8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it
is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now
than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone, the day is
near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of
light; 13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and
jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no
provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
In Romans 13:8-10,
Paul calls for a life within the community rooted in love. We might think of
Romans 1-11 as a discussion of how, in the light of the revelation he sees in
Christ, we are to love God, thereby fulfilling the first four of the Ten
Commandments. In Romans 12-16, Paul moves to a consideration of the second
table of the Ten Commandments that deals with relationships with people. He
focuses in these few verses on love as summing up what we owe each other. Love
suggests that something matters and is important to you. Your life is not a
“whatever” a life. Your life matters at the point where love sums up the desire
of your heart and the way you seek to live. If love is the answer, what is the
question? How would you answer that question? My suggestion is that love is the
answer to the question of what we owe each other, the question of meaningful
life, and the question of what leads to human flourishing. This concern of Paul
connects well with popular culture.
"All you need is love,
dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,
all you need is love,
dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,
all you need is love, love,
love is all you need."
Love is all we need. On this Paul, the apostle and
Paul the McCartney agree. For another generation, "Love Makes the World Go
Round." It is a nice thought. A romantic thought.
It
may be strange to think of love as a debt we owe to each other. Yet, ethical
life may well begin with the question of what we owe to other human beings.
Paul might suggest that before we discuss any ethical matters, let us
understand that ethical principles or rules begin with the priority of love and
must end with asking whether our ethics reflects love. Another aspect of making
your life the offering of a living sacrifice (12:2) is to have this kind of
love operative in your life. He has implied this view of love in 12:14, 17-21.
Love is to guide our relationships with others. Such love includes all persons
and is therefore universal. If Paul focused in 12:9-10 on love within the
Christian community, he is expanding its application here. Love, if we have
proper content to it, is the primary moral obligation we owe to each other. We
can speak this way about love because of its relationship with love as a
characteristic of God as we have seen that love shown to us in Christ and the
power of the Spirit. Loving each other finds a reflection in John 13:34, 14:12,
and 17. We also find it in Romans 12:10 and I Thessalonians 4:9. It fulfills
the law in the sense that one will do what the law entails, even as he earlier
argued that faith establishes the Torah. Although he likely is thinking of
Torah, Paul is also thinking of the legal obligations of moral and ethical life
in all cultures. The point is that Paul is not abrogating the law in any form
it might take. He assumes the value of the law, even as he wants to move beyond
it in saying that love fulfills it. Love does not cancel out the law. It
fulfills the Law. He has a positive view of the Law. However, he refuses to
make the Law the primary guide in a human life. Can we agree that if law were
the heart of our relationships, our relationships would suffer? Love becomes
the heart of interpersonal relationships. Love is the ethical outcome of the
life made new by faith in Christ.[1] Paul is suggesting that love is what we do
graciously in the lives of others. We act toward others as God has already
acted toward us in Jesus Christ, as he stated in 5:1-8. We can see this way of
thinking in I Timothy 1:14, I Peter 4:8-10, and I John 4:17-5:3. People are not
always loveable! I believe Erma Bombeck said that children
need love the most when they deserve it the least. The same is true if we
broaden our consideration to all the persons we meet. The point is not
that we are to feel warm and cozy about everyone. Paul highlights the
difficulty of this path by suggesting that we can fulfill the moral obligation
of not committing adultery, not committing murder, not stealing, and maybe even
not coveting, as Paul lists the Septuagint order of the Decalogue found in
Exodus 20:13-17 and Deuteronomy 5:17-21. He could have listed more such
commandments in the Old Testament. Yet, his answer would be the same. Love will
bring the entire law to its proper conclusion. In fact, love brings the law to
a head. Love sums up the law. This concept is not unique to Paul. Rabbi Hillel summarized the law in the negative form of the
golden rule: "That which you hate do not do to your fellows; this is the
whole law; the rest is commentary; go and learn it." A third-century
rabbi, Rabbi Simlai believed that Amos (5:4) and Habakkuk (2:4) had condensed
the law to one aspect: "Seek me and live." Jews of Paul’s day would
have found him quite appropriate here. He says that a particular “word” logoV sums
up the Law. This suggests that the “word” is a matter of divine revelation. The
Hebrew Bible refers to the Ten Commandments as the Ten Words. That word is
another portion of the Torah, Leviticus 19:18, to love the neighbor as oneself.
