N.T. Wright on Paul, Rome and Spain --OR-- Our Big Dreams and God's Small Plans
In his second volume on Romans from the The New Testament for Everyone Series, N.T. Wright talks about something very special that we might learn from Romans. No, not about justification by faith, or original sin, or becoming one in Christ. It's something you can only glean if you take the time to study and meditate on the New Testament. I mean really study and meditate on it, not just the texts themselves, but the history and the socio-political context behind them.
In his discussion of Romans 15, Wright talks about Paul's desire to go to Spain:
"I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be sped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little."
Commentaries on Romans tend to trivialize this fact. Wright doesn't. He points out that, although this is the first mention of Paul's ambition to go to Spain, it fits right in with everything we know about him. He longed to name Jesus as Lord throughout the entire world, and Spain would represent the western limit of the known world.
It was that desire, according to Wright, that played a large role in Paul's writing Romans. His home base had, thus far, been Antioch, but he had faced serious challenges and hardships there precisely because of his take on how the gospel worked to bring together Jews and Gentiles. It would make a lot of sense for Paul to now try to get the Roman Christians in on the act, to use Rome as his possible new base of operations "to the ends of the Earth."
It is within and probably based on those hopes that Paul writes Romans, in an effort to sketch out more fully the big picture of God's purposes, stressing particularly the unity of God's family in the Messiah, and how this plays out both for Jews and Gentiles.
Paul never made it to Spain (at least there's no evidence that he did). But he did write Romans. And Bishop Wright has this to say about that:
Perhaps God sometimes allows us to dream dreams of what he wants us to do, not necessarily so that we can fulfill all of them -- that might just make us proud and self-satisfied -- but so that we will take the first steps toward fulfilling them.
And perhaps those first steps (as they appear to us) are in fact the key things that God actually wants us to do. Paul may not have got to Spain. That didn't matter; the gospel got there fairly soon anyway. What mattered then, and has mattered enormously in the whole history of the church, is that, as part of his plan to go to Spain, he wrote Romans. We should never underestimate what God will do through things which we see as small steps to a larger end.
So dream big. And go for it.
But then leave it to God.
It'll all make sense one day.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
0 Comments:
Post a Comment