The Drama of Now!

Paul has worked from God's good news about his Son (1:1-4), his power for saving humanity (1:16-17); through a powerful overview of humanity's brokenness, both pagan and Jewish, and God's judgment/wrath seen in the consequences of sin and final judgment (1:18-3:20). Paul ends referring to Ps 143:1-2: God's faithfulness/righteousness is our only hope.

Now (emphatic) begins v 21 (in the present time v 26). Something new has happened, surprising and unexpected, but once you see what God has done, you see it fits perfectly. That is the Good news. We might expect emphasis on Jesus' life and death. It's there. But the great emphasis is on showing God's faithful righteousness (dikaiosyne, 4x).

The theme is how the whole story works, now that we see Jesus at the center of it all. The text is highly concentrated with every phrase linked to a part of the whole story.

Challenges of Translation and History

The translation given is very literal and tries to bring out a distinct understanding of Paul's words. Many argue about how several key groups of words should be interpreted. Part of the problem is the wide range of meaning and allusion these words have for Paul as they apply to both God and humans and as they are shaped by use in the Greek OT scripture.

Righteous-, just- (dikaio-), a large important group: both God's faithfulness to his promises and his justice as a judge. Human unrighteousness, and need to be judged right/innocent. Some interpret God's righteousness as a gift he imputes to humans by their faith.

Faith- believe (pistis, pisteuein). This has often been treated as belonging only to humans as the basis of justification by faith alone.' God doesn't have faith. But Rom 3:1-3 shows that Paul thinks of pistis as something belonging to God and v 22 speaks of the pistis of Jesus. This is usually translated as faith in Jesus (redundant) but needs the broader sense. Paul is certainly teaching that faith is the core of our response to the Gospel, but he emphasizes that our faith is focused on and grows out of Jesus' faithfulness, which embodies God's faithfulness to his promises and his way of mercy as a just judge.

Other important words are glory of God reflecting on the story of sin in Gen 3. The word redemption means deliverance as in the Exodus and breaking the enslavement of sin. Mercy seat (hilasterion) refers to the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of God meeting humans and the place where the blood of atonement brought God's mercy rather than judgment and wrath. Thus the whole story of scripture comes together.

Trusting the Faithful God through Jesus: vv. 21-26

21 In Jesus God has done something that reaches beyond anything Torah could do, but Torah with the Prophets anticipates it. 22 God himself in Jesus has become the faithful descendant of Abraham, David's son, the Messiah who embodies all of Israel. As Messiah/Israel, Jesus is the faithful one through whom God fulfills his promise to all humanity. Our response of faith/trust springs forth from his faithfulness (1:17): out of faithfulness into faith.

23 Jesus deals with the human situation as a whole. As God's intervention, he brings God's image/glory back to us humans. 24 He brings God's grace, free gift of love, by redemption, delivering us from enslavement to sin's power by making it possible for us to be in him, in Messiah Jesus. 25 He is the meeting place, mercy seat, that God himself creates, by Jesus' faithfulness embodied in his blood on the cross. The impossible becomes reality.

God unfolds what was happening in the long story of his forbearance in scripture. 26 It all comes to focus Now! in the time defined by Jesus. God is faithful to his promises, just in dealing with sin, and merciful in declaring right every person who trusts Jesus' faithfulness.

God and Israel for All the World

In this introductory section of Romans (1:18-3:20), Paul starts from God's act in his son Jesus and the power of that action to save all people, starting from the Jews and including all the world, showing God's faithfulness to his promises and his overcoming human failure.

Romans is known for its universal indictment of human sin and brokenness under sin (3:9). Paul has looked at the Gentiles, even its rigorous moralists, and at his own world of the Jews. Everywhere the indictment of sin holds. Even Israel's national claim to special standing because of God's gift of the Torah was repeated undermined by Israel's sins leading to exile, as scriptures emphatically show. Gentiles could be moral like Jews.

So what's special about the Jews? We might expect Nothing! Instead Paul says, A lot! Israel / Jews are not just an abstraction. They are a concrete people with real history with God. God entrusted them with his oracles God's self-revelation as creator, his promises, covenants, law, prophets, wisdom, steadfast love, faithfulness, judgment.

