Romans 2:17-29
“What’s Inside?”
April 3, 2011 - Fourth Sunday in Lent

         Somebody told me recently that DNA testing showed he was not Jewish. I can’t remember who was speaking, it may have been someone here, but despite a family tradition remembering a Jewish ancestor, his test showed none of the Y-DNA markers which connect a person with known Jewish populations. Whatever the family history told, he was not Jewish in the sense of race or biology.

         One suspects that DNA would have mattered little to the apostle Paul. In our text today from the second half of Romans 2, Paul goes toe to toe with those who claim to be Jewish in what he regards as merely superficial ways. I’m guessing that would have included biological Jewishness. It certainly included the primary physical sign of being a Jew in ancient times.

         Verses 17 and 18 challenge a Jewishness that relies on possession of the Mosaic Law. Paul addresses Jewish people who believe they are in a superior relationship with God just because they have knowledge of God’s Law in their sacred writings. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” is an old saying about property rights. But Paul declares it invalid as a spiritual principle. Mere possession and knowledge of God’s commandments is not enough to insure a person is in a good relationship with God.

         This past Tuesday I sat in a meeting with our executive minister of Ordered Ministry in Chicago. As I looked around Dave’s office in our new Covenant headquarters, I noticed a prominent plaque with the word “SARCASM” in large letters. Underneath it said, “One of many services offered here.” That plaque was a gift from someone who knows Dave well. He has a biting wit that more often than he himself might like takes a sarcastic turn.

         Paul takes that same turn here in verses 19 and 20. He bitingly supposes that some Pharisee or teacher of law imagines himself as “a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants.” In other words, he says, “because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth” you think you are something extraordinary in God’s eyes.

         Quicker than Simon Cowell skewering some lame dancer or singer on “American Idol,” Paul cuts through the façade of these Jewish pretenders in verses 21 to 24. “You, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself?” he begins. Then, with three examples from the Ten Commandments, questions whether their possession of the law amounts to any genuine righteousness at all.

         Those three commandments are interesting choices: stealing, adultery and what amounts to idolatry by stealing gold or silver from pagan temples. These rather visible sins are hardly the sort of offences an upstanding Jewish person was likely to commit. But Paul is operating sarcastically. He wants to show the deep divide between a righteousness that is being claimed and a righteousness that is actually lived.

         Ultimately verses 23 and 24 say that those who claim possession of the law but fail to live up to it break yet another commandment against dishonoring God’s name. They not only dishonor God themselves but in a loose quotation from Ezekiel 36:20, “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” They not only break the commandment, they cause others to break it too.

         With all of that, Paul is ready to broach one of the great themes of Romans he’s been hinting at. He wants to challenge the very idea of what it means to be one of God’s people, specifically here, what it means to be Jewish.

         So verse 25 takes up what for us is an indelicate subject, but one which was a key matter of self-identity for Jews. Circumcision was the physical mark on one’s most intimate flesh that reminded a Jewish man every day that he was one of the chosen, one of the possessors of the law, one of God’s own people.

         Go back and read the Old Testament and you find more than one story about displaying how seriousness circumcision was. In Genesis 34, the sons of Jacob demand circumcision of the men of Shechem if they want to marry Israelite women. In Exodus 4, God is about to kill Moses until his wife Zipporah performs an emergency circumcision of their son with a sharp rock. This little bit of genital surgery that we regard as an optional health measure was and is to Jewish people a key mark of spiritual identity.

         Now Paul wants to transform the whole understanding of circumcision saying, “You know, it doesn’t matter that much.” Just as merely hearing or knowing what God’s law is doesn’t matter as much as actually doing what it says, circumcision only has value “if you observe the law.” So even the uncircumcised person who does the rest of what God’s law says—who  doesn’t steal, commit adultery, worship idols or blaspheme—is ahead of the circumcised person who fails in those ways or in other parts of the law.

