Canter Bridge

When the apostle Paul’s discourse turns doxological, it frequently takes the shape of rhetorical questions hurled with gusto into the public arena that his letters create.

Yet Paul is confident enough of his own bearing in the story which fuels his letter-writing that he inserts himself and the answers that course through him into the mix. Paul who asks is Paul who must answer. Perhaps there is too much risk that rhetorical questions might be answered inaccurately by his correspondents. More likely, Paul’s passion seizes the day and declares into the very questions that he has forged.

What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.‘ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

These are the queries of a man who has known bitter experience that could plausibly be construed as abandonment by God. A man who has known both extra- and quasi-judicial condemnation, who has been anathematized by his social and religious kin groups would be a strange duck if he had never wondered whether some deep truth resides in their accusation.

More, when Paul speaks of trouble, he doubtless does so against the backdrop of the psychic scarring that sleepless, lonely nights inflict, wounds of which time can heal only the outer edge.

Nor ought we to empty the word ‘hardship’ of its condensed memory. Allowed its proper voice, its two syllables recall the claws of hunger that deforms and thirst that withers.

Famine, and its hopelessly steely sky? Nakedness, the shame of having no decent cover, the searing disdain of those who think one got this way, got here, for lack of a work ethic, for deficit courage?

Danger and sword, both unforgiving in their lethal indifference to the good or malice of minds and hands that wield them?

These are not abstractions, air-conditioned charcoal sketches of discomforts that all human beings suffer in roughly even measure.

On the contrary, Paul’s words are necessary abbreviations of the relentless, crushing violences that Paul and his new sisters and brothers have endured. Indeed, they must continue to understand what they are and are not if they are to live, as Paul describes their fate elsewhere, ‘hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.’

If such pains are patient of being abbreviated still further, Paul leads us in this direction by twice describing them as potential separation from the love of God. He must have heard the throbbing voice of these things insisting that this is what they signify. God has separated those who suffer such ills from his protective love, such argument would have the apostle believe.

But Paul has fought his way to a more accurate understanding of such things, one that claims for them an entirely opposite meaning. Whatever Paul’s scars connote, they do not describe separation. They cannot mean this, for God’s love in Christ—Paul has discovered—is too strong to brook separation.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul has known these forces, these flavors of human experience, these threats both known and unknown.

None can compare. None can separate.

They are paper tigers, to be crumpled up in good time and tossed into the wastebasket where forgotten things go when love shows itself triumphant.