Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 7 (Fr. Roberts)

When we hear that a man is justified, counted righteous, almost all of us imagine a courtroom. A charge, a judge, a verdict, a record wiped clean. It is a tidy picture. But it is not the one Paul is painting. The word he uses, the word our translation gives as “reckoned”, he repeats eleven times in this one chapter, because the whole argument turns on it. And it is not the courtroom word we take it for.

Righteousness, in Scripture, is less a quality you possess than a bond you stand in. To be righteous is to be in the right with someone. So when God reckons a man righteous, he is not scoring him. He is granting him a standing he did not have on his own. And you can hear what that standing is in the Psalms. Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD, the song asks, and who shall stand in his holy place. The righteous one is the answer. He is the one who may stand in the sanctuary and not be turned away at the door. To be counted righteous is to be granted admission. It is the right to come near.

Paul says the promise is made sure to all of Abraham's seed, and then he calls Abraham the father of all of us. The father of many nations. And that is an impossible thing to call him, because by this point his body is, in Paul's own phrase, as good as dead. A hundred years old, his wife's womb long closed. A dead man does not father one child, let alone a multitude of nations. So how is he our father? Paul answers in the same breath, and the answer drives everything else in the passage. Abraham is a father by the God he believed, the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Those nations did not yet exist when the promise was made. God had to call them into being, as he once called light out of the dark water. The power to become a father was never Abraham's own. It was given to him, by the God who makes the dead alive.

There is an older name for the one who is given that standing. He is called a priest. The priest's whole office is to come near, to enter the holy place and stand before God for the people. And the first priest was not Aaron. It was Adam. The garden he is placed in is a sanctuary, and he is set there to keep it as God's holy place and to stand in the Presence unashamed. And then he is stripped of it. He reached for a glory God meant to give him, and lost the glory he already had. He is driven out, and God sets cherubim and a sword at the gate to bar the way home. The priest is exiled from his own sanctuary. This is what Paul means three verses before our passage for today. All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Not fall short of a rule. Fall short of a glory. We lack the radiance the first man wore in the Presence and lost at the gate.

So when God reckons you righteous, the robe goes back on. This is how the Syriac fathers told the story of our salvation, Ephrem above all, and Jacob of Serugh after him. Adam was clothed at first in a robe of glory, a garment of light, and at the fall he was stripped of it, and the Son of God came down to give the robe back, to clothe the naked exile and bring him home. You were baptized into Christ, Paul tells the Galatians. You put him on. Christ himself is the robe.

But perhaps you suspect the robe is only a costume, that being counted righteous is a fiction, a pretend verdict over a real crime. So consider what kind of word God's word is. It is the word that said let there be light, and there was light, a word that has never once described the world but only ever made it. When that God says righteous over you, he is not pinning a label on you from across the room. He is doing to you what his word did to the dark and the deep. He makes what he says. Augustine put it plainly. The righteousness of God, he wrote, is not the righteousness by which God is himself righteous, but the righteousness with which he clothes a man when he sets him right. Clothes him. The verdict is a vesting.

But John Henry Newman saw what lifts all of this above a change of clothes. If God counts us righteous, and his counting is a making and not a pretending, then what is this righteousness he puts on us? Newman's answer was that it is not a quality at all. It is a Person. Christ, he said, is our righteousness by dwelling in us by the Spirit. He justifies us by entering into us. The robe is not something God hands you at the door and leaves you to wear alone. The robe is the Lord himself, put on from the inside. The glory that makes you fit for the Presence is the Presence, come to live in you. So the man God justifies is not only let back into the temple. He becomes the temple. Do you not know, Paul asks, that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you? The Presence Adam was exiled from, that the high priest could approach only once a year and only in dread, now makes its home inside the very person it has just set right. This is what the Greek fathers dared to call our being made divine, and it is nothing like a man hauling himself up into God. It is God giving his own glory back to the creature, and coming to live within the one he has clothed. The Word became man, he wrote, so that we might be made God.

And now you can see why none of it could happen unless the God who reckons you righteous is the God who raises the dead. You cannot stand in that Presence as you are. The glory that makes a man fit for the Holy of Holies is the same glory that burns up whatever is unfit, and you cannot vest a corpse. The people God is setting right are not only guilty. They are dead. To be brought near is to be made alive enough to bear the Presence and not be destroyed by it. The reckoning that sets you right has to be a resurrection, or it is nothing. Which is why Paul will not stop with Abraham. This was written for us too, he says, for us who believe in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The same word that called light out of the dark, and called a son out of a dead womb, and calls you righteous, is the word that rolled the stone away.

And one last thought draws the whole of it together, and carries us back to that impossible fatherhood. Think of how Isaac came to be. His father was a hundred years old and his mother long past bearing, two bodies as good as dead, and the child of the promise was a life God called up out of that dead-ness. He was, from his first breath, a gift given where there should have been nothing. And every one of us who believes comes into this family by that same gift, a life God gives where there was none. Not by bloodline. But by that one life, given out of death, received through one faith, and worn as one robe. That is what makes this gathering a household. Not that we resemble one another. But because the one life of God has come into us all.

So this is the gospel hidden inside a word we thought we understood. To be reckoned righteous is not a verdict filed in heaven. It is to be raised from the dead. It is to be clothed in the glory the first man lost. It is to be brought back through the sword and the veil into the Presence of God, and to have that Presence make its home in you. The word that raises you is the word that makes us kin. Not by blood. Not by agreement. But by one life, spoken over the grave, and given to all of us.