Incredible

Tuesday of Epiphany 3

28 January 2025

The Lord calls us to believe the incredible. We are loath to trust God’s radical resolution of human depravity through the declaration of divine righteousness. God has counted sinners righteous? Sinners? Really? How does that work? How can that be fair? I’ve been good, obedient, faithful to my wife and family, regular in church and Bible class and that doesn’t do me any good in God’s sight? What’s up with that, God? It is evidence of my deep depravity that I actually think this way. I should not be pleading my own holiness in God’s sight. What have I got, what have I done, how have I lived in a way that is totally pleasing to God? The standard I need to keep is not social piety, but the standard is “be holy, because the Lord your God is holy” (Lev 19:2). And what exactly would my piety serve to substitute for? The righteousness of God; which is the righteousness of Christ. Oh, there is a great plan; I am going to plead my own righteousness in preference to the righteousness of God’s eternal Son.

But isn’t there a premium with God for my own piety? If not, why do I bother to be pious? Simple: for my neighbor’s benefit. Piety is for this world and its relationships, duties, and responsibilities over against our neighbor. It has no value for righteousness in God’s sight. This is incredible to us because of our opinion of the law; our love of our own piety. Our Lutheran confessions warn us against thinking that “works merit forgiveness of sins and justify. This opinion of the Law naturally sticks in people’s minds. It cannot be driven out, unless we are divinely taught” (Ap 5, 144). Only God’s Word can overcome our inbred opinion that our piety is meritorious in God’s sight. When we no longer believe this, it is a divine miracle every time, because what God has done for us in Christ is incredible to human reason.

God has saved the saints with His righteousness at all times. He promised the righteousness of Christ to Adam and Eve and covered their shame (Gn 3:15; 3:21). Abraham, whose piety was hardly exemplary, becomes the father of faith (Rm 4:16). Rahab, a prostitute, becomes an ancestor in the messianic line, because she was placed into the righteousness of her Heir (Mt 1:5). The righteousness of God is not some doctrinal quirk of the Apostles imposed on the New Testament. This is why Paul continually points to the Old Testament saints. Only the wicked are heirs of this righteousness (Rm 4:5). This is an offense. This angers our old Adam. This rejects our own piety. We howl against this like the pious son in the parable of Luke 15: “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him” (Luke 15:29-30)! This is the opinion of the law. It must be slain, so that the righteousness of Christ might become our own and our only righteousness before God. Isn’t that incredible?

John Chrysostom

“This righteousness (Rm 1:17) is not your own, but that of God; hinting also at the abundance of it and its power. You do not achieve it by works and labors, but you receive it as a gift from above, contributing one thing only from you: “believing.” Then since his statement did not seem credible, if the adulterer and effeminate person, and robber of graves, and magician, is not only to be suddenly freed from punishment but to become just, and just too with the highest righteousness; he confirms his assertion from the Old Testament. With a short statement, he opens a vast sea of histories to one who has a capacity for seeing them. For after having said, “from faith for faith” (Rm 1:17) he sends the hearer back to the working of God, which took place in the Old Testament, which, when writing to the Hebrews [Chrysostom believes that Paul is the author of Hebrews], he explains with his usual great wisdom, showing that both the just and the sinners were justified in that way even then. Therefore he also made mention both of the prostitute and of Abraham.”



John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, 2