Romans - Lesson 50

Romans 12:9-21

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction and faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

A. Manifestations of Love: 

Romans 9:21. Here is a passage that sort of goes all over the place. It defies neat simple outlining. That is fine; we need to be careful sometimes, thinking that we have to have these nice, neat outlines.

Here Paul is talking about a variety of manifestations of love. If you look at the Greek, there is a certain structure that Paul is working with in the Greek text that is almost impossible to bring out in the English. Even there that structure is more grammatical than it is substantive. 

The general point of the paragraph is probably announced by Paul in the opening words. NIV: ‘Love must be sincere.’ Actually, there is no verb here, so you could almost view this as a heading – “Sincere Love.”  Put it in the middle of the text, underline it, and make it the heading for everything that follows here. What form does sincere love take? Then Paul mentions a lot of different things along the way, focusing both on love for those within the Christian community and love for those outside the community.

Let me make observations on a couple of points. One, it is interesting to me having introduced the subject of love, Paul moves to specific moral qualities: hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Paul might be suggesting that love (we have to be careful about pushing too hard lest we go beyond the text) has grounding in the will of God for us. There are certain things that are condemned by God as sinful; there are certain things commended by God as good, and love will recognize that difference, and love will take the side of what is good. Right away Paul may be giving us a word that undercuts the tendency in our day sometimes for love to be this sort of vacuous feeling that doesn’t actually have very specific content. 

B. Allusions to the Teachings of Jesus: 

Second, one of the very interesting things about the passage is that this is perhaps the place in Paul where he is most obviously picking up the teaching of Jesus. This comes out especially in verse 14, ‘bless those who persecute you; bless them and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, etc.’ This is language that clearly alludes to the teaching of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. 

Paul doesn’t quote these as the words of Jesus; indeed, Paul never does quote words of Jesus directly. Occasionally, he refers to the teachings of Jesus. One of the interesting, and over the years, somewhat controversial, absences in the letters of Paul are clear references to the teachings of Jesus. You read the Gospels and look at the teachings of Jesus. Then you come to the letters of Paul, you almost move into a different world. 

There is a long-standing debate on how Jesus is related to Paul. Some say that Paul is the real founder of Christianity, almost independent of Jesus. Obviously, we are not going to go that way, but I think what we have is the teachings of Jesus orally passed down. When Paul writes Romans, it’s unlikely that we don’t have a written Gospel yet, but we have the teaching of Jesus that is being handed down in the churches in various ways which is forming the community and which Paul will pick indirectly as he does here in writing to the Romans.

One of the interesting things that is at least implied by this which is a bit controversial is that apparently Paul doesn’t think that quoting Jesus lends any significant authority to what he is saying beyond what he is saying himself. 

C. Translation Decisions and Issues:

This is why we translators of the NIV detest red-letter versions of the Bible. Please go out and become evangelists contra red-letter Bible. They give people the impression that those words in red are more important than the other words. This is contrary to the doctrine of Scripture. We go so far as to put in the very preface to the NIV this language: beyond “the formatting of the text such as lining the poetry, paragraphing, setting up of lists, indenting letters and lengthy prayers within narratives and insertion of sectional headings, has been the work of the committee.” These are all decisions that we make. “However, the choice between single-column and double-column formats has been left to the publishers. Also, the issue of “red-letter” editions is a publisher’s choice – one the committee does not endorse.” 

Student:  
Do they make a red-letter edition?

Dr. Moo:  
Oh, yes, thousands of them. That is the majority. Publishers tell us that is what people want, that is what people buy. They want red-letter editions of the Bible.

Student:  
My experience in reading the red-letter sometimes, it’s almost like reading a book that someone else has highlighted and suddenly you find you’re only reading the highlights. You do get that psychological effect, I’ll just look for the red letters, that’s what is most important.

Student:  
I have even found one edition that has the Old Testament with the words of God in red.

Dr. Moo:  
I have seen those too. I’m somewhat exaggerating the point here just for the fun of it. 

Student:  
Is the idea that the Book of Matthew and the Book of Romans were written at a similar timeframe, so Paul can’t refer to a written text. 

