Romans 8:22-27
22 We know
that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and
not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the
Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For
who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not
see, we wait for it with patience.
26 Likewise
the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we
ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And
God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the
Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
In Romans 8:22-25,
a section that began in verse 12, Paul focuses upon the Spirit making people
children of God. This formation occurs through the pain, struggle, and
suffering of a human life. This portion of Chapter 8 reminds me of a basic
human reality. The
life-journey of every human being involves pain. We may wonder why. We may
rebel against it. However, the harsh reality is that living things struggle and
suffer to maintain life. Often, such pain deepens the experience and appreciation
of life. In fact, if we knew the secret history of our enemies, we might see in
them a sorrow, pain, or hurt that would disarm us of our hostility toward them.[1] Life
has hurt everyone. No one receives an exemption from the pain that comes in
living a human life. Paul is not going to offer what philosophy and theology
would later call theodicy. He will not explain suffering. Suffering and pain in
life is part of the training we experience that will reveal who we are. If the
person remains oriented toward God while life pierces the person with the nail
of affliction, the nail pierces a hole through creation, through the thickness
of the veil that separates the person and God.[2]
Could pain deepen our character, help us appreciate life, and even enable us to
go deeper with God? We learn in this passage that Paul answers Yes. Paul
encourages those whom the Spirit has freed to participate in the life of the
Spirit.
We have seen in
this passage that Paul moves from the
concept of slavery to adoption and from passive, futile struggle to active
participation. Those who are in the Spirit experience, in their own being, the
labor pains of the birth of the new age within. Something new is being born in
the world. The new age of God is not just a redesign of the old age, but is the
birth of something fresh and unexpected. God's new creation will come out of
the old creation, and will quickly grow up to replace it. At the center of this
transformation is the Holy Spirit, a current of divine power that comes
directly from God. Nature is in sorrow, as the strong devour the weak, and the
crying of the wind, etc. The whole
creation is crying for release. Paul's use of the metaphor of a mother delivering
a child is rich and passionate. People who have disappointment by Paul's
teaching about the role of women in the church in other letters I hope will
allow the fullness of this image to touch them. Paul's ability to conceive of
the transformation of all creation in terms of giving birth is so gracefully
inclusive and utterly marvelous! All creation is in the process of hard labor;
the contractions come faster and harder. Yet, the experience of the passage of
time seems cruelly slow. However, Paul
does not divorce the personal from the cosmic. He invites believers to see the
big picture. When Paul writes of the suffering or travail of creation, he finds
some support in a modern theory of the development of early earth. The early
Earth may have been "an interrupted Eden" -- a planet where life repeatedly
evolved and diversified, only to be sent back to square one by asteroids 10 or
20 times wider than the one that hastened the dinosaurs' demise. For Norman
Sleep, the travail of creation is very real. The Stanford University
Hence, the time
now is one of waiting patiently, but not passively. While hope silently waits
for the Lord, it restrains faith from hastening on with too much precipitation,
confirms it when it might waver concerning the promises of God or begin to
doubt of their truth. Hope refreshes faith when it might become fatigued,
extends its view to the final goal, so as not to allow it give up in the middle
of the course, or at the very outset. In short, by constantly renovating and
reviving, it is furnishing more vigor for perseverance. Humanity can venture to
realize this hope in its own free act, looking and moving forward as free
people. Of course, human hope usually orients itself toward something other
than God. Christian hope has its power in the One hoped for who is its basis,
who is present in it even though it still looks and moves to Christ. The basis
is God in Jesus Christ who is the future of humanity, creating its own
expectation. As Christ is that future, one experiences saving now in hope.[7]
Christian hope reaches beyond what is present to something not yet visible.
This is true of all hope, and hence hope is essentially part of our being
human. Self-transcendence characterizes human life, especially marked by the
fact that dissatisfaction with all that we are now and have fills us at least
in the sense of realizing that all things earthly are frail and perishable. We
are on the way to a future fulfillment that transcends all that now is. Hence,
new hopes always fill us, or rather; we vacillate between hope and despair. For
on what can we base our inclination to hope? Where does it find any solid
ground? Ernst Bloch thought of hope as having an ontological basis in the
natural processes of life and its anticipation. Jewish and Christian hope has
its basis in the promise of God.[8]
We have here the
decisive eschatological reference for the understanding of nature. We need to
reject any talk of the sacramental reality of creaturely things as too general
and imprecise. Nevertheless, we may make a positive view of the thought of
Teilhard de Chardin that in the sacraments of the new covenant, and above all,
in the Eucharistic bread and wine, Christian worship takes up all creation into
the sacramental action of thanksgiving to God. We learn that the goal of all
creation is to share in the life of God. Why else should it sigh under the
burden of corruptibility? We may view this sighing as an expression of the
presence of the life-giving Sprit of God in creatures. The creative divine
Spirit is vitally at work throughout creation, but also suffers with creatures
because of their corruptibility prior to taking creative shape in humanity, in
one man. Only in this way can the rest of creation participate in the liberty
of the children of God, in the eschatological future of the children of God,
which has already come in the resurrection of Jesus. The destiny of creation is
to be in fellowship with God, in the sense of sharing in the fellowship of the
Son with the Father and through the Spirit. It has not yet found direct
fulfillment in the existence of each individual creature. It could not do so
because only at the human stage in the sequence of creaturely forms did express
distinction come to between God and all creaturely reality. Without their distinction,
there can be no creaturely participation in the self-distinction of the Son
from the Father. Hence, in Romans all creation is waiting for the manifestation
of being a child of God in us, by which the creatures themselves will also be
children. Nevertheless, even with the rise of humanity in the sequence of
creatures, creation has not attained participation in the fellowship of the Son
