Devotion for Thursday, March 12, The Second Week of Lent
Romans 5:6 | While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
This is no mixed message, there is one message. It is a strong message, true, and one to be urgently studied, and conceivably rejected; but it is not a double message. It asserts the helplessness of human kind. “While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
To die for a person would only have meaning or nobility (vs. foolishness) if the person needed dying for. Sacrificing one’s life for a person implies the direst need on the part of that person. St. Paul sees us as absolutely caught, enthralled, in such direct need. We are caught between the demands of our voraciously needy narcissistic nature (sin, in Paul’s language) and the demands of God’s total perfection (the Law, summarized in the Decalogue). Ours is a supreme unanswerable caughtness, truly with no exit, zippered in between two opposite countervailing forces, sin and law. We are not only “helpless,” we are “ungodly.”
The good news then takes two forms: God came at the right time, He comes to our helpless lives at the urgently needed time; and he tilts his love toward the ungodly themselves. “They”—we—do not have to want to get godly in order for God’s love to move in our direction. It is to the degree we are ungodly that God gets set in our direction. This is fantastic and miraculous.