Feast of Salvation

We are always in a hurry. We want to cut through the preliminaries and get right to the meat. We know our attention spans to be limited, so we strive not to spend them on the insignificant. Thus, we open our Bibles and read, “Paul, blah, blah, blah,” and we think: All this courtly introduction stuff, that’s all just form isn’t it? Paul had reams of sheets printed up with this standard intro, and he only began to write when he got down to the important stuff, right? If we slow down, if we pay attention here to the “unimportant” stuff, we wonder whether we will have any attention left to give when Paul gets serious.

This same Paul tells us, in the meat of his epistles to Timothy, that every word of Holy Writ is profitable, so we must believe him. And as we look through the introduction of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome (if we will take the time to look) we can see the richness of these “formulaic” words. He repeats these themes in his other letters not because they are meaningless but because they are meaningful. That the ideas are repeated is not a sign that we can let our minds stray but that we should pay attention. This is the important stuff, and, in many ways, a failure to understand it leads only to a failure to understand the whole of the letter.

Paul affirms he is a servant. He is not a free man and never has been. He has been separated to the Gospel of God, the Good News not that we move from freedom to slavery or from freedom to freedom, but from slavery to sin to slavery to Christ. His apostleship is bound up in this message, this message that the Jews should have known, since it had been foretold by the prophets. But his apostleship is for all the nations, for this Christ who has been raised from the dead is declared to be the Son of God. He is Lord over all men and Savior to all who believe, first the Jews and then the Gentiles. God vindicated His own righteousness and that of His Son when He raised Him from the dead. And God vindicated His Son’s reign when He lifted Him up to His heavenly throne. As Romans is the Gospel writ small, so this brief introduction is Romans writ smaller still. Here Paul does what he always does—he preaches Christ and Him crucified.

When we skip lightly over this material, we skip lightly over the Gospel by which we too have been saved. When we skip lightly over the Word of God, we make light of our sin, of the holiness of God, of the grace of His Son, and of the promises of the kingdom. Such is not becoming of our calling, for we are the called of Christ, beloved of God, called to be saints. That is the meat, just as it is the bread and the wine. May we learn to savor together this year the feast of salvation, and so walk worthy of our calling.