with the Father. The tension between the emergence of humanity as the last link
in the chain of creaturely forms and the fulfillment of humanity’s destiny
connects with the fact God intends humans as creatures to be independent
beings. This is generally true of all creatures. Human beings are the climax of
their creaturely sequence. The creature needed a prehistory of growing
independence in a sequence of creaturely forms. Humans came into existence at
the end of this sequence. They had to develop their own independence. As
creatures ripened for independence, we are to relate to God as children who
receive all things from their Father. We can see here that creation and
eschatology belong together because in this way we can see the destiny of the
creature will come to fulfillment. For the creature, the future is open and
uncertain. Creatures awakened to independence open themselves to the future as
the dimension from which alone their existence can achieve content and
fulfillment. The experience of the creature is that the origin and the
consummation do not coincide. They form a unity only from the standpoint of the
divine act of creation. Yes, human beings are to have dominion, but acceptance
of our own finitude must also mean giving to all other creatures the respect
that is their due within the limits of their finitude.[9]
One needs to read
Romans 8:26-27 in a way that closely identifies it with what Paul has just said
in the first part of this chapter. We see this with the word “likewise” at the
beginning. Paul has focused upon the presence of the Spirit through human
weakness as well as the groaning and suffering of creation. He ended by
stressing the hope the Spirit gives us. The Spirit groans for us, yes, and the
Spirit gives us hope by helping us in our weakness. Thus, as he continues that
theme, Paul expresses a profound “religious” or “spiritual” experience. He
stresses that although we experience all the weakness of the flesh, the Spirit
helps us. Even in our weakness, we pray. Regardless of the difficulty in which
we find ourselves as human beings and as followers of Jesus, prayer remains a
possibility and reality. The Spirit helps us in our prayers even when we are so
weak we do not know what to say. We can be grateful for this, for in our
weakness, we might ask God for anything out of our egoism, anxiety, desire,
passion, shortsightedness, unreasonableness, and stupidity.[10]
The Spirit is emotionally involved and eternally invested in our yearning for
the divine. In this sense, every successful prayer has an ecstatic element in
that the Spirit prays through us, even it should be unspeakable sighs.[11]
Since the Spirit is the Spirit of God, the Father knows what the Spirit is
saying on our behalf. The Spirit interprets our stuttering, stammering,
groaning, and yearning in a way that becomes praise and love. The Spirit makes
the pain of this life easier to bear by placing it in the context of hope. God
is not distant from us. God is immanent, with us, and for us, through the
Spirit. Even if we are inarticulate, the Father is aware of our needs through
the immanent experience we have of the power of the Spirit. The Spirit
intercedes “for the saints,” but only in accord with the will of God. When our
words are incapable of articulating our greatest needs to God in prayer, the
Spirit calls out to God for us.[12]
Paul will write of the Spirit in a similar way in I Corinthians 2:6-16, where the
Spirit is the way God communicates revelation, wisdom, and gifts. In 4:1-5,
judgment from God is what matters, in contrast to judgment from others. In II
Corinthians 3:4-6, Paul stresses that any competence he has is due to the new
covenant written in the Spirit that gives life. The closeness of the Spirit to
our weakness puts us in the position of those who hope when we do not see. We
can wait patiently during the night longing for morning to come. The Spirit who
helps us is the Spirit by whom God has poured into us the love of God in
Chapter 5.[13]
The Spirit is the personal center of Christian action. As such, those in Christ
re-center their lives away from self outside themselves to the power the Spirit
gives them. The Spirit becomes a personal center of power as those in Christ
walk in and live by the Spirit. Those in Christ have found the ground of their
lives beyond themselves.[14]
This leadership of the Spirit is of a personal sort. Those in Christ, those who
participate in Christ and are in union with Christ, live in the sphere of this
spiritual power. Paul is careful to provide moral and institutional guidance in
a way that provides some structure, but we must always be aware that he also
expected the power of the Spirit to provide leadership in new ways.[15]
One way to view the biblical
notion of the Spirit (Holy Spirit, Spirit of God) is that God is the source of
life-giving energy we need. Life has its ups and downs, twists and turns, that
can leave us weary. That means, of course, that we need to develop our time
with God. As individuals, we need energy as well to live our lives. Most of us
do not miss the time for physical nourishment. As the saying goes, call me
anything, but do not call me late for supper. Most of us make sure we have made
time for friends and family. We are social creatures, after all. However, when
it comes to seeing the feeding of mind and soul as important, we tend to be
less diligent. We need to remember that when we are weak, “the Spirit helps us
in our weakness.” (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit strengthens and improves our
prayer lives, creating a direct channel between ourselves and God. Such
intercession makes it possible for us to pray as we ought, for the Spirit gives
us both the words we need and the assurance that God hears them. God is already
penetrating our hearts, filling us with divine power. The Spirit is at work
within us, to do God's will and bring about God's new creation. Paul assures us
that we are not powerless victims, vulnerable to all the struggles and
heartaches of life. No, our powerful and creative God is at work inside us.
[1] If we
could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life
sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. - Henry Wordsworth
Longfellow
[2] Weil, Simone. "The love of God and
affliction." Waiting for God. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1951.
[3] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology, Volume II,
136-37, 138-39, 231.
[4] Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.3 [73.1], 913-4.
[5] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume III, 175.
[6] Paul
Tillich, Chapter 18, “Waiting,” The Shaking of the Foundations
[7] Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.3 [73.1], 913-4.
[8]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
III, 175.
[9] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology, Volume II,
136-37, 138-39, 231.
[10] Barth, Church Dogmatics, III. 4 [53.3], 100.
[11] Paul
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume
III, 116-17.
[12]
Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, 176.
[13] Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.2 [64.4], 330.
[14]
Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, 177.
[15] Paul
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume
III, 116-17.
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