ or ‘We’ll let bygones be bygones’, but to commission him for his vocation. Feed my lambs; tend my sheep; feed my sheep. Now, in Romans 8, I suggest that Paul does something similar. He begins the chapter with the word of ‘no condemnation’, and ends it by insisting that nothing can separate us from God’s love. But the heart of the chapter, the verses now before us, have to do with the vocation of those who are held within that great assurance.
What, after all, is the church for? What are its ministers for? Well, many things – living the gospel, proclaiming the crucified and risen Jesus as Lord of the world. But to live and announce that message in and to the world, with the world in its current state, means engaging with the world’s reality, its turmoil, its trouble, its tears. And we can’t simply say ‘Well, that’s all right, because Jesus is the answer.’ Nor can we say, ‘Well, of course the world’s a mess, because it doesn’t know Jesus; but we’re all right, heading for salvation somewhere else; we don’t really belong here, we’re just passing through.’ Nor may we say, as some wanted to say when the COVID pandemic struck, ‘It’s all someone else’s fault for being so wicked; God is punishing those people for the sins we’ve always known they were committing.’ No: part of our primary calling as followers of Jesus is to lament: to stand in the place of pain in humility, sorrow and hope. That’s what the children of Israel did in Egypt. It’s what the Judaeans did for four hundred years before the Messiah came. It’s what we are called to do as we stand in prayer at the heart of a world in pain.
This vocation will come for us whether we’re ready or not. You see, this passage is all about being co-glorified with the Messiah – which sounds wonderful, until we recall that, for Jesus, glorification meant being betrayed, denied, vilified, whipped raw and hung up to die. This is again clearest in John’s gospel, where the ‘glorification’ of Jesus occurs when Jesus is crucified. Conformed to the image of the son, Paul will say in verse 29. And, to say it again, standing at the place of pain isn’t just something nasty to get through. It is a vital part of the means by which God is working out, in the present time, his glorious rescuing purposes for his world. Learning to lament is a non-negotiable part of becoming the people through whom God is accomplishing his saving plan for the whole creation. (This, again, is one of the reasons why the Psalms have always been central to daily Christian worship.) Of course, this can tip over into a martyr complex which brings its own variety of unhealth. The second-century church spotted that one early on: deliberately trying to get yourself killed isn’t the point. We need to see the challenge coming and understand what’s really going on.
Now all this so far is really by way of introduction. But now at last let’s ask the three questions which as I’ve said we should always bring to a passage in Paul.
First, look at the beginning and ending of the paragraph. That’s a bit artificial here because we’ve broken the single thread of verses 18 to 30 into three separate sections, 18–21 in our last chapter, 22–7 in this one, and 28–30 in the next one. So we are still within the overall sweep of suffering and glorification, as in the longer unit of Romans 8.18–30. But verses 22–7, our present concern, do have a clear theme of their own. There is one Greek root that occurs three times, here and only here in Romans. That is the clue.
The word in question is the word ‘groaning’: the verb stenazō in verses 22 and 23 and the cognate noun stenagmos in verse 26. This repetition tells us how to read the passage. First, the world is groaning in labour pains. Second, the Messiah’s people are groaning as we await the resurrection. And then, climactically (not as a separate paragraph as in some translations, like the RSV and NRSV!), God’s own spirit is groaning within us. We are caught up, vocationally, in the work that God is presently doing to bring about the redemption of creation. Our prayers, more specifically the anguished prayers that come when we are overwhelmed and don’t know what to pray for – they are part of the vital means by which the triune God is doing and will do the work of liberating creation from its corruption and decay. That’s what this passage is all about.
So if the first question is about the overall shape of the passage, our second question is to look at the little connecting words that hold things together. Paul begins verse 22 with oidamen gar – ‘For’ we know; I have translated that gar as ‘let me explain’. This whole paragraph, in fact, is digging down beneath the grand statement of verses 19 to 21 to show ‘what’s really going on’ ‘right up to the present moment’. Paul emphasizes that the Christian’s groaning is a special, focal part of the groaning of all creation. Then we have the two little verses about hope and patience, verses 24 and 25, which together explain why we are where we are. We were saved in and for hope (24a); this is explained by Paul’s note about how hope works and why it produces patience:
