Into the Heart of Romans, page 16
24For [gar] we were saved in hope; but [alla] it isn’t hope if you can see it; for [gar] who hopes for what they can see? 25But [gar] if we hope for what we don’t see, this means patience.
That then brings us to the climax of the passage, which, to repeat, is certainly not an aside, as we can see from the start of verse 26: ‘In the same way, too’, hōsautōs de. The point Paul is making is new and perhaps unexpected, but the hōsautōs insists that it belongs exactly with what’s just been said. The first half of verse 26 states the basic point, and the second half explains it with a gar which this time I’ve left untranslated. But then, as so often at the end of a train of thought, Paul rounds it off with a de, here in verse 27, as though to say, but notice that at the heart of this whole train of thought we find God himself, God the heart-searcher, God the father hearing and knowing the groaning of all creation and the inarticulate groaning of our hearts, because he, the father, knows the mind of the spirit which is groaning in those very places. Thus:
26In just the same way [hōsautōs de] the spirit helps in our weakness; for [gar] we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but [alla] that very spirit intercedes with inarticulate groanings. 27And, however [de], the heart-searcher knows the spirit’s mind, because [hoti] the spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with God’s will.
We need to pause and take in the extraordinary claim Paul is making. I have said before that when we look at the biblical sketch of Israel’s coming Messiah, in the Psalms, in 2 Samuel, in Isaiah and elsewhere, we are being nudged to the realization that this is a vocation designed for God’s own use. God creates the category of Messiahship, of the anointed king, so that he may himself come and be the anointed king of Israel, doing in person the work of judgment and mercy for which the ideal king would be equipped. Well, just as we can look back at the formation of that messianic portrait as a role designed for God’s own use, so the call to be people of lament at the place where the world is in pain is itself a vocation designed for God’s own use, in the person of his spirit, dwelling – and groaning! – in the hearts of God’s people. The logic of these connecting words that tie together verses 22 to 27 makes this quite clear.
Our first question, then, has always been the overall shape of the passage. Our second question teases out the effect of the little connecting words by which Paul signals how he at least thinks the argument is held in place. Our third question is to examine the larger first-century context. Here, I suggest, there are two particular overtones that would strike the alert first-century listener.
The first is the image of creation as a woman in labour. I mentioned before the grandiose Roman imperial propaganda that displayed nature as a serene, fruitful matriarch, surrounded by the signs of peace and plenty. Paul too uses vivid female imagery, but for him it’s creation rather than nature (that is, the world in relation to its creator rather than an independent being), and at each stage he depicts a woman groaning in labour pains, struggling to give birth. This evokes the biblical theme sometimes referred to, a bit vaguely, as the ‘messianic woes’. It’s a well-known biblical and Jewish theme, in which God’s purposes will come about through, and even by means of, a time of intense suffering like that of a woman giving birth. You find this in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and elsewhere, and in second-Temple books such as 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra. Many Jews in Jesus’ day clung to this hope: that sorrow and pain would increase but that, through it all, God’s fresh, redeeming, restorative purpose would be fulfilled. Jesus picks up this theme in John 16, where he speaks of the woman in labour having sorrow but then her sorrow turning into joy. And now Paul declares that this is where we are. We are in the throes of labour pains.
The second larger context, to which I have already alluded, is the exodus. This might seem strange, since we’ve followed the exodus-story from Romans 6 (with the crossing of the Red Sea), through Romans 7 (arriving at Sinai), and now in Romans 8 being led to the promised inheritance. What are we doing back in Egypt again, with the Israelites ‘groaning’ in their slavery, as in Exodus 2? But the point is that, throughout Romans, and indeed throughout Christian experience in general, we are faced with the ‘now and not yet’ of salvation, as in verses 24 and 25. In the same way, as in verse 23, we are already ‘children of God’ but are simultaneously awaiting the resurrection as the ultimate moment of ‘adoption’. This is the classic eschatological tension: we are already God’s children, but this won’t be apparent until the resurrection; we have escaped Egypt, but we are still groaning as we await full release from slavery.
