Living Sacrifices in Relationship: Romans 12.9-21

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Romans 12-14 describes how Paul expects Christ-followers to behave in community. In 12.1-8, he urges humility and inner transformation, and teaches that everyone in the Church has been given gifts to help build up the community. Now here in 12.9-21, he continues by discussing what healthy relationships look like.

Text

[12.9] Let love not be hypocritical. Hate what is evil and stick to what is good. [10] Show affection to one another with the love of siblings. Try to outdo one another in showing honour. [11] Do not hold back when it comes to effort; boil over in spirit. Serve the Lord. [12] Rejoice in hope. Be patient in trouble. Persevere in prayer. [13] Treat the needs of the saints as your shared concern. Pursue hospitality. [14] Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. [15] Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. [16] Agree with one another. Do not think about lofty things, but associate with those who are lowly. Don’t act as though you were wiser than others. [17] Do not repay anyone evil for evil; plan ahead for what would be good for all people. [18] As much as you are able, as much as it is in your power, live peacefully with all people. [19] Do not take justice into your own hands, beloved, but leave wrath to God, for it is written: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” [20] Instead, “if your enemy is hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink. For by doing this you will heap burning coals upon their heads.” [21] Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Experience & Encounter

What I noticed about this passage, especially in the Greek, is how unrestrained it is. It’s a bold vision of community life, and Paul’s language is equally bold. (The image of boiling over in spirit is particularly striking.) The imagined disciple-in-community whom we meet here is a truly remarkable, humble, and self-controlled person.

On a more technical level, the straightforward translation here masks what is a rather odd mishmash of grammatical constructions in Greek. While I feel comfortable treating everything as imperatives, there is a lot of variability in the underlying text.

Explore

While the message here is pretty straightforward, two questions can guide the rest of the study:

  • What’s happening with the grammar of the passage and how might that impact our interpretation?
  • Is there anything else about the list of virtuous behaviours we should know?

Grammatical Considerations

The underlying Greek here is very odd. While I (along with most translations) have treated all the clauses as imperatives, there are actually very few imperative verbs here. The main clause in 12.9, which introduces the whole section, has no verb at all — one has to supply a form of the verb ‘to be’, but the mood is up to the reader to supply. Is Paul saying “Love is not hypocritical” or “Let love not be hypocritical”? Both are completely reasonable readings. The former would be more common (this is Tonstad 292*’s preferred reading), but in the context of what turns into a list of desired behaviours, the imperative seems appropriate.

This verbless clause is followed by a series of twelve short clauses, ten featuring participles and two with the same verbless construction as 12.9a. One logical interpretation of such constructions would be that the twelve are all examples of what unhypocritical love looks like (Tonstad 289; Kruse 474). But that rationale is weakened since the rest of passage jumps between imperatives, participles, and infinite constructions with no apparent semantic difference. Since all of the various constructions could take on an imperative meaning in given circumstances, I’m comfortable enough carrying this sense through the whole passage (see SBL for a similar conclusion). Thankfully for our purposes, the difference in meaning suggested by alternative interpretations of the grammar are very, very minimal. (As we’ve seen elsewhere in Romans, this isn’t always the case!)

Life in Christian Community

This passage flows directly from the previous one, as a further discussion of what it looks like to live out God’s mercy (Tonstad 292). In view of God’s mercy, we are to live as a sacrificial offering to God, not to be conformed to this age but be transformed through the renewing of our faculty of understanding in Christ, to be humble, and to use our God-given gifts for the building up of the Church. Now here Paul tells us that mercy is to be lived out through genuine, unhypocritical love. I won’t comment here on all of the characteristics listed in this passage, but a few deserve closer attention.

Unhypocritical Love

The word the New Testament uses for love is agape, what was outside the New Testament a rare and unusual word. (For example, even in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition in which the New Testament participates, the Greek-language Old Testament used words from the agape family only nineteen times — compared to over seventy-five times in Paul alone (Kruse 475).)

