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Romans 5:1-11
A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent
How big is God? We talk about how God is infinite, and yet how he came in Jesus Christ, and he comes to us in his promises and little bits of bread and wine. How can that be? Then we remember that God created infinity itself; suddenly that changes everything. We have these limits. We think we have some kind of God in a box.
To get at this, let’s remember Luther’s journey. He was there in Upper Germany, a bright young man, preparing to be a lawyer. And then one day on his way to Wittenburg he was caught in a storm. Branches were blowing off trees. There was lightning all around, and he was he was going to die. He prayed to St. Anne: “Save me, if you save me, I’ll become a monk.” Then he was saved, and much to his father’s dismay, he turned around and became a monk, and he was determined to do it right.
Luther was a high achiever. But the most important thing about him was that he couldn’t lie to himself. He was brutally honest. When he was supposed to fast for two days, he fasted for four. When he was supposed to sleep on a bare cot, he slept on a bare cot without a blanket.
But no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried to atone for his sins, he realized: “I’m doing it selfishly. It’s supposed to be done out of some good will. But I’m always thinking selfishly of what it means for me.”
No matter what he did, he ended up in spiritual pride, thinking: “I’m doing this; I’m a good person.” Or in spiritual despair: “I’m just flattering myself that I’m a good person.”
He would go to his confessor and try to get it right. His confessor, Staupitz, who happened to be the head of this Order of Augustinian monks, got really tired of Luther. He said: “You’ve gotta get over this; you gotta get on with it.” Finally, Staupitz said to Luther: “Go and become a professor of the Bible.” Get your mind on that.
So, Luther, bright guy, became a professor of Bible, and as he was doing that, he came to this matter of God’s justice. He came to the fact that God is just, and God’s justice is just something we cannot face. God’s justice demands, and God’s justice is just too much.
And then somewhere around 1514 while he was studying, he said it suddenly came to him that God’s justice is not what God demands but what God gives. He said it was as if the gates of paradise opened to him. Everything changed. That meant not only that everything changed about his thinking about salvation, but it was like a light went on about the whole Bible itself. The key to the whole is that justice is not what God demands, but justice is what God gives, and that makes all the difference.
And so, out of the Reformation came a slogan about God’s justice: “Justification by faith,” and it comes from Romans 4:5, which we had last week, where it says: “And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.”
That slogan “justification by faith” is well-known. There is a lesser-known slogan, “justification of the ungodly,” which means the same thing. Only the lost can be found. Or as it says in Mattew 9:12: “Only the sick need a doctor.” The justice God gives is “to the ungodly.” And as we noted last week, “ungodly” doesn’t mean you’re not pious enough or not doing something you’re supposed to do. It means something foul and abhorrent; something cast into outer darkness, into the pit.
Those who want to be godly are on their own to fulfill the law. But for all the rest of us, righteousness is given apart from works.
We may ask: But isn’t faith our response to what God has done, and thus a kind of work? As in: “You must believe.” Or “You gotta have faith.” The word “faith” can be used that way, but that’s not what Paul means here in Romans.
Rather, faith is something God gives us, and the symbol of that is, as you know, infant Baptism. The tiny baby who is baptized, doesn’t realize it, doesn’t feel it, doesn’t make a decision for it. God does it. It is like Ephesians 1:4: “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Faith is given to us, like being marked with the cross of Christ forever. It’s done to us.
We get a little trouble with this because in Romans 3:24 it says: we “are justified by his grace, as a gift,” and we think: “Well, yes, when a gift is given, it must be received, and we should say: “Thank you.’” So, a gift has two sides to it, and that’s where this metaphor of faith as a gift goes wrong. “By his grace,” really means it’s one-sided. He does it to us and in us, and that’s it.
One more thing. It’s important to add the word “alone.” The slogan is not “justified by faith,” but “justified by faith alone.” In Romans 3:28 Luther added the word “alone” so it would read: “. . . a man is justified by faith alone apart from works of the law.”
This has come out acutely in our lifetime in the official Dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics.
This august group of scholars first came together after Vatican II ended in 1965. Buoyed by the hope of Christian unity, both Roman Catholic and Lutheran officials assigned their best scholars to this Dialogue. The two teams of about 10 scholars each met twice a year. In the 1970’s and 80’s this Dialogue gained international attention as the arena where the big questions were being taken up.
[One of the Roman Catholic scholars said that if his superiors cut off his travel fund, he would pay out of his own pocket to attend the Dialogue meetings.]
These scholars spent about five years discussing “justification by faith.” Could Lutherans and Catholics today agree? If not, could they clarify where the basic differences lie?
The Lutheran team asked the Catholic team: “Could you get rid of the word “merit,” or find a way of getting around it, find a way of saying salvation is not by merit?
Intense discussion followed. They even produced an extra volume of essays just on justification in the New Testament. Finally, the Roman Catholics said: “No.” They couldn’t do that. They said they had to stick with the word “merit.”
That means that “justification by faith alone” is not something Catholics hold. To be sure, Catholic do hold to “justification by faith,” but not “by faith alone.”
So, in the end, after five years, they concluded that they couldn’t agree, but they could say where a basic difference lies. It lies on this matter of faith “alone.”
It’s helpful to see that this same problem arises between Lutherans and evangelicals for a different reason. Because of how we use the Bible, specifically because of how the Book of James differs from Paul.
In James it says faith without works is dead. It talks about Abraham and says: “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” But it doesn’t stop there. It goes on to say this is because Abraham worked, he did good works, and it says: “. . . [A] man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). This means that the only place where it says justification “by faith alone” in the New Testament is where it rejects it!
In James it says that Abraham was a friend of God. But Paul says it’s “justification of the ungodly.”
So, we have a real contradiction, and it can’t be dodged because the key to everything is “justification of the ungodly.” God gives his justice. He does not sit there demanding of us.
It can help to see how Paul develops this in Romans 4 and 5. It is like a fireworks show that builds to a grand finale. As you know, Abraham and Sarah grew very old, and that blessing of being a father of many nations hadn’t even started. Then at 100 years old they have Isaac. That’s the beginning of the fireworks. Impossible!
And then it goes on in Romans 4:17 to say the Lord “created out of nothing.” Stupendous!
And not only that. Then says he creates life out of death, and finally, even more than that, the grand finale: “He was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). Boom! Boom! Boom! That’s the biggest blast of all.
We should have trumpets blasting because that’s what it’s all about: Holiness, the holiness of his cross by which he redeems us from the pit. As Paul writes in Romans 5:10: “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life.”
The biggest problem of all is our sin, our rebellion, and yet he takes care of it all. How big is God? He not only can bring life out of death, but also holiness instead of our trespasses.
Luther puts it well in the Smalcald Articles. He says: “We cannot pin our hopes on anything we are, think, say, or do” (Tappert 3/3/26, p.309; a better translation here than Kolb/Wengert, p.318).
Thank God, because if it depended on us, our work, or our decision, or our belief, we, like Luther, would never get beyond spiritual pride or despair.
But because it is in spite of anything we are, think, say or do, because it’s his doing, we can be certain. Because it is, and because “justification by faith alone” means the same thing as the lesser-known slogan “justification of the ungodly,” we live forgiven and free. This is the key to everything.
Amen