So at last, with our overall survey in place, and our three questions asked and answered, we can plunge into the passage line by line.
Verse 22 offers a realistic appraisal of the present creation, as opposed to the bland optimism of imperial propaganda. Paul says ‘we know’. The ‘we’ here can’t simply be ‘all human beings’. All humans are aware of earthquakes, epidemics and war. But only those inhabiting the biblical tradition are likely to understand these as the labour pains of a renewed creation, rather than the chance horrors of a random universe (for Epicureans), the blind power of the world’s inner logos (for Stoics) or the flickering shadows of the insubstantial secondary world (for Platonists). So, paradoxically perhaps, though deeply biblically, this way of looking at the sufferings of the world is inherently positive: God’s new world is waiting to be born! The fact that labour pains are simultaneously horrible and full of hope answers exactly to verse 18, with present sufferings unable to compete with coming glory.
Paul insists that this state of affairs is going on ‘right up to the present’. Eschatology has been inaugurated. The new world has begun with Jesus and the spirit. But this doesn’t diminish the ongoing pain and sorrow of the old world. Rather, it produces a highly uncomfortable tension. This is especially distressing for anyone who thought, as (alas) many have been taught, that becoming a Christian would be the gateway to a smooth, untroubled life . . .
So, with verse 22 as the basis, Paul moves quickly to the parallel truth about the church. What is happening in creation as a whole is mirrored in the experience of Jesus’ followers. The phrase ‘not only so’ suggests that this too, as with the previous verse, is something that ‘“we” [ought to] know’. We ourselves are going through the labour pains, the messianic woes. We too, from one perspective, are still in Egypt, awaiting God’s fresh word of sonship. How easy it would be for a Christian to think, well, of course the world is in a mess; people after all are sinful and deserve God’s wrath; but we Christians are just fine, and anyway we’ll be leaving this place before too long. No! The church is groaning at the heart of the groaning of creation. And that isn’t an accident. It is where we are called to be. Standing in this place is our vocation, one key element in the present wise stewardship which, as redeemed humans, we are to exercise over creation.
This is accentuated, in verse 23, by the fact that we have ‘the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us’. Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, was the Jewish feast of the first-fruits. It was the welcome sign of the longer-term harvest. Paul frequently echoes this theme of ‘first-fruits’, indicating that the spirit is the ‘down payment’ in advance on the full promised inheritance.2 In the spirit, we are already tasting God’s new world. And that, of course, makes our ongoing life in the old world all the more painful.
That tension is then reflected in the initially surprising second half of the verse: we are still eagerly awaiting our ‘full sonship’. Already in verses 15 and 16, the spirit has assured us of sonship as a present status, albeit with the coded warning that this will mean sharing Jesus’ Abba-prayer, his Gethsemane-prayer. We now find ourselves in the in-between state, like the time in which Jesus himself, having been affirmed as God’s son in his baptism, had to await his public vindication in the resurrection.3 That interval was a time of fierce testing for Jesus, both in the desert and in his public career, and of course in his last days and hours. We too are waiting for resurrection: for vindication, yes, as Paul will say in 8.33–4, but here more particularly for ‘the redemption of our body’. The word for ‘redemption’ here is apolytrōsis. This is a regular term, not just for someone purchasing the freedom of a slave. It is, more specifically, a reference to the exodus itself, as you might have guessed from the exodus-echoes that are awakened by the ‘groaning’ motif. God ‘redeemed’ his people from Egypt, declaring them thereby to be indeed his people. The resurrection of Jesus’ people, the result of the spirit’s work within them as in 8.9–11, will be our exodus, declaring us to be his people but also constituting our rescue from the slavery we have shared with the rest of creation (8.20–1).
Verse 23 thus places the church at the heart of the groaning of all creation. This is so, not despite the fact that we are the new-exodus people, but somehow because of it. As the people of the crucified Messiah, we are called – in the Messiah’s spirit – to share the pain of the world.