God entrusted his oracles to Israel for the sake of the whole world, as a light to the nations, not just for one people. God always cared for his whole creation. Some were unfaithful! In fact, that was the repeated story, from Abraham to Jacob, Moses, David...(See Ps 51). God always had to create a way to be faithful to his promises in spite of human failure.

Note that Paul here speaks of faith/trust (pistis/pisteuein) for the first time since 1:17. Here he shows the breadth of these words. Not simply believe in something, have faith in Jesus as a mental process, but trust/faithfulness as a way of life and character. He speaks of the faith(fullness) of God on which everything depends. God's faithfulness is also God's truth (3:4,7) and God's righteousness (3:4,5,6). The verses that follow show it fulfilled in the faith(fullness) of Jesus Messiah (3:22) often translated as faith in Jesus. These important words include both sides: believing, trusting, being faithful in life. God's faithfulness in Jesus is the basis of our faith / faithfulness / trust that brings life (1:17).

Is it Really all that Bad?

Paul has been in a lot of conversations and controversies about all this. He knows how we want duck the indictment for sin. Yes we sin, we lie, but that just makes God's truth and faithfulness stand out. We make God a hero. He should be happy. In fact, let's sin more so that God's even more heroic and glorious when he save us. Are you saying that, Paul?

No! Sin, violence, deception, rage, injustice still destroy human life on every level. Jews have had a very vital role to play in bringing the revelation of God to the world, but they are still united with everyone else in the destructive power of sin. Just read the scriptures. The indictment finds both Jews and Gentiles in their different ways under sin's power.

Paul quotes a series of scriptures, Psalms and Isaiah, that point to the pervasive power of evil. They mostly speak metaphorically, inclusively rather than list specific wrongs. Understanding is lost. Life becomes futile. Peace is lost. Recognition of God is lost.

The Law of the Knowledge of Good and Sinful

This is the alienation of humanity from God portrayed in Genesis from the garden of Eden. All humans experience the suffering of evil the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

But Torah brings the knowledge of evil as sin in relation to God. All are indicted. But that God is the faithful one who promises blessing to all people through Abraham's seed, Israel, the Messiah. The story is as paradoxical as humanity. God himself, not just his law, must enter human life in order to open new life, transformation, setting all things right.

An Impartial God in a Divided World

Paul's focus is the Gospel God faithfully fulfilling his promises in his Son Jesus Messiah. His power to save everyone who trusts/believes, the Jew first and also the Greek (1:16).

It is the astonishing seriousness of the core of God's action incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection: God becoming human, the death of God, the conquest of death and the creation of a new life that reveals what is at stake, the depth of human brokenness.

The world is divided Jew/Greek and many other ways. But God is creator of all, loves all, will judge all impartially, on the basis of the whole reality (works) of life, including the secret depths of life, through Messiah Jesus (vv 6-16). The Torah/Law is very important but does not limit God. It is given to Israel and marks a great covenant relationship.

But the many nations (Gentiles) who do not have it, still have moral responsibility in their heart, conscience, reasoning. God shows no partiality. He looks at the secret reality.

In the Gospel he brings all people broken, dying, in need of life into direct connection with his promised blessings for his whole world that he made through Abraham and Israel.

The Call and Indictment of Israel

But what about Israel? What about a Jew like Paul? (A theme throughout Romans.) Paul lived within the pagan world as a Jew with a strong self-identity, a sense of the calling of Israel that he took seriously as a Pharisee (Phi 3:5-6). But he knew the deep paradox of it.

There was so much that was wonderful. Knowing God, receiving the Torah, Exodus, Messiah, promises, etc. Israel was called by God to be a light to all the nations (Gentiles) (Isa. 42:6-7). Paul knows that calling is real and important. The Torah is a true gift of God to Israel and the truths it unfolds of the one creator God and his interaction with his people are basic.

But just read the story in scripture! Israel's failure was always evident. From the golden calf to divided kingdom to idolatry to exile. More recently look at the Herods, the temple high priests, the drive toward violent confrontation with Rome, the people of the land.

Paul knows many Jews had high moral standards, as he had. But scripture itself says that Israel had not fulfilled its calling to be a light to the nations. Passages like Isa 42 and 52 deeply studied by Paul point to God's promises to be faithful to Israel in spite of failures, to raise up the Servant of the Lord, Israel, or one who embodies and serves Israel, to do something new, a Suffering Servant to heal Israel and the nations. God never fails in his promises to Israel, but intervenes himself to become Israel's Messiah, Servant.

God Follows not External Boundaries but Deep Reality

But aren't the boundaries clear and indisputable that mark off the Jews as God's elect people: Circumcision, Torah observance (Sabbath, purity laws, tithing, feast days)?

Paul, like Jesus before him, says these boundary markers have become external, ritual lines that mark no real devotion of life to God, no circumcision of the heart in real love for God and his will. This was already anticipated in scripture (Deut 30:6; Jer 4:4), and the prophets repeatedly indicted Israel for elaborate religiosity without transformation, for ritual without justice, for sacrifices and rites in a society that oppressed the poor.

God is now showing that he will not recognize those external boundaries, Paul says. There is one God of all people and he will judge all people by the same standard: Not external marks they have but the transformation of their heart and life, the deep reality secret to all but God. He works from the inside out. When God dies for you, taking on your sin, and you trust his faithful work, and his Spirit works in you, a new reality begins!

Our Thanksgiving and Remembrance Service

The Inescapable Indictment of Sin

Paul is expressing the Gospel what God has done in Jesus power for salvation, God's faithful righteousness in action. We respond with faith, live by faith. But the reality that we trust Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection points to the deep universal problem.

Paul started with the fundamental problem replacing the real God who makes us in his image with images of ourselves, our desires. The outcome is self-delusion, a distortion of human life (1:28-31). We recognize a moral law, know we break it, and accept the wrong.

Kindness, Patience and the Changed Heart

Paul turns to address anyone who agrees with his indictment: You,' Human' (anthropos). Very general: Jew, Gentile. Many have expressed indictments of the evils of human life (including Paul). But can I stand outside the indictment as a judge? Can I, even as a better' person than others, avoid condemnation. Devout Jews (like Paul) often felt superior to Gentiles. Greek/Roman moralists felt superior to the masses. We can all be judgmental, but that is part of our self-delusion. In truth we condemn ourselves (2:1).

The long story of humanity from promises to Abraham to Paul was not God approving the corruption of human life. Paul describes it as God's patience showing the profound need for a fundamentally new way of thinking (repentance). God will ultimately judge all human life according to truth, with just judgment, setting things right, as only the creator can. That is God's faithful righteousness, keeping promises, impartial, just to all.

Impartial Judgment According to Works

God's judgment will be a verdict on the reality, the works' of each life, as scripture says. Paul emphasizes this by repeating work' and obey.' Not theory, not claims reality! Paul uses two pairs of statements to drive home the point that God's judgment will justly fit the reality of each life and fulfill God's promise to restore all humanity that he has created through what he has done in Israel's Messiah: Jew first, also Greek.

Negative: Self-centered, self-deluded. Not persuaded by/obedient to truth, but following injustice, unrighteousness: The result is wrath that falls on all that destroys human life; tribulation, distress that corresponds to the evil that has been done, by Jew or Gentile.

Positive: Seek glory, honor, immortality by patient good work (Mt 25): God gives the life of the age to come (zoe aionios), resurrection, eternal life. This is God's verdict on Jesus as God's Son by the resurrection from the dead. That's for all who work the good,' Jew or Gentile.

This passage is really surprising/difficult to many taught to think that work' is a bad word for Paul and for the Gospel. Isn't the Gospel about faith, not works? Is Paul just setting up a hypothetical scenario that no one can really fulfill? No! Paul is too emphatic. The just character of God's judgment by works is given in scripture. In fact, it's our only hope.

How Can Anyone Survive that Judgment?

Still, the question remains. If the indictment for sin is as universal as Paul affirms, and the judgment by works on human life is as true and just as Paul emphasizes, how can any of us stand in that judgment? Won't there be wrath and fury for all? Impartial condemnation?

That is one fundamental question of Romans. How can I actually do what is good? How can I have a real change of thinking and action (repentance)? How can God's just verdict on my life be not condemnation but eternal life? Paul sets out to unfold the answer.

The key is in the event, what God has done in Jesus, his death and resurrection. This radical, unexpectable crucifixion of God and creation of new life, opens a new world of hope.

Lewis Smedes, who was my ethics professor at Fuller Seminary, described it this way: "Ingratitude decays the spirit, spoils the soul, decomposes life itself."