Paul will refer to it in Galatians 5:14 as well. Jesus started this line of
argument (Mark 12:28-31). We are to understand this use of neighbor in the
universal sense we discussed earlier. I have long appreciated the guidance of
C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity on
this point.
Do
not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor, act as if you
did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are
behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you
injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you
do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
Love fulfills the law because it does no wrong to the
neighbor, universally understood. The neighbor might be the enemy, which he has
covered in 12:14-21. The neighbor might be governing authority, which he has
covered in 13:1-7. Love is the supreme gift in I Corinthians 13. Love is the
freedom to be a servant to each other in Galatians 5:13-15. He complements the
congregation for the love it has already shown and encourages this love with
increasing depth and breadth in I Thessalonians 4:9-12. Truly, our
conversations about God (Romans 1-11) are always interrupted conversations when
we consider the supremacy of love toward human beings. If we do not hear the
voice of God in the other person, we may not hear the voice of God anywhere.[2] Paul is seeking to derive
the content of his practical directions from the relation of believers to
Christ. He reconsiders the divine law in light of the love of God for the world
that the Father demonstrated in the sending of the Son. The fellowship we have
with God calls us to the difficult path of love for human beings.[3] We must be clear. A love
for God that omits such love for the neighbor is not love for God. Law demands
action, but for Paul, the action the Law requires is love. In the giving of
oneself that love suggests the believer fulfills the Torah. They do what God
requires and what is right in the sight of God.[4]
Frankly, life is harder this
way, for such love, properly understood, takes us beyond the legal question we
often have in mind with moralistic thinking. We will never fulfill this moral
obligation!
Yale theologian Miroslav
Volf gained some insights into this question recently on a trip to his native
Croatia. He and a friend went on a quest for some sausage, and their journey
took them to the home of an old man in a distant village. When they entered his
kitchen, they saw an open Bible on the table, one that the man had clearly
picked up and read. The old man offered them some wine, and they started
talking. Not about sausage, but about Christian life. The old man said,
"Always
choose a more difficult path. It's easier for us to be served than to serve and
to take than to give. Serving is the harder path, giving is the harder path.
Because we are selfish, the path of love is always more difficult."
Miroslav Volf was amazed that they were having that
kind of conversation, rather than just exchanging a few pleasantries about the
weather or sports. Yet, if the Bible were on your kitchen table, then those
sorts of conversations would happen. The old man was willing to engage others
in conversation about the great questions of human existence and challenges of
a life worth living.
To conclude, yet
another song:
And when you feel afraid (Love one
another)
When you've lost your way (Love one another)
And when you're all alone (Love one another)
And when you're far from home (Love one
another)
And when you're down and out (Love one
another)
And when your hopes run out (Love one another)
And when you need a friend (Love one another)
And when you're near the end (Love)
(We've got to love)
(We've got to love one another)
Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all
Set us free
In Romans
13:11-14, Paul culminates much of his
argument about the nature of salvation in Jesus and the life of the church. He
addresses himself to the special need for ethical consecration because of the
approaching eschatological crisis. As he has just discussed, love is the
primary preparation for the “end.” Paul begins by saying that they know the
time is now to awaken from sleep. Paul expresses this concern in other letters.
