Letter to the Romans
1 From Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ,
an apostle called and set apart for God’s Good News,
2 the very promises he foretold through his prophets in the sacred Scriptures,
3 regarding his Son, who was born in the flesh a descendant of David,
4 and has been recognized as the Son of God endowed with Power,
upon rising from the dead through the Holy Spirit.
Through him, Jesus Christ, our Lord,
5 and for the sake of his Name,
we received grace and mission in all the nations, for them to accept the faith.
6 All of you, the elected of Christ, are part of them,
you, the beloved of God in Rome, called to be holy:
7 May God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, give you grace and peace.
Paul longs to visit them
8 First of all, I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is spoken of all over the world.
9 And God, whom I serve in spirit by announcing the Good News of his Son, is my witness that I remember you in my prayers at all times.
10 I pray constantly that, if it is his will, he make it possible for me to visit you.
11 I long to see you and share some spiritual blessings with you to streng t h en you.
12 In that way, we will encourage each other by sharing our com mon faith.
13 You must know, brothers and sisters, that many times I have made plans to go to you, but till now I have been prevented.
14 I would like to harvest some fruits among you, as I have done among other nations. Whether Greeks or foreigners, cultured or ignorant, I feel under obligation to all.
15 Hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel also to you who are in Rome.
16 For I am not ashamed at all of this Good News; it is God’s power saving those who believe, first the Jews, and then the Greeks.
17 This Good News shows us the saving justice of God; a justice that saves exclusively by faith, as the Scripture says: The upright one shall live by faith.
Humankind under God’s “wrath”
18 For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who have silenced the truth by their wicked ways.
19 For everything that could have been known about God was clear to them: God himself made it plain.
20 Because his invisible attributes – his everlasting power and divinity – are made visible to reason by means of his works since the creation of the world.
So they have no excuse,
21 for they knew God and did not glorify him as was fitting, nor did they give thanks to him. On the contrary, they lost themselves in their reasoning and darkness filled their minds.
22 Believing themselves wise, they became foolish:
23 they exchanged the Glory of the immortal God for the likes of mortal human beings, birds, animals and reptiles.
24 Because of this God gave them up to their inner cravings; they did shame ful things and dishonored their bodies.
25 They exchanged God’s truth for a lie; they honored and worshiped created things instead of the Creator, to whom be praise for ever, Amen!
26 Because of that, God gave them up to shame ful passions: their wo men exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
27 Si milarly, the men, giving up natural sexual relations with women, were lustful of each other, they did, men with men, shameful things, bringing upon them selves the punishment they deserve for their wickedness.
28 And since they did not think that God was worth knowing, he gave them up to their senseless minds so that they committed all kinds of obscenities.
29 And so they are full of injustice, per versity, greed, evil; they are full of jealousy, murder, strife, deceit, bad will and gossip.
30 They com mit calumny, offend God, are haughty; they are proud, liars, clever in doing evil. They are rebellious towards their par ents,
31 senseless, disloyal, cold-hearted and mer ci less.
32 They know of God’s judgment which declares worthy of death anyone living in this way; yet not only do they do all these things, they even applaud anyone who does the same.
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Comments Letter to the Romans, Chapter 1
• 1.1 Paul, an apostle called and set apart for God’s Good News. Paul speaks of the Gospel three times in this paragraph. In his time the word Gospel, which signifies Good News, conveyed the meaning of victory. Paul presents himself as one announcing the liberating message given to all humankind.
What is Paul’s Gospel? He develops it briefly in the following lines. The Son of God has come down to earth and after sharing our common condition, has through his Resur rection, taken possession of the Glory due to him.
An apostle called and set apart… (v. 1). The twelve apostles were selected by Jesus and confirmed in their mission by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Here Paul reminds us that he himself was made an apostle by Jesus, who met him on the road to Damascus.
Recognized as the Son of God (v. 4). Another possible translation: constituted, or designated as Son of God. That does not mean that Jesus was not the Son of God before his resurrection, but he was so really one of us that nothing of his divinity showed. On the day of the resurrection, the Spirit of God “invaded” his human nature: from now on he is present and active in our history as the Son of God.