In this sermon Amy looks at the story of the lepers that Jesus heale from leprosy. Nine went on their way and only one returned to thank Jesus. What made this man return to Jesus? What did he see and experience when Jesus responded to his cries for mercy with healing grace? And how can we live in gratitude everyday, seeing our lives as gifts from God?

Looking into the Darkness of the Human Mind

Paul is unfolding God's announcement of Good News of what he has done in Jesus, Messiah of Israel and Lord of the world. That event / proclamation is his power to save everyone who trusts it, thus showing his faithful righteousness in keeping his ancient promises.

But the event corresponds to the need. The death of the Messiah, who is God, and his resurrection fit the profound darkness of the human plight. Paul looks at that plight in vv 28-32: humanity's unfit mind' produces destructive relationships, alienation from each other, violence, injustice, broken families, worthless promises, finding new ways to hurt. We not only do destructive things, we come to believe that that is normal and good.

This deep brokenness is why God has intervened in Jesus. God's wrath, ultimately seen in judgment, now is the basis for his intervention in Jesus to forgive, heal, reconcile.

How Life Goes So Wrong

Maybe Paul wants to convince us that with so much wrong God is right to be wrathful. But the situation is more complicated. Paul traces the problem deeper, further back. The vices are only a symptom of a more basic breakdown of human thinking and motivation.

Humans have become disconnected from the basic reality that they are created by God. They suppress the truth' (18). They exchange the glory of God for an image of a likeness' (23). They exchange the truth of God for a lie' (25). They do not think fit to hold God in their knowledge' (28). God doesn't stop being God, but humans grow alienated from the deepest reality of their existence. God gives humans freedom in creation as his own image in the world, but they use the freedom to break their knowledge and relationship with their creator and to break each other. God's wrath is not in punishing them, but handing them over to do what they want (24,26,28). Humans can do wonderful and noble things but they use more energy in selfish harm, large and small.

That great exchange of the truth of our relationship with God for rejection and distortion is the basic human problem. In the gospel God reveals his persistent love for reconciliation.

Natural and Unnatural Relationships

In order to vividly illustrate this exchange, Paul points his readers to well-known practices of the society around them, in which both women and men (no one is left out) exchange their natural relationships for unnatural. In our day it is very important to read texts like this with historical understanding, since they relate to highly controversial issues today.

Paul is talking about the widely known and approved (but also criticized) practice of married men (with wives kept safely at home) finding sexual stimulation (without danger of children) through relationships with boys or young men (as well as with slaves or prostitutes). Paul is dealing with the vast body of people with opposite-sex attraction who exchanged normal relationships in that day for those against their own nature.

Paul is not talking about the small percentage (3-5%) of people who grow up with a same- sex attraction simply in their nature (without any exchange) that leads them to want romantic, intimate relationships with people the same sex. A fundamental difference.

Human Unity in Brokenness

Truth is the important thing here. Whatever breaks the truth about God breaks the truth about ourselves and breaks our lives. But suppressing the truth' is really something that unites human beings in their brokenness. God breaks in with the Truth of His Love.

Justin Lee, Torn. Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting. Sally Gary, Loves God, Likes Girls. Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian.

Revealing God The Dark and Light

Paul is unfolding the Gospel God's proclamation of good news what He has done in Jesus that has opened a new era in his relation with his creation, revealed his righteous faithfulness to his promises, and opened salvation for all who trust Jesus Messiah as Lord.

Paul digs deeper: for...for...because.' The gospel reveals God's righteousness as power to save people (16-17). But that is based on God's wrath' being revealed. Wrath? Anger? Why anger? Because the whole history is God's long work to overcome human evil, sin, brokenness, corruption. All that alienates humans from God. To bring reconciliation, life.

God's wrath is an old story, a fundamental theme of Israel's story, from Eden to Exile. It hits Israel and Pagan oppressors. God's final judgment will ultimately come against all evil that corrupts his creation. But now that final judgment has been brought into view in Jesus crucifixion and resurrection. The future becomes present. The Lord of judgment is the crucified God. That complicates things. It reveals both the nature and depth of evil, that could bring such a death, and the faithful love of the God who still brings salvation.

The cause of wrath goes deep: godlessness/ungodliness (asebeia) and unrighteousness/ injustice/wickedness (adikia) when human life loses touch with, suppresses reality/truth.

Seeing God in His Creation

The paradox of human brokenness is that it is the breaking of God's greatest gift. God created the whole universe, and here gave only humans the self-consciousness, freedom, and moral capability to enter a relationship with God. But that meant real freedom.

God shows himself everywhere, but never in a way that forces us. Paul's language draws on well-known arguments among Jews of his day that continue in renewed forms today. As perception expands the causes for wonder and reflection expand on every level.

If one thinks of origins and causes, our cosmology goes back to a big bang.' Where did that astonishing singularity come from? How did a mindless universe decide on inflation' or the four forces (now five) that order everything from quarks to galaxies? Who came up with the Higgs boson? What mindlessness wrote the encyclopedia of DNA in every cell?

Think of our inner life: How are we conscious in an unconscious universe full of wonders? Are we the smartest things that exist? If our minds, philosophy, scientific understanding, morality are nothing but electrical impulses in essentially mindless brain cells determined by physical causality, why should we trust our best science or moral outrage at atrocities?

Everywhere there are signs of God: creator, artist, physicist, mathematician, poet; his love of physical and moral order, his willingness to grant freedom and creativity to his creation.

From Distorting Idolatry to Deep Relationship

Paul says that the deep problem in human life is not an inability to know God. Rather it is that we humans don't want a limit on us represented by the real and living God. If God is real, with real love, real wrath, real intentions, real relationship, a real creator, real judgment, then we have responsibility as creatures to our creator. Our lives are gifts not fully our own.

Paul says that our common human tactic is not to get rid of God but to substitute for him, to replace him with an idol, from a golden calf to the modern trinity: money, sex, and power. We live in a world of idols. Power, the great father: violence, oppression, manipulation. Money, the son who makes all things possible, worshiped in a thousand temples. Sex ...! The church itself has often in history been a temple of those idols in all their variations.

In creation, humans were to be the image of God, reflecting God's glory and care into his world, joining with God as his regents in caring for and directing his creation. To know and honor God as God, to realize the gift with gratitude is the start of real relationship.

Paul's Longing for Rome and New People

Paul is beginning a letter to believers in the capital of the empire, hoping that they will help him traveling into new work in Spain. He has had long acquaintance with disciples from Rome (Aquila and Prisca, 16:3), and is aware of the challenging situation as Jewish believers have returned to Rome after years of forced absence (49-54 under Claudius).

He writes out of his experience that proclaiming Jesus (Gospel) in complex Greco-Roman cities created communities that couldn't have been imagined before: Jew/Pagan/slave/free. It has power for transformation. Paul articulates the event, vision, theology, and practice of that Gospel. This is his own call and journey and the challenge of the church then/now.

This story may seem narrow, ethnic, problematic (Abraham, David, Israel, Jesus, crucified!), but it's really the story of God and his whole world and challenges both Israel and Caesar.

Gospel in Person and Proclamation

Rm 1:1-17 sets out the basic foundations of all that follows. The Gospel (euangelion) of God (v 1) is the announcement of events already in place and what they mean.

Last week: God's proclamation of good news: What God promised (known in scriptures from Abraham to prophets) he has now fulfilled. The promises were God's own commitments that also initiated covenants with people. Promises about his son: Israel, David's seed, the anointed king, Messiah, Jesus. What happened in Jesus showed he was not only son of God as David's seed, but was the very presence of God, son of God in power, Yahweh visiting his people, marked by the defeat of sin and death in his resurrection by the Holy Spirit.

That's God's announcement in action. He has already done it: His promises fulfilled in Jesus. Now, Paul says, I get to tell it. I'm eager, because I'm never shamed by it: God works in it.

It is God's power: God's action becomes our proclamation, story, faith, change of identity, trust, hope. God saves people by bringing them into the promises he made for the world. Our response is faith (pistis)/believing/trust/commitment of life. It is trusting in God's promises for his whole world fulfilled as God came for us in Jesus Messiah. Astonishingly, the Jews, the focus of the great story, are now fully joined by all people, God's creation.