In I Thessalonians 5:2, he reminds them that the Day of the Lord will come like
a thief in the night. In 5:4-8, they are not in darkness, but children of
light. They are not to sleep, but rather, are to keep awake and be sober. They
are to put on the armor of faith, hope, and love. In Colossians 4:2, Paul
encourages his readers to be watchful in prayer with thanksgiving. Many of us
have come to think of conversion as a form of awakening. The sleep from which
one awakens is the relentless downward movement caused by sloth. Christians can
be asleep, of course.[6] The notion of “awakening” in conversion is
the result of the influence of pietism and Methodism. The notion is legitimate
in that it has a close proximity to the resurrection of Jesus. It suggests a
specific word that awakens, and passages like this suggest the need for continual
awakening, to the shame and good fortune of believers. When Paul refers to time
here, he is not thinking of the clock or the calendar. Rather, any moment can
become the time of God and the activity of God.[7]
Such a moment is hardly like other moments. Time reveals its secret. Every
moment of chronological time bears within it the unborn secret of its
connection to eternity. We stand at the boundary of the chronology of time and
the divine moment in our lives. In this sense, theologians are quite wrong to
relegate “eschatology” to a harmless chapter at the end of theology.[8] The reason to awaken spiritually is that
salvation is nearer now than when they became believers. The night is far-gone
and the day is near. This assertion
of the imminence of the day of the return of Jesus is quite similar to what
Paul wrote in I Thessalonians (4:15; 5:4-5) and I Corinthians (7:29). The wait
is like being in the night and waiting for daylight. If the chronological time is short, then of course
believers must not waste their chronological time squabbling with the State or
the neighbor. Rather, they are to respect the State and love the neighbor. The
understanding Paul has of salvation and Jesus Christ has a deep grounding in
his understanding of the community of faith, the church. It is in the church
that the Roman Christians are working out and through their salvation in
Christ. In the church, they now know the life of light and day for which the
Spirit has made them newly alive in Christ. The church, for Paul, is the
training ground within which Christians can live such a life, and the place,
despite its human frailty, through which God continues to stretch forth all the
possibilities that the light of Jesus Christ means for the world. This sense of
the shortness of the time available arises because of Christ. The promised reign of God drew near and came right
up to them and with it the end of time. The new day is the event in which they
in their time bore witness. They continue in their time, but only as they are
in the time of the revelation, declaration, and realization of their time in
its hastening toward the end that has already come. Christ rules time, time is
short, and the duration of time is unknown to those who live in it. Essentially,
the vanishing of the night and the breaking of the day has begun and no one can
stop it. The same Lord stands at the beginning and the end, he is also Lord of
the time between.[9]
Therefore, as we come to ethical
portion of the exhortation, they are to lay aside works of darkness and put on
the armor of light. They are to live honorably as in the day. We cannot
separate the eschatological from the ethical in Paul. The image he has in mind
is warfare. He refers to the weapons of righteousness in II Corinthians 6:7. In
I Corinthians 16:13-14, Paul encourages them to stand firm in their faith, have
courage and strength, and let all they do be one in love. Ephesians 6:10-17 the
author encourages them to be strong in the Lord, putting on the whole armor of God.
Warfare
and the equipment of war were common sources for ethical metaphors among many
writers in Greco-Roman antiquity. For example, the first-century Stoic
philosopher and teacher Epictetus compared the challenge of living a virtuous
life to a soldier out on campaign.
Discourse 3.24.34
“Each person’s life is a kind of campaign, and a long and complicated
one at that. You have to maintain the character of a soldier, and do each
separate act at the bidding of the general, if possible divining what he wishes.”
[2] Barth, Romans, 494.
[3]
Pannenberg, (Systematic Theology,
Volume 3, 68-69)
[4] Barth (Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.1] 732-3)
[5] --From England
Dan and John Ford Coley, "Love Is the Answer." YouTube has several
versions of them singing this song.
[6] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV. 2, 66.4)
[7] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV.3 71.2)
[8] Barth Romans, 497-500.
[9] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.4, 56.1)
[10] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology, Volume II, 366.
[11](Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul
[Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997], 279-297).
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