15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 

There is a caricature of Pauline theology, and especially of St Paul’s ideas about salvation, which turns it into a matter of individualistic escapism. Such a theology is fitting, I suppose, for a consumerist society full of people working miserable and meaningless jobs; but that is a subject for another day.

One manifestation of this version of St Paul is the “Romans Road”, which is a sort of four-step programme towards salvation, each of whose steps is a bit of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It begins at Romans 3.23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, which describes the human condition; before moving on to tell us what this entails, based on Romans 6.23, “the wages of sin is death”. And then it offers the solution in Romans 5.8, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”. And then there’s the call for our response from Romans 10.9, “if you confess with your lips […] and believe in your heart […] you will be saved”. I believe that there are some versions of this that include more steps and thus additional accompanying verses from the Letter to the Romans: but this is the efficient version, also apt for our modern sensibilities. 

One has to admire the neatness of the thing, though it’s a pity that Step 2 uses Chapter 6 and then we have to turn backwards to Chapter 5 for Step 3. Perhaps St Paul could’ve planned things better. All the same, it is rather impressive that just this one letter “containeth all things necessary to salvation”—who needs the rest of Holy Scripture?

Look, I am not really interested in criticising what our brothers and sisters and second-cousins in Christ say in their tracts—or Powerpoint presentations, as the case may be. The Romans Road: it’s not crazy. And while I would probably rather would-be converts begin with John’s Gospel, the Letter to the Romans is really not a terrible place to start—just ask St Augustine, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Karl Barth, all of whom credited their spiritual awakenings at least in part to St Paul’s masterpiece. 

The more of the Letter to the Romans, the better: if there is a corrective to be made, it is to include Romans 8 as a station on this road, which is rarely done except to assure penitents that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8.1). What we don’t get is any of this stuff about creation and its groaning, and about the redemption of our bodies. 

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The redemption of our bodies. There is here, neither an utter rejection of our embodiment, nor an uncritical acceptance of it, and therefore a criticism both of certain secular as well as spiritual attitudes. 

On the spiritual side of the ledger, what this reading of Paul does is to resist the denigration of the body in preference for the soul, and indeed the strong dualism that enables it in the first place. Our bodies will not be cast aside in the end, as if dead weight; but they will be redeemed, recognised as precious treasure. 

On the secular side, what we are pushing back against is an unwillingness to admit that there is something wrong with us, not just at a superficial level, but deep within in, in our very bones. Our bodies need to be redeemed; we need to be transformed. 

And not only our bodies, but also our body—our English translations give us the plural form for the Greek singular, and while we ought not read too much into such grammatical minutiae, this one does lend itself to some theologising. It is at least consistent with St Paul’s speaking, in the same breath, about creation as a whole and about us in particular: this talk of our body—our shared embodied reality—requiring and also receiving redemption. 

And this is where we part company from those who use the Romans Road as a guide for individuals qua individuals to be saved, which is—more often than not—to have one’s soul whisked away, on a one way ticket, to heaven. We insist instead, not only on the intimate connection between soul and body, but also between us all, who share this ensouled and embodied human life: it is not enough that individual human beings are saved, we yearn instead for humanity as a whole to be saved. Nor are we content to stop at the edge of our species; it is all of the natural world—with whom our embodiment is also shared—that must be saved, if salvation is to have any meaning for us. 

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If salvation—if redemption—is not about escape, not about the abandonment of this awful mess of a world, this mess of our own making; if it is rather about the transformation, the renewal of all things, then we must understand our mission afresh. 

It is so easy to treat this place—this church—as a sanctuary from the outside world, a safe haven from the tragic ridiculousness, the ridiculous tragedy of modern life, run as it is by the mendacious and the mediocre and even the malicious. And that’s not entirely inappropriate. It feels otherworldly in here by design. The vestments, the incense, the sublime music: none of it is accidental. This is meant to be a foretaste of heaven, an analogy, even if not quite an approximation, of the beatific vision.

But nor is it an accident that this reprieve from the outside world is temporary. Nor that this church is in a city, and not hidden away from the world, on a mountaintop about the fray and fracas. Nor that the word “Mass”—our favoured term for this celebration of the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood—is taken from the dismissal, when we are called to leave this place, back out into the world, our bellies full of Christ. It is as though that this is the most important thing that happens here: that we are sent to bear in our own bodies the world’s salvation to all who need his redeeming love.