Romans 8:14-17

It is perhaps helpful to remember on this day that the word “pentecost,” given as it is to this day on the church calendar, is used not only for the harvest festival that is attended by early followers of the way, as recounted in opening of the book of Acts, but also for the Jubilee, that 50th year when “good news [comes] to the poor” with the proclamation of “release to the captives,” “sight to the blind,” liberation of “the oppressed,” that is, “the year of the Lord’s favor” (see Luke 4:18–19). Indeed, the gospel is the good news not only that debts—both tangible and intangible debts—are forgiven, but also that the system is eradicated that makes debts both possible and inevitable.

What Paul is bearing witness to in the 8th chapter of Romans is the revolutionary and historic significance of the glorification of the mutilated, dead, and damned body of Jesus, that is, his resurrection. Jesus is not to be understood as an identity, spiritual or otherwise, simply indwelling a material body. Jesus is his body. When his body is robbed even of the possibility of a purity demarcated by a system that separates the pure from the impure, he, this Galilean peasant, is robbed of that possibility. God’s resurrection of the mutilated, dead, and damned Jesus is the rupturing of that system, as an old wineskin is ruptured by new wine. The covenant that determines that only the pure can be made holy is now an old covenant within an old world. The resurrection of Jesus is the inauguration of a new covenant in which the condition for the gift of holiness is not wholeness of “spirit” or “soul” or “body” (three words gesturing to the same human life), but the faithfulness by which that body, that soul, that spirit, lives out into the faithfulness of God.

It is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of holiness (see Romans 1:4), that works this concurrence of faithfulness, the faithfulness of God and of us. It is the Spirit, not only of what was and what is, but above all the Spirit of what is to come, who gives us to live from and (because “from”) to the New Creation that even now is sending earthquakes through this present evil age.

The Spirit of holiness is the same Spirit that carried Ancient Israel from Babylonian Captivity and Egyptian bondage through the wilderness into the Promised Land, the same Spirit that never ceased carrying it in hope out into the coming of the Messiah and the dawn of a New World. It is the Spirit of holiness who made sure that Ancient Israelites were hale and hearty, strong and whole, made sure they prevailed against their enemies and survived, when other nations were wiped from the face of the earth by mighty empires, famines, plagues, and other calamities of history. And it was the survival of Israel that the Spirit of holiness worked, again and again. It was fitness for survival that the Spirit ensured, through the priestly enforcement of purity laws.

The point of life, every faithful Ancient Israelite knew, is to be holy as God is holy, that is, by entering the holiness of God disclosed in the Tabernacle and the Temple. Without entering God’s glory, God’s holiness, life is vain, they knew. And the only way to enter God’s glory, the only way to be glorified, to be made holy, was to have been rendered “clean,” “pure,” “whole,” “healthy,” by following the prescriptions for being pure or recovering a lost purity. Much of the Law of Moses is in fact an inscription of the way to well-being as a way of entering God’s glory.

The work of Jesus, as recounted in the gospels, was above all to place himself in the midst of a system of purity/impurity. He was enclosed by that system the way wine is enclosed in wineskin. He reached out his hand, indeed his whole body, to those too broken, too unfit for entry into God’s glory, too defiled, too impure, too sick, too disfigured, to be made holy. Jesus, the gospels go out of their way to tell us, lived with and was counted among those who would live and die without ever having a reason to justify their having been alive.

Everything in the covenant God had made with Israel declared with the force of divine authority that Jesus’s living among the unclean made him also unclean, no less unclean. He is rightly condemned by the law of the covenant God had made with Israel. That the gospels declare that he is not defiled by his contacting the wretched of the earth, that rather his contacting them purified them instead, none of that could be confirmed by God’s covenant with Israel. If what the gospels declare is true, it could only be true by an event by which God makes a new covenant, a covenant that marks the passing away of an old world and the dawning of a new creation. In this new creation, there is no defilement that can separate us from the holy God. There is no disorder or disease that could bar the door to our entry into God’s glory. The point of life is still to be glorified by the glory of God, but now, “We don’t need no ticket / We just get on board” (Curtis Mayfield, “People Get Ready”), now, we are invited to trust that God loves us and invites us to step out into God’s glory.

That is, we don’t have to survive. We don’t have to thrive. We don’t have to succeed. We don’t have to satisfy anyone’s idea of a good life. The call to holiness is a call that everyone, a call even to those most often told they are not good enough, even those who are killing themselves by the way they live. Everyone is called to live out into the reckless life of abandon to the love of God. Indeed, it should be expected that to live out into the holy love of God and thus to live out into the lives of those this God loves is to endanger your life, as it did the life of Jesus. Paul is saying, “Do it anyway! And do it unafraid! For you are heirs of a life that is not trapped in the binary opposition ‘life vs. death,’ a life that so bathed the crucified Jesus with eternal life that he never ceased—even in resurrection—being crucified, as his wounds declare.”

Just as God has Israel start over in the year of Jubilee, God has Israel and all the world start over when the life of Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried, is raised by God on Easter Sunday.