         Paul is getting at something that was a strong theme in the teaching of Jesus, something that we heard today in our Old Testament reading. Remember? In I Samuel 16, Samuel goes looking for God’s choice of the next king of Israel and he’s sent to Jesse’s family in Bethlehem. He spies the oldest son Eliab and sees a tall, handsome young man and thinks, “This is the guy!” But God says, “Do not consider his appearance or his height… The Lord does not look at what humans look at. They look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

         That’s Paul’s conclusion about circumcision and about Jewishness in general. Verses 28 and 29 tell us, “A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly…”

         External appearance alone makes no spiritual difference. It’s what you are internally that counts. As Paul will sarcastically suggest more than once, you can cut yourself up on the outside however you like, but unless there is an internal, spiritual cutting away of sin, a circumcision of the heart, external surgery won’t help you a bit.

         My wife’s sweet old Czechoslovakian grandmother had terrible arthritis. She once heard my wife’s father and brothers talking about the virtues of WD-40 as relief for stiff, squeaky joints. She didn’t realize they were talking about cars, and the next thing they knew she found the can in the garage and started spraying it on her elbows.

         Without something happening internally, external acts of religion will do no more good than spray lubricant on arthritic elbows. In many, many ways, they are the right idea, but something needs to happen on the inside as well as on the outside. That’s why WD-40 works for sticky transmission linkages. You spray it on the outside, but it soaks inside.

         Paul wants everyone, not just Jewish people, to learn and practice a faith that is both external and internal. He’s not at all suggesting that doing what’s right on the outside doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t have made theft and adultery and idolatry his sarcastic examples if that were the case. No, he’s saying that a faith that is only about keeping external commandments is incomplete and ultimately empty. True religion, true faith, changes you both on the outside and on the inside.

         Merely external religion tends to get hung up on one or two or three external marks and forgets the rest. That was the problem with possession of the law and with circumcision. Jewish people thought those were enough. In our Gospel for today from John 9, that’s was the Pharisee’s problem. In their eyes, Jesus didn’t keep one law, about not working on the Sabbath, and so they couldn’t see that He kept a deeper law about showing love and kindness to a person in need.

         So Paul’s sarcastic interrogation about whether you think you are a guide for the blind points back to the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees who couldn’t see what Jesus had done for the blind man. Those teachers refused to be taught when they needed teaching to understand who Jesus was and what He could do for them.

         Paul and Jesus and the whole Bible teaches a faith that transforms us through and through. It doesn’t just modify a few external behaviors. It changes the heart, the character, the soul, whatever you want to call it. So that internally and externally we become what God wants us to be.

         Faith in Jesus Christ is both more promising and more challenging than if we only focus on the external. If we think that believing in Jesus is just about washing away our guilty feelings, it’s like washing, waxing and polishing your old car when what it really needs is an engine overhaul. It’s looks better and for awhile you might imagine it even runs better, but it’s till going to misfire, blow smoke and eventually break down completely.

         So today I would invite us to consider on what external laws we’ve focused. In a previous generation it might have been things like not smoking or drinking. For us it might be church attendance or generous giving. Those are not bad rules, but what God wants for us in Jesus is a complete internal overhaul. As Paul might say to us, do you go to church and praise God but silently curse your co-workers? Do you give a tithe of your paycheck, but refuse to lend a hand to your next-door neighbor? Jesus wants to change all that, change us from the inside out.

         That’s why verse 29 says that circumcision of the heart comes by the Spirit, not by the written code. We can’t get that internal change by ourselves, anymore than Grandma Tichacek could get WD-40 inside her elbows. We need the grace of Jesus to work in us, to deliver us from spiritual blindness, like He delivered the blind man from his physical handicap.

         In this season of Lent, we’re asked to look at ourselves. Consider whether your focus is on a few externals while you’ve forgotten crucial internal components of faith.

         Yet it’s not, as some supposedly spiritual guides tell us, all a matter of looking “inside yourself.” No, Paul definitely wants you and I to look at how we behave on the outside as an indicator of what’s inside. But he wants us to have eyes that see ourselves and our behavior from another, better perspective. So the last word here today is about those who have a true circumcision, an internal faith, a real relationship with the Lord. “Such a person’s praise,” he says, “is not from other people, but from God.”

         Let’s go home with that today. Ask ourselves about what we do, “Is it something merely on the outside so that people will like me or praise me, or is it on the inside as well, so that God finds it pleasing?” That’s why in Holy Communion we say the words “Come not to express an opinion.” In other words, don’t come to put on a show for others. But “come to seek His presence and pray for His Spirit.” That’s what will make a difference, externally and internally. May the gracious Spirit of Jesus be in you and with you all today.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj