Sermon preached at Evensong of the Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2024

In the year 121 AD, the Emperor’s secretary completed what was to become a blockbuster. Suetonius’ The Life of the Caesars, or The Twelve Caesars, recounted through history, anecdote and gossip, the details of the lives of twelve Roman Emperors. From Julius Caesar to Domitian, these accounts spanned over a century of Imperial rule, and remain very important sources for Roman history today. Biography is often able to give us particular context or colour to wider historical reflection, and Suetonius’s Life of the Emperor Claudius certainly does this in buckets.

At Sunday Evensong this month, we have been exploring a handful of chapters from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. Probably written at some point in the 50s AD and almost certainly from Corinth, Paul’s letter to the Roman church is a mature statement of many of his theological themes. Through this letter, Paul is introducing himself to a church which he has not founded, nor for whom he has a particular care, but which he will visit in due course. The passage we heard read tonight from Chapter 13 feels like a very strange insertion in the overall context of the letter. The preceding verses have been about overcoming evil with good, blessing those who persecute you, and feeding your enemies. Then, we have what feels like a sudden gear change as Paul seems to enter hectoring mode, telling his readers pretty bluntly to respect the governing authorities which do not ‘bear the sword in vain’! After seven verses we then get back into the thread of the letter with some teaching about love and the urgency of discipleship. So, what is going on?

One answer to this question is perhaps found in Suetonius’s Life of Claudius. We know that a large number of Jews were present in Rome in the middle-middle/end of the first century, and the letter to the Romans steers us strongly to believe that at least some significant figures who followed Christ in the Roman Church had a Jewish background. Suetonius reports that the Emperor Claudius ‘acted against the Jews’ because they had been making constant ‘disturbances at the instigation’ of someone called Chrestus. Many scholars believe that this is a reference not to a popular agitator, but is instead a sloppy variant of Christus – Christ. We know that the Emperor expelled the Jews from Rome for public disorder over this figure. So, it is very plausible to read the available evidence in a way which assumes that there had been riots when Jesus the Messiah (the Christus) had first been proclaimed in the synagogues of Rome. Paul is eager not to encourage sedition but stability and social cohesion. Followers of Jesus should be good members of society, partially because of what Paul believes, as a Roman citizen, about the nature of that society’s structure, and also perhaps because he does not want Christians to become known as troublemakers. That would not be good for a newly emerging Messianic sect which proclaims One God at the expense of ancient polytheism. To us today, Paul’s unqualified directness may seem naïve or vulnerable to all sorts of abuses, but this is a letter not a treatise, and therefore has a context. That context is historical, surely, but also literary. The literary context of Paul’s teaching is within the wider ethic which he sketches elsewhere in the letter. Immediately after these verses, Paul sums up this section by referring to the great commandment: love your neighbour as yourself. Love is the fulfilling of the law. Love is the completion of politics, because love is the consummation of God’s gift.

There is a vast volume of Christian reflection on what it is to be a good citizen, and how to engage with power. It is not monochrome. Although there are very many heroic stories of Christians resisting the corruption of power, and indeed of the Christian tradition shaping the practice and policies of government, Christians are as capable of colluding with tyranny as any other group. Paul’s teaching in those early verses of Romans 13 is based on an assumption that the structures of civic society are somehow divinely mandated, as well as a sense that the Pax Romana is worth defending. Whilst we might be properly suspicious of either or both of these assumptions, they do perhaps provoke some thoughts as we move towards a general election this week.

For Paul, a realisation that the authorities within society may be negligent, corrupt or lacklustre does not nullify the role of the state itself. The state, and its leaders, have certain priorities and responsibilities which are inherent to itself if it is to be a state. If you’re particularly interested in this theologically, later Christian writers such as Augustine and Martin Luther develop this line of thinking in fascinating ways. Today, we might consider just how our public structures are best able to deliver the public good. In conversations around budgets, corporate and individual responsibility, the priorities for society, how might our discernment and our vote engage with those policies which enrich the possibility of our state becoming a better kind of state, the state better-doing-what-it-does. Whilst for each of us personally, those questions may lead us to party political conclusions, they are not principally party political questions. Whilst we would perhaps resist Paul’s opinion that governing structures have some kind of divine mandate, surely Christians throughout history have insisted that these structures can be used for good or for ill, and that they routinely need refreshment and imagination. The structures of our society can offer an architecture which promotes a Christian vision of wholeness, flourishing, and justice – or they can be less than that. And if we want them to do the former, that refreshment and imagination is going to be necessary again and again.

The second category in Paul’s thinking which I have assumed for this afternoon is that the Pax Romana was something worth defending. The Pax Romana was a period of relative peace and stability for around two centuries which began with the reign of Augustus, still Emperor at the time of Jesus’s birth, in 27 BC. The concept was hugely popularised by the philosopher Seneca in the mid 50s, around the time that Paul was writing Romans.

Now, there were of course downsides to the Pax Romana, presumably not least for some of those affected by the Empire’s expansion. Surely, it was useful propaganda. But at its heart was the sense that stability is worth preserving, that chaos is ultimately destructive, and that a shared peace is one which protects and enables the flourishing of the whole. Those are priorities which Christians can also embrace today. In our political decisions, we need to work out what we value. What we want to preserve. What is necessary to ensure a basic level of societal peace and protection for all.

We cannot read a straightforward modern political blueprint off the pages of the New Testament. But we can get a sense of societal priorities, and of how the formation of a Christian life can relate to those priorities. At the end of today’s reading, Paul reminds the early Roman Christians that the only debt they should have is love for one another. This is a love which, for those Christians, within a few years, would lead them to martyrdom. It is a love which cares for the poor and outcast as Jesus did. A love which binds together rather than breaks apart. Which treasures rather than traumatises. It is a love which leads oneself again and again to self-examination and to the challenge of forgiveness. What in our own habits and decisions can help shape a society which draws on love as a political force?  

When we talk about love as a political category, we should be neither romantic nor naïve. The love we see flowing from the heart of Jesus is self-giving, rejected, poured out, vulnerable. But it is also the very stuff of creation, the energy of life, disrupting, embracing, relentlessly and lavishly given, resolute, unquenchable. Structures which serve that kind of love and allow it to thrive – in the church and in secular politics – are very hard to find. Because if we mistake those structures for the gift itself, they can so quickly become idolatrous and diabolical. The place to start is in our own hearts, and our own communities. And, only in the security of the love which we owe one another, to hold each other to account.