We might ponder where precisely this vocation takes us. The world struggles with issues of authority; so do we. The world struggles with issues of sex and gender; so do we. The world is still in a mess over multi-culturalism and ethnic integration – and so are we. And so on. No doubt this is partly because the church is failing in its obedience. But at the same time this pain-within-pain, the pain of the church within, and mirroring, the pain of the world, doesn’t surprise me. When Jesus breathed his spirit on his followers, he said, ‘As the father sent me, so I send you.’ And where had the father sent him? To the place where the world was in direst pain, so that he could take it upon himself. Our vocation, by the spirit, places us, right now, where the world is in pain, so that, as Paul is about to say, we can be in prayer right there.
Verses 24 and 25 then look back to the start of chapter 5. Living with ‘hope that is not yet seen’ constitutes a call to patience. Verse 24: salvation is given (past tense), but in and for hope. Some translations make the ‘hope’ here refer back to the coming resurrection: ‘that’s the hope for which we were saved’, which may be pushing Paul’s language further than he actually takes it, but which certainly expresses his thought. And again, we have that strong word apekdechomai, as in verses 19 and 23: we eagerly await it – but with patience. As we all know, getting the balance between eagerness and patience, in any context, is a tough call. But it is our call.
So to verses 26 and 27, the ‘unutterable groanings’. Some have wondered whether Paul is referring here to speaking in tongues. But Paul elsewhere sees tongues as spirit-given language; I don’t think he’d refer to that as alalētos, ‘inarticulate’. Anyway, he is talking here about all Christians, but he knows that not all speak in tongues.4 His point, rather, is to focus on the way the spirit enables us to fulfil our vocation as intercessors at the heart of the groaning of creation.
We are not good at this. We would much rather celebrate our own salvation. The ‘weakness’ here seems to be our failure to think sufficiently deeply into the real plight of the world, and hence our ignorance in knowing what to pray for. But at that point, he says, the spirit ‘comes alongside to help’: synantilambanetai, a double compound expressing the way the spirit acts with us (that’s the syn bit) and in our place (that’s the anti bit). This is the word Martha uses in Luke 10.40 when she wants Mary to ‘come alongside and help with some of the work in the kitchen’. Paul is moulding the Greek language to say as best he can what he said in verses 14–16, that the spirit comes alongside our own spirit so that together they can do what’s needed. The spirit here works in us and with us, on our behalf and then through us.
So Paul now refers to the spirit’s activity with the same vivid female metaphor he used for the groaning of the world and the church. The world is in labour pains; the church is in labour pains; and the spirit is also going into labour, the groaning labour pains of the new creation. Think of the ruach Elohim, the wind or spirit of God, brooding over the waters in Genesis 1.2. (Paul clearly has Genesis 1 in mind in Romans 8.) This is the ultimate seed of all hope: for the world in chaos, God’s spirit is the agent, the source, of new life.
So what is the spirit doing with this groaning, with these labour pains? In that groaning the spirit is pleading for us. The word Paul uses here is hyperentyngchanei; it is possible (since it occurs nowhere else in surviving ancient Greek literature) that Paul has even made it up, to hold together the fact that the spirit is present and at work (tyngchano) within us (en) and on our behalf (hyper). At the very point where we find ourselves in pain and sorrow too deep for words, at the heart of creation’s wordless pain – pandemics, climate crises, wars, violent crime and all the rest – in all this, God’s own spirit is there, with powerful groans which, though wordless, form the ultimate language of intercession.
But how do we know that God’s spirit will be there, doing this work? How do we know that God has not given up on his creation in disgust, as some Jewish thinkers speculated? Because we will be there, indwelt by that same spirit. We are called to be people who stand at the place of pain – in the cancer ward, at the asylum-seeker’s court hearing, by the graveyard full of memorials to small children or to families whose homes have been bombed in war – so as to be those within whose own painful perplexity the holy spirit will plead to the father on behalf of the whole creation. Indwelt by God’s spirit, we are to be right there in the chaos, so that God’s new creation may finally emerge, this time with humans as its spirit-enabled agents.
This vocation is – to say the least – challenging. It is hard work. Fortunately, God has provided a prayer book to help us. It’s called the book of Psalms. And that is where Paul goes now.
How do we know that this inarticulate groaning of the world, the church and the spirit is not in vain? God himself, God the father, says Paul in verse 27, searches all hearts. Nine verses later he quotes Psalm 44.22: ‘for your sake we are killed all day long.’ The previous verse of the psalm insists that God knows the secrets of our hearts. Paul, inhabiting this psalm, provides an example of God-given lament. And the picture that opens from this apparently unlikely place is a matchless image of the Trinity: the spirit calling to the father from the depth of the world’s pain – and the church’s pain! And God the father hearing and knowing what is going on, exactly as in Exodus 2.23–5, when God hears the groaning of his people in Egypt. And we who find ourselves caught up in this extraordinary communication of father and spirit are, says Paul in verse 29, conformed to the image of the son.
This is our own Gethsemane moment, our own ‘why-did-you-abandon-me?’ moment. It will come in one way or another as we follow Jesus, and specially as we minister to his people. Romans 8 is indeed about assurance, but it isn’t just the assurance of salvation; it is the assurance that when we are in that dark place, sensing our own pain at the heart of the world’s pain, this is not outside God’s saving purposes, but is actually at their heart. This is why I insisted in early 2020 that the first proper response to the COVID pandemic was lament. Only when we hold back from knee-jerk reactions to the world’s troubles and take the time to lament, to allow the spirit’s wordless groanings to find a home within us, can we find a way forward.
Thus the glory to be revealed, the image-bearing authority exercised by God’s people within the new creation (verses 18 to 21), is anticipated in the present time in the strange, dark work of prayer. We do not pray for the church and the world from a great height, as though we could look down on them from a safe and smug distance. We pray out of our own pain, whether of sickness or grief or injury or disappointment or opposition or apparent failure or depression. The God who has saved the world through Jesus and his death and resurrection is saving the world through the work of the spirit. And we are called to be the Tabernacle-people, the place where and the means by which the spirit undertakes this constant, often painful, frequently wordless work. The sign that the divine glory has come to dwell within us, in our midst, is that we are in this way exercising the human ‘glory’ of delegated ‘authority’ over the world. That is what prayer is about; and when the world is in a mess, prayer may well look and feel like what Paul says here. And all this is part of what Paul understands by ‘loving God’, being enfolded, taken up, within the Jesus-shaped love that constantly flows, in both directions, between the father and the spirit. That, indeed, is the vital link to the next verse (28), which we shall consider in our next chapter.
You see, faced with the world in chaos, and the church in a muddle, God doesn’t just stand to one side and say, I wish you people could get your act together. The mystery of Trinitarian theology is the mystery of prayer, that God the spirit comes to that place of pain so that our griefs, sorrows and loves are taken up into the grief, sorrow and love of God. This is what it means, in verse 17, to suffer with the Messiah so that we may be glorified with him.
The famous hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’ catches this sense of spirit-inspired wordless prayer. This hymn, the translation of a fourteenth-century Italian poem, ends with the confidence that God’s work of healing is going ahead and that we are caught up within it, even if it is beyond human ability to describe it:
And so the yearning strong,
with which the soul will long,
shall far outpass the power of human telling;
for none can guess its grace,
till she become the place,
wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.5
And, we might add, wherein the holy spirit utters her groaning.
Notes
1 One should also note that the clause about God’s spirit filling the whole world is taken from the Wisdom of Solomon 1.7, where the point is not celebration but warning to evildoers: God knows exactly what’s going on!
2 E.g. Rom. 11.16; 1 Cor. 15.20. On ‘down payment’, arrabōn, see e.g. 2 Cor. 1.22; Eph. 1.14.
