I’ve been wondering why this beautifully poetic and positive passage from Romans also features the ominous sounding words, “leave room for the wrath of God” and “vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” How do these words grab you? Comforting? Unsettling? Confusing?
They are words that can summon certain assumptions and a variety of images. After all, our world is full of global, local and personal examples of wrath and vengeance. So we need to be careful not to interpret them or ever quote them unless we faithfully understand the apostle Paul’s fuller message to us. To guide us in this direction, let me introduce you to Pierce O’Farrill.
I “met” him last Wednesday through an article in the current issue of Psychology Today magazine. I like to read this particular publication because I’m personally and professionally rooted in an approach to human well-being that integrates science and spirit. Still, I didn’t expect to find such a faithful testimony there.
Pierce is twenty-eight years old. He can be “overcome with joy” and “moved to tears” just by “looking at the Colorado mountains.” I believe most of us can relate to this kind of deeply spiritual moment, to being enlightened by the beauty of God’s majestic handiwork in Creation. For Pierce, it’s also fused to intense gratitude to God for being alive. And not just in a general, feeling blessed kind of way. His is overwhelming thankfulness for having survived one specific day in his life journey.
Pierce was present and pierced with bullets on July 20, 2012 at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. When the full armored, gas masked gunman starting firing his assault rifle from in front of the screen, Pierce ducked down in the third row. Someone was dead next to him and another dead in front of him. He hid behind the seats, counting on them to shield him. Fully realizing he may be breathing his last breaths, he also counted on Christ. As we might expect, however, he did not pray for his life to be spared. He recounts that he instead prayed by faithfully professing that be it his time to die, he was ready. He was shot twice in the left foot and once in the arm, but following that intense confession of security in the Lord and the inches-close gunman walking away, he survived. Later, he spoke to many reporters about how he “felt nothing but gratitude from the moment he woke up from surgery.”
We can easily understand this absolute appreciation for living another day. Perhaps harder to understand and accept for many of us, however, are these later words of his -- “I never felt anger at the shooter.” There was absolutely nothing in this article to indicate that he’d become hostage to feelings of hatred and revenge. Nothing of this sinful but totally understandable sort seems to have been triggered after what had been done to him, to the 57 others who were injured, and the twelve people killed by James Holmes.
Quite to the contrary, Pierce lived out the hope of Jesus Christ in his heart. He was patient through suffering and persevered in prayer. He came to have radical empathy. “What would it be like,” he asked, “to be so consumed with hatred that you only think about hurting people?” And his witness to forgiveness grew stronger, saying, “I believe every single person has a chance at redemption.”
Pierce O’Farrill talks honestly from his heart for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to read. He speaks not as victim, but as one who knows a victorious way of living in Jesus Christ. In doing so, he boldly affirms exactly what our passage from Romans today concludes with – “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Good versus evil. This is a timeless theme of the human story. We are people of Easter faith. We profess that the human story has been, continues to be, and will ultimately be fully delivered from evil through the conquering love of God in Jesus Christ. In every bad and outright evil situation, we are called upon by to speak to and act like our Lord. In doing so, we make room for Him. This is what it means to make room for God’s wrath and vengeance. It means to make room for justice, peace and reconciliation as revealed in Jesus.
Evil absolutely angers God. But God does not respond retributively. God instead responds by stretching out the all-encompassing and amazingly restorative love of our Lord in order to reach us, defend us, heal us, empower us. Every time we deeply and truly trust in this by actively making room for it in this wounding and wounded world, we are able to rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer.
In Romans 12, you may be surprised to learn that the word we translate into English as “evil” does not refer to some dark external cosmic force bearing down on us. Paul did not choose a word that points to a power beyond ourselves, making us victims of its chaos. He instead chose a word that involves choices we make every day of our lives. Each of us is being “evil,” he teaches, when we are in the wrong mode of thinking, feeling and acting … when we are not being what we ought to be as God’s beloved in Jesus Christ. We ought to be ardently, actively, always choosing the way of Christ … the way of holding fast to what it good with harmonious mutual affection instead of haughty one-upmanship; the way of offering radically compassionate hospitality to all instead of ignoring and cursing them; the way of forgiving enemies instead of repaying evil for evil.
The March/April 2006 issue of a Weavings, a journal of Christian spirituality, is dedicated to the theme of Enemies. Among many good articles, it features an open letter to enemies by a former Princeton University professor named Marilyn Chandler McEntyre. She admits that while her life is comfortable and safe, she indeed has enemies. These are any and all that set her at war within herself, that seek to hurt the people she loves as well as has been commanded and taught to care about, that attack the Body of Christ from within and without, that “poison the air, the soil, the water, the spirit,” that lure, lie, and threaten, and that live in Washington, the Middle East, in Hollywood, in middle America, in her household and in her heart. How and why shall I love you? she directly asks this conglomerated character of evil. Her reply makes room for a faithful answer within us all, and is worth quoting a little bit of length –
“I believe that I must love you because we have been given one another for that purpose. In some dark and mysterious way, we are gifts to one another. We have been given the historical moment, the circumstances, and the call to encounter in each other the very powers of darkness and light that afflict and heal this fallen world. And our assignment – yours and mine – lies in that encounter. We are here to learn how to love, how to exercise the power of love, even unto death, even toward those who violate what we hold dear. I believe I must love you because my life depends on it. Not only the life of my body, but the life of my soul … until I learn to love you, I am likely to remain in the squalor of my own self-righteous judgments, protecting my own point of view, condemning and cutting off some who may be the very strangers sent to give me a chance to offer the cup of cold water.”
Powerful voices like this and like Pierce O’Farrill encourage and inspire us to be absolutely genuine in our faith journeys. They boldly invite us to gladly make the ever-expanding, concentric circles of God’s love in Jesus Christ our daily priority. They precisely echo Paul’s call to us in today’s passage from Romans.
At its ancient Greek root, the word “genuine” in Romans 12:9 means “undisguised, not pretending, sincere.” A different Bible translation of this same verse captures this well by saying, “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it.” (The Message). This should be our faithful response to every circumstance of life we find ourselves in -- most especially when bad things happen in this world that deeply horrify us.
Committing to live this way, “is no empty commitment,” preaches another voice I heard in print this past week. It means, where we can, we can choose not to make ourselves victims. We can instead choose to accept the stance Paul learned from Jesus, a stance “which will hold us up even in situations of adversity.” This is the stance that soberly recognizes that “violence has a way of sucking its victims into cycles of violence and making its own disciples.”[i] But we who are disciples of Jesus Christ can break these cycles by rejoicing in hope, being patient in suffering, and persevering in prayer. We break these cycles, as the Psalm of security and trust that is Psalm 16 teaches, when we refuse to worship what multiplies our sorrows and instead take glad, secure refuge in the Lord and our Lord’s instruction.
In God’s grace and by our faith, may we indeed “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Amen.
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