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July 16, 2023: The Final Payment on the Road of Faith and Good Works
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In the words of St. Paul this Sunday, “We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.” Well, that must be one, very loud groan. As loud as the cherry bomb I heard go off on the Fourth of July on the other side of the Church as I sat peacefully and quietly on the rectory side reading a great book called The Greatest Philosopher Who Ever Lived. More on this book in a near future column. Going back to the cherry bomb, it was one of those unexpected noises that makes a person’s heart rumble up, down, and all around for a good 10 seconds or more. If creation is groaning this loud in labor pains still to this day, then it must be a 20-pound baby about to be delivered. Someone call the Guinness Book of World Records.
This imaginative verse from St. Paul from his Epistle to the Romans is one of those images in Scripture that does not get altered over the centuries. Anyone with eyesight and all the other bodily senses knows that creation to this day groans loudly in times of trouble, such as a World War, or some other tragedy on the grander scale of events, groaning for peace to come about permanently, groaning for lies and deceit to vanish into truth, groaning for the virtue of holiness to overcome all the profanation throughout society that has settled into a Sodom and Gomorrah culture, groaning for the love and goodness that Jesus preached and lived to come to us without any holding back. Paul uses an image of creation groaning as one that is on edge, about to bring forth a worldly, universal, and eternal condition that we cannot and would not refuse. At least not anyone in a loving, peaceful frame of mind.
When pondering this verse from Paul, the Apostle cannot be speaking specifically of the birth of Jesus, although this would place some degree of understanding to this verse. That creation is groaning for a Savior; that Israel is awaiting their Messiah; that the world God created is awaiting a Redeemer, One who justifies us before God, placing us back into right relationship with our Creator.
Paul cannot be pointing toward the Jesus he had come to know and love through his personal calling from the Lord. The Word has already become flesh by the time Paul wrote his treatise to the Roman Christians. Therefore, he must be referring to what is to still come. That creation groans for something more after Jesus has recreated the world in his life, death, and resurrection. Do we still wait for the Red Sox to break the Curse of the Bambino? No, they’ve already done this. But for those of us who care, we do await them winning another World Series at some point in our lifetime. The birth and life of Jesus has brought salvation to a creation that awaited some, shall we say, straightening out. Creation was crooked, off-kilter, unbalanced, standing sideways, in a humpback position, falling down, walking with a cane through the centuries and millennia. Mrs. Creation was an old lady in need of rejuvenation. She cried out for some liquid, some good blood. not Abel’s blood, but blood that would reawaken our world, causing us to stand tall (even short people), and walk a path that was made straight beginning with John the Baptist, concluding with a Man from Nazareth. All this happened before Paul wrote his famous letter to the Romans, a letter so deep and profound that theologians are still trying to grasp the larger meanings of the words Paul was inspired to write through the Holy Spirit. So, for the Apostle to write that “creation is groaning in labor pains,” he obviously did not refer to the birth of Jesus that occurred about 60 years previous to this letter.
Therefore, what was Paul referring to in the image of creation groaning in labor pains. What is this anticipation of the birth of a 20-pound baby? What is the 20-pound baby, for we know it is not a child? What child can be born at 20-pounds? What mother can give birth to a 20-pound child, and live to tell about it? Well, we know Paul is not referring to the birth of a child as we know children. So, this leaves us dis-counting the birth of Jesus, and the birth of a child. Any child. But what it does not dis-count is that of creation groaning in pain, seeking to be reborn in some other way as connected to the life of Jesus. Something on this scale must be drawn from the life of Christ. It has to somehow be connected to his life. Creation in and of itself has no power to be reborn unless it came from above, in the same way our Lord told Nicodemus in the dark of night that he must be reborn – born from above - if he truly sought the Kingdom of Heaven. Nicodemus was a pretty intelligent man, but he could not figure out what Jesus was actually saying to him. The good Pharisee did figure out that he could not return to the womb of his mother, whoever that holy woman was. He passed his biology class. But he had a much harder time with this spiritual event Jesus referred to in having to be reborn. We hope and pray he figured it out before his death. I would like to meet and greet Nicodemus in heaven one day.