Paul calls this love here unhypocritical. Many translations choose the more straightforward ‘genuine’ here, but I like the force of the more literal translation. Our word ‘hypocrite’ comes from the Greek hypocrites, ‘actor’. The metaphor is of pretending to be what we’re not and saying what we do not really feel or believe (Witherington 293). As someone always intrigued by the ways Jesus’ teaching is reflected in Paul, it’s interesting that hypocrisy was one of the main charges Jesus leveled against his opponents, especially the Pharisees. That accusation was grounded in their tendency to use Law-keeping as an excuse not to show the love of neighbour that was the point of the Law. If we see verses 10-13 (or even 10-21) as expansions on the idea of unhypocritical love, we see that there are no excuses not to love our n2eighbour as ourself, even when that neighbour is our enemy.

Honour

As Tonstad puts it, the whole passage “reinforces a life-orientation that is self-giving, dedicated to the good of others and the building up of the community” (Tonstad 292). Here Paul describes this sensibility in terms of outdoing one another in showing honour. This other-focused mentality stands in contrast to the ‘way the world worked’ for Roman society, in which social status was based in how much honour one received, not showed (Tonstad 293; Eberhart; Witherington 293).

Effort and Energy

Paul then uses two highly energetic images (12.11). First, he exhorts the Romans not to hold back when it comes to effort, spoude. The NRSV translates this as ‘zeal’, and while that’s a perfectly good translation, It’s notable that he doesn’t use zelos, ‘zeal’, here, as he did to comment on Jewish religiosity in chapter 10. As we saw the other week, in the context of the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism, zeal often took a dark and violent turn. Perhaps it’s to avoid such associations that he uses the more general term spoude, ‘haste, speed, effort’, here. The image is of not holding back in a race and pushing as hard as possible instead (Kruse 476; cf. 2 Corinthians 7-8 where Paul uses the term five times).

Then he tells them to “boil over in spirit,” or possibly ‘in the Spirit’. While it seems likely in the context he means the human spirit, in light of how all of this is empowered by the Holy Spirit and what Paul has had to say about ‘mutual indwelling’ between humanity in Christ and the Holy Spirit, it amounts to much the same thing. For Paul, the genuine life of the human spirit is entirely caught up in the activity of the Holy Spirit (Kruse 476).

Shared Needs

As part of this vision of community life, the faithful are to “hold in common the needs of the saints.” As Witherington notes, within the context of Claudius’s recent death, this could be an implicit request for more settled Gentile members of the community to support the returning Jewish exiles (Witherington 292; cf. Nanos; Kruse 478; Jewett (2008) 764). But this request is also paired with hospitality to strangers. The pairing of these two suggests Paul is talking about a broader ethical vision rather than behaviours shown to fellow insiders alone. The Church is to be a community of grace, but that grace is to pour out into the broader world, as we see in the following verses (Kruse 479).

Echoes of The Sermon on the Mount

While what Paul has said so far since 12.9 has resonated strongly with Jesus’ teaching, the second segment of the passage, 12.14-21, contains more explicit reference to it, and especially the Sermon on the Mount (Witherington 292; Kruse 480):

Again we see that supposed dichotomies between the teachings of Jesus and Paul are greatly exaggerated. Here Paul cites the emerging traditions of Jesus’ teachings that were later codified in the Gospels in the same breath as he does the Wisdom literature (12.15 ~ Sirach 7.34, Ecclesiastes 3.4; 12.16b ~ Proverbs 3.7; 12.20 ~ Proverbs 25.21-22), and the Law (12.19b quotes Deuteronomy 32.35) (Witherington 292).

Heaping Coals

Finally, we should note a curious comment Paul makes in 12.20 that by doing good to one’s enemies, one “will heap burning coals on their heads.” The best interpretation of this, common in both the early Church and many recent commentators, is that returning good for evil shames one’s enemies by revealing their evil for what it is (Kruse 485). (For more on how this works, see my post on the prophet of nonviolent resistance, Howard Thurman (or better yet, read his power work Jesus and the Disinherited).)