In this whole set of events culminating in Jesus Messiah, God is revealing himself. He shows his righteousness (dikaios), his faithfulness to his promises, his profound love for all his people, his just indignation at all that corrupts destroys human life. In God's self- revelation, he sets the stamp of the transformed life, the salvation that he calls people to. The revelation, Paul says, is out of faith/faithfulness (pistis), into faith/ faithfulness (pistis). It moves out of God's faithfulness (pistis) into our faith and faithfulness (pistis). From the faithful love embodied in Jesus to our response of trust and transformation.

Paul quotes the prophet Habakkuk, who struggled to understand how God could possibly be faithful when foreigners were conquering Israel. God gives him the vision of a long story slow, sure, moving to a great fulfillment. The righteous lives from faith.' God and human.

Our Trust in God's Faithfulness to His Promises

Paul's language is compressed and challenging. He expects us to think hard, experience God. In English we struggle even to translate. Greek pistis/pisteuein faith, faithfulness, belief, believe, trust, trustworthiness.' Greek dikaios, etc. righteous, righteousness, just, faithful, justify, justification.' Paul will unfold the interactions of these two deeply related concepts.

But the basic pattern: God acts in promise and faithful fulfillment. He has done this in Jesus Messiah, his death/resurrection. The Gospel calls us to trust and be shaped by that reality!

The Gospel of God

We begin explorations of Paul's letter to the church in Rome. Written from Corinth in the winter of 55-56, about 25 yrs. after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.

Paul begins by calling himself a slave of Messiah Jesus Christ = Messiah, anointed King. Paul is a Roman citizen, a Jew, trained as a rabbi, a Pharisee, a Greek-speaking citizen of Tarsus in Cilicia. A slave?! He is a called apostle (emissary), marked off for God's announcement of good news the Gospel of God. That's what this letter is about.

Gospel (euangelion) announces something that has happened. It is not primarily religious doctrine, ethics, philosophy, plan of salvation, etc. Though the event affects all of these.

The event is Jesus: By his life and death Jesus is Messiah (God's anointed King) and Lord. The event is the culmination of scripture, God's promises, prophets' anticipations (Isa 52:7-10) and flows out to touch and change every life, both Jews and Gentiles (nations) all people.

Paul and His Journey to Rome

Paul is ending an intense period of work in the Aegean area (Greece and Turkey). He has established churches in major cities and sent out workers into wider regions. He has lived with intense hardship, beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, etc. (2Cor 11:24-28). But he has brought a message that has transformed the lives of both Jews and pagans, bringing them together in new communities that broke barriers of class, race, religion, gender.

His plan now is to go through Rome to Spain. The church is already strong in Rome, and he hopes that they will help him in the new mission. After he first goes to Jerusalem. But the church in Rome has been experiencing changes. Jews were expelled from Rome by emperor Claudius in 49, who died in 54. Now Jews were returning. After the Jew/Gentile church became entirely Gentile for 5 yrs, again they must deal with Jew/Gentile relations.

Son of God Son of David. What is a Messiah?

There is a reason that this Gospel breaks down strong barriers among people. Because at its heart is the event that broke the fundamental separation between God and humans. If that barrier can be crossed, no artificial wall can stand. It is captured in the phrase God's son' (v 3-4). For Christians the phrase came to mean divine,' but not in Paul's day.

For Jews like Paul, God's son' referred to Israel (Ex 4:22), or to the Davidic king who embodied, Israel (2Sam 7:12). The anointed king, Messiah/Christ, was son of David and thus God's son, without any suggestion of divinity. But Israel had had no legitimate Davidic king since the Babylonian exile. What of the promises (Ps 89; Ps 2)? When would the anointed one come?

Son of God in Power

The promises were also expressed as God's coming to his people; the return of the LORD to Zion (Is 52:8). The arm of the LORD, God's own intervention, who is also servant of the Lord to heal his people (Is 53) was anticipated. How could varied hopes come together?

That was the great announcement of God concerning his son (v 3). One who was flesh, the seed of David like many others, was also Son of God in a new sense, in power, the presence of God (Phi 2:6-11). God was indeed visiting his people; Yahweh was returning to Zion.

This was challenging, seeing One God with new depth. But it was proclaimed by the breaking of another barrier, between the present and the future. God promised the healing of his creation by resurrection, overcoming death. In Jesus, future resurrection became present.

Through these events, Jesus reveals a deep reality of God that gives all humans new identity: grace, love, peace, uniting peoples. Greeks, Romans, Jews, all are called, loved, transformed.