Either way, it seems the groaning Paul refers to here is the doing away, in a final way, with all of the pain and suffering we endure in this still crooked world that Jesus straightened out (redeemed) by his victory over sin. Our Lord’s birth and subsequent life and death took on the bigger – the biggest - challenge that only God could handle. As creation groaned in labor pains for a Messiah to come through Israel, this groaning was answered. Again, this crying out addressed, not Israel being a nation in control of its own destiny, wiping out the Romans while setting up an everlasting Israeli Kingdom on earth, but rather, Jesus’ birth addressed the unending, loud human wailing that was “born” in the Garden of Eden, humans crawling on one’s belly and crawling over one another, finally returning to the dust from which we came. What a horrible existence Adam and Eve handed on to us! One of sin, death, brokenness, infighting, violence, and so forth. And to think we could have had Paradise the entire time! The birth of our Savior in Bethlehem traveled the entire distance to address the groaning pains of sin and death, a lengthy distance that traveled from the Garden of Eden to the Cross. The Via Dolorosa that has his fingerprints all over it.
It would seem that St. Paul, in the above verse from Romans 8 referred to, that he hints at the many groanings he endured for Christ his Lord and Savior. In essence, the same type of groanings we endure in our daily living. His forty lashes minus one; beaten with rods; imprisonments; stoned in hatred of the message; shipwrecked; dangers from rivers, robbers, his own race, Gentiles, in the city, in the wilderness, at sea, from false brothers, sleepless nights, hunger, thirst, fasting, cold, and exposure. Not to mention Paul’s daily anxiety for the Churches. I sense Paul gave us his short list here, leaving out many tribulations. He was very humble, thanks to Jesus. A handsome, well-dressed priest, the man from Tarsus was not.
When considering the above list, would we, if we were the person who had all such things heaped on us, would we not desire the creation in which we experienced such personal hatred and violence to cry out for something better through labor pains? Would we not scream like we were in labor (even silently) for a rebirth – a final rebirth – where all the universe is transformed into the condition of good and dandy? Of love and peace? It seems like St. Paul is leaning heavily on the side of Jesus returning to be rid of, once and for all, what remains of any and all brokenness in a redeemed world. Jesus came to save us from our sins. Apparently, there are many folks, including ourselves at times, who do not desire our sins to be saved. Living in a present culture that has lost much of its sense of sin does not help this program. It does not cooperate in the beautiful gift Jesus won for us on the Cross. The gift of his mercy, of course.
With all that Paul dealt with and confronted head on after the Lord pulled him aside and asked the future Apostle why he was persecuting him, it seems that Paul, in the most unselfish ways, wrote this verse in Romans 8 so that others would not have to deal with the profound human messiness he knew firsthand. Like Jesus, Paul did not make all that was heaped on him about himself. He knew others in his Christian communities dealt with the same human wretchedness now internalized in him. All creation groaning in labor pains, it seems, is a deep, sustained cry for the Lord Jesus to come back and establish His Kingdom on earth, the new Israel. He wants a “loving cherry bomb” to explode. How often have any of us cried out for the Lord to come back and “straighten out this mess?” The thought has crossed my heart and mind many times, while at the same time embracing the beauty and greatness of human life, which makes for an interesting conundrum.
While not writing his words about Mary giving birth to Jesus, a Virginal birth we believe was absent all labor pain, Paul looks ahead to a time when all the shipwrecks and beatings of this world redeemed by our Lord and Savior through his life, death, and resurrection will come to fruition. The Apostle looks forward, as do we, to the final payment on this road of faith and good works. The last groaning, if you will, bringing forth all the fruits of the Spirit, eternally. And to this we say, “Amen.”