Paul usually reserves the term “God” for God the Father, fountain of the divine be ing, from whom all divine initiatives originate. The Father communicates his life to the Son. The Son, for his part, reflects this life back to the Father in such a way that they mutually generate the Holy Spirit. The whole vocation of a Christian is rooted in this life of God, and that is why Paul constantly mentions the names of the three divine Persons.
We will encourage each other by sharing our common faith (v. 12). The apostle, as well as the believer, needs to share anxieties, hopes and a common faith. The Church is a fellowship and in order to develop our Christian life, we must multiply meetings in which we can be in communion with one another.
• 16. I am not ashamed… (v. 16). He who is proclaimed Savior by Paul is a crucified Jew, an unknown carpenter. How often they laughed at Paul when he spoke about this dead man who had risen from the tomb to be the Judge of humankind!
It is God’s power… (v. 16). The miracles that accompany the preaching of the Gospel are signs of God’s powerful action in transforming people and history in every place where the Gospel is preached and inspires those who hear it.
Upright… righteous… righteousness (v. 17). The word justice used by Paul also signifies uprightness. On the other hand, when he speaks of the justice of God usually he is not saying that God is just: his justice denotes an intervention to keep order in the world. In a special way the justice of God has humans to become just, that is, upright before his eyes. It is a matter of understanding that the words justice and just had a wide meaning in the Christian vocabulary and now simply designate all that is good: being just speaks of a life as God would have it. The just person is rather like a saint, in the way we understand it today, or putting it more modestly, she is as she should be in God’s eyes.
For that reason we shall at times translate God justifies us by: God makes us just and holy, or: God gifts us with true righteousness.
The Jews, like most humans, thought that peo ple become righteous by their own efforts. Paul retorts that the righteousness God wants is some thing much greater and beyond what human efforts can achieve. We are upright and friends of God when he allows us to approach him after making us holy by his grace.
The apostles preached the Gospel to two classes of persons:
– the Jews, prepared by God to receive the Savior,
– the Greeks (or people who spoke the Greek language). In fact the Jews con sidered Greek all those who were subjects of the Roman Empire. These people did not know the Word of God, nor did they have any hope in him.
Paul shows that all people need the Gos pel. Because the world lives in sin, and all of us to a greater or lesser degree are responsible for existing evil, we must believe in the Gospel if we want to be saved.
• 18. In these paragraphs Paul speaks of the pagan world of the Greeks, which included the great majority of humankind who had not received the word of God. In reality, God had not been absent from their conscience, and through centuries of civilization and religious research they tried to know God and the truth. Paul shows the failure of such human endeavor; ignorance and immorality are much more prev alent in the countries where God had not spoken as he did to the Jews.
They knew God and did not glorify him as was fitting… (v. 21). We have to compare this text with another famous one, found in Wisdom 13, and with the speech of Paul in Acts 17:27-29. In these verses the Bible shows clearly that it is possible for everyone to know God. Anyone who looks at the world and reflects on life easily finds signs of the presence of God. Yet, when one lives in sin, truth is silenced. People do not openly deny God; they simply ignore him.
Faith is neither an option nor a luxury, as if we could well do without it. Certainly a majority on the planet do without it comfortably. Yet, if we were to withdraw all that comes from faith in our culture and life, the world would die for want of hope, as is already the case with nations and ideologies that have renounced it. This is why, in announcing the Gospel we free people who are truly in need of the Gospel, even though they may feel satisfied with themselves.
God gave them up to their inner cravings. Paul stresses the fact of homosexual relationships. In the Greek world, sexual relations especially between men were accepted and even praised by the greatest philosophers. Paul says: such an attitude is not the sign of a more open or free spirit, but comes from their ignorance of God.
This condemnation which only repeats those of the Old Testament (Lev 20:13) astonishes even Christians in the countries where the real religion is liberalism. Total sexual license with, in particular, the acceptance of such relationships flows from an idolatry proper to the liberal society, which has become a society of consumption. There, for those who are well off and in good health, the ideal is to satisfy every desire and profit from life to the maximum. Once God has been replaced by creatures, animals or fabricated articles, one can have him say everything, because, in fact his Glory is not known and darkness fills the mind.
In fact, homosexual relationships are a form of idolatry of one’s body. It is not, of course, a question of condemning those inclined towards homosexuality, whether it be by nature, or much more often, through cultural deformation.