Justified by faith

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. Romans 5: 1-2.


Sometimes the choice of readings gives preachers a pretty strong hint as to what they are expected to say; and today’s are like that. From Exodus, God’s promise of faithful support to the Israelites in the wilderness; from Matthew, Jesus’ compassion for the thousands who came to him like lost sheep; and from Romans, Paul’s insistence on the free grace of God. We are talking about openness, inclusion, acceptance, God’s readiness to meet us where we are with love and without preconditions.

All that is as it should be, because that is the heart of the Christian faith. We do proclaim a love without bounds. But if you read these passages in their contexts, you may begin to feel that there is an elephant in the room: something large that no one is too keen to notice. Because if God is offering grace and salvation, what is it that we are being saved from?

Paul, in Romans, is clear about that: we are offered salvation from sin, from condemnation, from the wrath of God. We don’t nowadays say too much about those things. But for Paul, being aware of them was the precondition for knowing God’s love. His letter starts by reminding the Christians in Rome how corrupt they are, how little difference there is between them and the pagans among whom they live. And so through the greater part of Christian history. As late as the eighteenth century, John Wesley saw it as his first task to bring people to a ‘conviction of sin’. Only at that point could they understand God’s forgiveness. It was there that grace began.

Not only don’t we talk much about this aspect of our faith: I suspect we don’t feel much of it either. How many of us, when the service speaks of ‘our manifold sins and wickedness’, peer around in the corners of our lives, trying to find some adequate guilt? Forgetting a birthday? Being late with the car’s MoT? Not speaking up when someone rubbishes Christianity? Is that conviction of sin? Is it really wickedness?

Perhaps I’m unusually smug and self-satisfied (my family would delete the ‘perhaps’). Perhaps that is precisely my sin. But that seems too glib an answer. Perhaps people were more wicked in the past? That seems unlikely. As we struggle to understand what St Paul and John Wesley were on about, we have to ask whether we are missing the point somewhere along the line. When they insist on the power of sin; when they draw a direct line between sin and God’s grace, have we really understood what they are saying?

Paul tackles the question through his discussion of the Jewish law. As a Jew—and he still thinks of himself as a Jew—that law is at the heart of his tradition. Judaism was the giving of the law. But as a Christian, he has taken a step away from the tradition, and he is trying to see what the law is good for and what it is not good for. The point, he says, is not to junk the law, but to know what it can do and what it can’t.

The law, Paul says, is good for two things. First, the very fact that God gave the law reveals that God is righteous. Gods, in the ancient world, did not have to be righteous. They could be whimsical, vindictive, cruel. Think of the Greek gods. But when Yahweh gave the law to Moses, he showed himself to be a righteous God, faithful and just to those who were loyal to his covenant.

Second, the law very clearly marks out for us what offends God’s righteousness. Idolatry, lying, murder, adultery, the exploitation of others—all these are discordant with God’s goodness. So the law provides a basic plan for living in harmony with the righteousness of God.

But there is one thing that the law is not good for, and this, for Paul, is the most important thing. It is not good for giving us peace with God, for bringing us close to him, for knowing that we stand within his grace. Indeed, it works against that, by deepening our sense of the gulf between ourselves and God. Here we are, struggling and failing to keep the law; and there, at an infinite remove, is the righteous God, the judge whom we can never satisfy, in whose eyes we are always unjustified and inadequate. So how can we be fully his people? In these terms, Paul recognises, the problem is insoluble.

What is his solution? Most of the letter to the Romans is spent working that out. Paul makes it clear that the difficulty is not with the law itself: in itself, the law is good and must be upheld. The problem is that it puts the emphasis on our efforts. It is we who try to obey the law, we who impose it on others. Whereas the outcome that Paul is looking for—peace with God, knowledge of his grace in our lives—cannot be the result of our effort. We cannot bring those things about by following rules, however good the rules may be. Peace, grace, can only be the gift of God.

The law shows us what we can do to come nearer to the righteousness of God, and that is important. But Paul insists that what we do for ourselves is not, in the end, the point. The point is that something has been done for us. It is not to do with our own effort. It is more to do with recognising what has already been done, by Christ in his living, dying, and living again.

This recognition is in large part what Paul means by faith. When he says that we are justified by faith, this does not mean that we should work harder at faith, make faith our effort, by believing more, or believing more intensely. That won’t, of course, work: you can only believe what you can believe. To respond in that way is to fall back on to the treadmill of effort which the law encouraged. Once again we make the mistake of thinking that we can do this salvation thing for ourselves, if only we believe harder, deeper, longer, better, go to church more often, pray every day.

But the point is what has been done for us. In Christ, Paul recognises that the initiative has passed to the other side; and with that the whole dynamic of our relation to God has been reversed. Because the initiative has come from God and not from us; because Christ, in sharing our living and dying, has closed the gulf between us and God; the point now is to recognise what has already happened.

Is there no effort involved? Yes there is, but it is an unusual effort. A French writer has described it as ‘effort without effort’: we have a task, but it is to open our eyes to the moment of recognition, to see that what has already been done lifts from us the burden of effort. That recognition is faith, and it justifies what we are: nothing more is required of us. Though it is simple it is not easy, because our world tells us to lay out effort, to take control, to decide for ourselves, to shape what happens to us. Those are the lessons of our time and it is hard to stop. But perhaps sin, the elephant in the room, is precisely this desire to master everything, to do not only those things that we can do, but also those things that only God can do for us. Sin, we mistakenly think, is the opposite of goodness; but in reality it is the opposite of faith, of that recognition of God’s gracious action which frees us from the effort to be our own saviours. Amen.