Romans 12:17-21

O Sing of the Wrath

Romans12 by Joshua Palmer

Romans 12:17-21

¹⁷ Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. ¹⁸If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." ²⁰To the contrary, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head." ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Mynin aeide thea Pylyiadeo Achilyos.” So begins one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written. It is the first line of Homer’s Iliad. Maybe you read it in high school or remember the story from the movie Troy a few years back. 

The Iliad is the story of the cost of one man’s quest for vengeance. The quote reads, “Of the wrath, sing goddess sing, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.” And what follows is a detailed record of the destruction wrought by Achilles as he seeks to avenge the death of his cousin. Line after line and chapter after chapter, with brutal lists of the dead, Homer warns us of what vengeance can do to two states. And to one man. Out of his rage, Achilles pursues revenge even knowing that he will die because of it. Later, after his death, his friend Odysseus is allowed to speak to him briefly in Hades. There, Achilles says that he regrets choosing the path of warfare and destruction.

 So it is with humanity, and so it is with us. When we are wronged, hurt, abused, mistreated, or manhandled, we are filled with wrath. Sometimes our wrath is red-hot, like Achilles; sometimes it is passive-aggressive, just simmering under the surface. For deep within us all is an innate sense of justice. When justice does not seem so blind, or is blind in all the wrong ways, we seek redress. We leap to right the wrong, particularly if it is against ourselves.

How deep does our desire for vengeance go?

Imagine two children playing. Imagine that there is just one new, interesting toy. And one of the children takes it from the other. You know what will happen. The wronged child will first complain, loudly, to his parents about fairness and favoritism. If this does not work, he will take action on his own. If he is older than the other child he will use cunning to get the toy back. If he is a toddler he will use his teeth.

Now imagine a freshly mopped floor in Walmart. An indolent employee has not put out the yellow caution sign and you slip and fall and hurt yourself. You do not immediately think of biting like the toddler. No, you think of compensation. For your doctor bills, you reason with yourself. How will I pay for the doctor bills? And if the wealthy corporation is less than generous, you think of personal injury lawyers. Besides, Walmart can afford it, they won’t even miss it. Right?

The Christians Paul is writing to in Rome had a much better case to make for wrath and vengeance than we usually do. They had earlier been expelled from Rome by edict of the Emperor Claudius. This probably meant they had forfeited their property along with their civil rights. Furthermore, the reason they got expelled was for fighting with the Jews. We know what fighting with the Jews looks like from the rest of the New Testament. Paul had been whipped, flogged, stoned, imprisoned, chased off and thrown out of synagogues all over the Mediterranean for fighting the Jews. We can imagine the scene in Rome was not much different.

And yet, Paul instructs these Christians to do good rather than avenging themselves. “Repay no one evil for evil,” he says. “Never avenge yourselves,” he says. But rather, “do what is right” and “live peaceably with all.”

You are probably thinking, Ok, this is about Christians having to turn the other cheek, as we’ve been told to do probably hundreds of times since we were kids. This is about loving our neighbor as ourselves, right? Well, you’d think so. You’d think that the command to love our neighbors is the reason we are forbidden from avenging ourselves, wouldn’t you?

But, oddly, that is not the reason Paul gives for prohibiting revenge. Taking vengeance doesn’t just violate the second table of the law, the neighbor part. It violates the First Commandment as well. Paul writes, "but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'" Paul says we must not repay evil for evil, or an eye for an eye, because that is trampling on the rights of God. “Vengeance is mine… says the Lord.” It is God’s job to make sure the wicked get their just desserts. It is His throne before which all men will be judged.

The Scriptures are replete with passages which affirm this truth. Deuteronomy 32 says, “Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and their doom comes swiftly.” Hebrews 10, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians, “But God’s wrath has come upon them at last!” Jesus, in Luke 18, “shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.” Paul, in his second letter to the Thessalonians,

“since indeed God considers it just [or righteous] to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God.”

And again from 1 Thessalonians 4, “the Lord is an avenger.”

         So before you pound out that angry email, before you honk at that that kid who’s too busy texting to go when the light turns green, before you sue someone, remember whose toes you are treading on. Remember whose shoes you are stepping into. Could you imagine walking into a courtroom, shoving aside the judge, banging the gavel, and dispensing justice from the bench? How then do you propose to take matters into your own hands?