Dr. Moo:  
That may be part of it, but I think we put more emphasis on written text than would have been true in the ancient world where the oral word was remembered and passed down-is very important also. 

By the way, the single-column I mentioned, that gets really important to read the poetry well. If you are in the Psalms for instance, and you have a double-column edition of the Bible, it is wrecking the spacing. The lines have to be short enough so that you don’t see the poetry the way you should. That is why a single-column Bible is really helpful if you really want to follow the poetry. We try to represent the Hebrew poetry by carefully identifying the lines, and how many lines there are; when you have a double-column edition, you lose all of that. 

I personally prefer a double-column edition in narrative and a single-column edition in poetry. Sometimes I find in the single-column the lines get really long to read through. That’s where the single / double column issue becomes important.

A little translation committee story here. The red-letter edition thing got us into a trouble with the NIV. Following most contemporary Johannine scholars, we decided that John 3:16 is not a word of Jesus but a word of John the Evangelist. As you know, the original doesn’t have any opening quotation marks, closing quotation marks; you have to figure out where those go. This is especially challenging in John because Jesus and John sound so much alike. Almost all the recent commentators on the Gospel of John think that at the end of verse 15 is where Jesus stops speaking and John the Evangelist starts commenting in verse 16. If you have a black letter edition you hardly even notice, you’ve got the closed quotation mark at the end of verse 15, but who is going to notice that? Now put all that in red, and suddenly John 3:16 isn’t in red letters anymore. How can you degrade John 3:16 in that way? And so, we got the mail from various people. At any rate, translation follies. 

D. Coals of Fire: 

The third point to mention in the passage is the difficulty of understanding why Paul quotes the verse from Proverbs that he does in verse 20. This has become almost standard Christian vocabulary, hasn’t it? “Heaping coals of fire on someone’s head.” Very commonly used. Paul is concerned about people not thinking they need to repay; they need to take vengeance; Paul says let God do that. 

On the contrary, what t we are to do, he quotes from Proverbs here, “if your enemy is hungry, you are to feed him and if he is thirsty give him something to drink. In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head.” What is this heaping burning coals on someone’s head about? Try to disassociate yourself from the way that metaphor has been used popularly in Christian circles. Pouring burning coals on someone’s head doesn’t sound like a very good thing to be doing. How does that fit into being kind and loving to somebody? What kind of image is that? 

John Piper wrote his dissertation on some of these passages about love and retaliation. He makes the case in typical Piper fashion that the burning coals consistently in Scripture are an image of judgment, and that is what this must mean here. Give your enemy food, give him something to drink. By doing that indirectly you will increase the judgment that will come upon that person. 

In other words, we have a responsibility to love others in this way and in loving others that way, if they remain unrepentant in a sense our love for them provides more ammunition for God to judge them. Piper’s argument is to look biblically at the way the language of fire and coals are used; pretty often and pretty persistently are images of judgment.

I think that view can work into a biblical ethic and world view but it is a strain a little bit I think. Most interpreters have not been inclined to go that way. So, the main option here is to think that the author of Proverbs is himself alluding to some Egyptian practices. Parenthesis - some of you will know that there are some pretty obvious connections between the wisdom that we find in Proverbs and certain Egyptian wisdom traditions. Solomon is writing a lot of the Proverbs; maybe some of his wives communicated that or something. Who knows? But at any rate, there is an obvious connection there. 

We do know of a practice in Egypt in the ancient world in which one would signal repentance by carrying a platter of burning coals over their head. That might be what Proverbs is referring to and therefore what Paul is picking up as well. If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. By doing so you might stimulate that person to repentance. This is how this imagery is usually used in Christian circles. Probably, that is right. But I do have to acknowledge that Piper has a case to make when you look at the language that is used in Scripture this way.

So, what Paul does in this passage is to mix together the obligations we have as believers to other believers in the community and the obligations we have to those outside the community. I use the word mix advisedly because it’s not like one part is for the Christians, another part is for the non-Christian world. It goes back and forth which is part of the point that Paul wants to make here. When we think about our duty to love and to love sincerely, that love takes a lot of different forms, both relating to Christians and non-Christians in a way that we can’t neatly set out.