Challenge

Passages emphasizing peacemaking, forgiveness, and self-offering will always be challenged as putting too much onus on the oppressed or abused person. While I think this is a challenge that simply must be accepted and heard rather than pushed back against, see some of my thoughts engaging with it here, here, and here.

But for today’s Challenge section, I’d like to focus instead on the question of this passage’s relationship to ecology. Sigve Tonstad considers this to be one of the most important and relevant passages in all of Scripture when it comes to this great issue of our time (Tonstad 293). Why? And is he right?

Tonstad’s argument rests on the passage’s grounding of Christian ethics in mercy and compassion (Tonstad 287). Paul has already argued that God has shown compassion for humanity in sending Jesus to fix the bug in our programming that stems from Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden (Romans 5-8), and that God continues to show mercy upon Israel, just as God has throughout history (9-11). Now that same mercy grounds the ethical vision of chapter 12.

And as Tonstad correctly points out, “compassion [is] now the sentiment that is most needed and most lacking with respect to critical ecological concerns” (Tonstad 293). The question for us then is whether the natural world and the other-than-human life within it are legitimate objects of compassion. What are the boundaries of our mercy? Or, to use contemporary psychotherapeutic language, how far does our ‘circle of empathy’ extend? It’s an interesting question to ask right now, since there are strong and vocal political forces telling us that many people — the poor, refugees, immigrants, queer people, prisoners, persons of colour — are not legitimate objects of Christian compassion, let alone the environment! There is ample biblical evidence to insist that Christianity is all about love of neighbour, and that, as the Sermon on the Mount and Parable of the Good Samaritan tell us, our neighbours include those we consider our enemies and those whom we least want to love. So, I won’t argue for that here. The gospel truth is that every one is owed our compassion, empathy, grace, and love. Full stop. But what about the rest of creation?

Here we have to go back once again to the creation story. As we’ve seen, both in this series and the series on Genesis, humanity was created to tend to and care for the earth and its creatures as God’s official representative (’image’). Creation, including the animals, was given a blessing and initial commandment by God similar to our own. The world as created by God is “an economy of life and plenitude” (Tonstad 295). This economy was broken by Adam’s sin — the very same sin Jesus came to undo, reestablishing God’s just order. And since, in Paul’s view, we participate in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and are united to him and by him, we are newly enabled, empowered, and therefore emboldened and entrusted to live out God’s just ways.

With all this in mind, we have every reason to believe and to insist that, yes, ecological concerns are legitimately Christian theological concerns, and the created world is due our mercy and compassion. I’ll give Tonstad the last word on this:

Paul’s injunctions are set against a horizon of need that is different from the twenty-first century, but his framework is not outdated. Along the narrative axis, the flashbacks to Genesis are hugely empowering for the earth and the rights of non-human creatures. The ‘Father of mercy’ in Paul’s letters is the … the Creator of all that exists. An ethic of compassion had much to keep it busy in Paul’s time, but the ecological concerns of the twenty-first century call for redeployment of compassion of a different order. Likewise, the world to which the believer is asked not to conform has taken ecological strides in the wrong direction unimaginable in Paul’s time. These changes define areas of non-conformity for our time that are as much in need of thoughtful, pro-active, compassionate living as what Paul urges in Romans (Rom.12.9-21). (Tonstad 295)

Expand

One of the things that first grabbed my attention about Integral theory and especially its psychological applications, was the idea that genuine growth involves a greater ability to understand others’ perspectives and therefore act out of greater empathy. That is really what this passage from Romans 12 is all about. It’s a radical call to centre empathy (which is nothing other than mercy by a different name, no matter what anyone might tell you) and grace (which is empathy put into action) in our relationships and communities. Here we see grace spilling out of our own individual experiences into our relationships with our churches, and from our churches, into society at large and, if our reading is correct, into the whole creation. This is about as expansive as it gets.

Summary & Conclusions

In Romans 12.9-21, Paul promotes a powerful ethical vision that is grounded in love, mercy, and grace and strongly reminiscent of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.

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