      And this is the rub. We think we are God. We want to mete out our own justice because, at heart, we are a bunch of vigilantes. No, vigilantes has just a shade of a positive connotation. We want to be a lynch mob – judge, jury, and executioner. We brazenly would supersede almighty God’s sovereign authority because we do not fear Him. We would right our own wrongs, and we would do it on our schedule.

Why do we do this? Because we do not trust God to balance the scales of justice. We do not trust Him to right the wrongs. We do not trust Him to avenge us. We want Him to come with His angels in flaming fire and inflict vengeance on those who do not know God, but we aren’t sure that He really will.

And yet, somehow, when we fantasize about justice, we never see ourselves as “those who do not know God.” We are always vying to be the judge, never to be the defendant. We always have a good reason for being rude, for being right, for cutting someone off in traffic. In your mind’s eye, are you ever the one doing the first evil? Are you ever the one who did the initial wrong?

You are. And I have bad news for you. Justice, particularly of the “an eye for an eye” sort, is God’s justice. A fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is how you ought to pay, not only for what you do to those around you, but for usurping your God by trying to punish the people around you for their wrongs. All that vengeance, all those avenging angels, all that purging fire … should fall on you. God’s vengeance should be wrought on us.

Children are prone to cry, “that’s not fair!” when they are being punished. Little do they know that fairness is the last thing they want. If we got the justice we so madly chase after, we would suddenly find our thirst for vengeance immediately quenched.

And justice would come to us if not for Jesus. You see, we don’t just fail to give place to the wrath of God, taking justice into our own hands, we deserve the wrath of God. We are the ones on whom His vengeance should fall. But God loved us so dearly that He sent Jesus to take our place, as our substitute. Long ago, and in a hundred different ways we abrogated any claim we had to justice. When we threw in our lot with the devil, when we openly declared ourselves to be enemies of God, and, even today, when we fed our fleshly desires, we threw away any claim we had to justice.

No, you have no claim on God, no right to demand justice, except through the blood of Jesus. That blood, freely shed for you, purchased you back from the devil. That blood, shed on the tree for you, turned the vengeance of God away from you. Let us be clear, the vengeance was poured out. But where it should have been poured on you, it was instead poured out onto the only person in the history of mankind who did not deserve it. On the cross, the vengeance that belongs to God – “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord" – belonged to God both in the giving and in the receiving. And all this for you, so that you could return to God’s side as His son. Though you had joined His enemies and attempted to seize His right to justice, He wanted you back.

And you know how God tends to throw curveballs just when you think you’ve got Him figured out? In a weird way, by relying on the greatest injustice, the true Son dying for us traitors, we finally get that justice we’ve been waiting for. And that’s because, Jesus’ resurrection is not the end of the story. One day He will return for us. When He does, he will judge the nations, and the scales of justice will again be restored. Christ will come with His angels and set everything aright, just as it should be, properly balanced.

In that day, there will be a judgment. But we need not fear that judgment seat, that Judge. No, when we who are baptized into Christ stand before the judgment seat of God, before the throne of the God of the universe, we will not be judged according to what we deserve. For we have put on Christ, and will be judged according to His merit. And there could not be a more secure resting place than in the arms of Jesus.

So where does that leave us? Now that you, dear Christian, have been purchased by the blood of Christ and are no longer standing, disarmed at the business end of God’s wrath, what are you to do? The answer is given to us in the Catechism. Now we can fear and trust in God. We can fear God, respecting His sovereignty. And we can trust that He will bring retribution on His enemies and ours in His time.

But Paul goes further. Paul says that when we are freed from our need for revenge we can actually do good for our enemies, and thereby overcome evil. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” We can do good for our enemies because we have not received what we deserved. This is how Augustine and Luther talk about the burning coals at the end of verse 20. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Our good deeds burn the Old Adam flesh of our enemies. Then, hopefully, one day our enemies will become our brothers as the fire of the Holy Spirit falls on them when they too are baptized.

So too we are free now not to worry about getting our own. We can be at peace with everyone: intentionally ignoring a snide remark from our mother-in-law, refusing to bite when an insult is offered, declining to comment on blog posts.

Because, in the end, God will be God.

Remember, however, that although I have used the metaphor of the scales of justice and have spoken of Jesus’ righting them, the truth is, for you, those scales are broken. Thanks be to Christ, you are now free to fear, love, and trust in God above all things.