By combining Romans 1:16-17 with Romans 3:22-31, this week’s lectionary reading underscores some of Paul’s most important theological arguments about a “gospel” that is, in Paul’s words, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16).  The details of Paul’s arguments are shaped in part by their original context in the earliest decades of Christianity.  Yet his arguments also have implications for contemporary Christians, and the ways in which we think about homosexuality.

One of the central components of Paul’s gospel is his view that all human beings, including both Jews and Gentiles, “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23).  The sinfulness of humanity was still apparent to Paul, as it had been to God in the days of Noah according to Genesis 6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19. 

In order to make his point in the context of early Christianity, however, where some Christians came from Jewish backgrounds and others came from Gentile backgrounds, Paul finds it necessary to challenge the belief that following Jewish law in itself allows a person to become righteous before God.  Paul, who was himself Jewish, does recognize some “advantages” to being a Jew (3:1); for the Jews are those who were first given the law, which Paul in 3:2 calls “the oracles of God.”  These oracles are the same “words” and “commandments” of God referred to in Deuteronomy 11:18-21, 26-28.  While acknowledging this “advantage,” however, Paul in Romans insists upon a kind of equality for everyone in the eyes of God. 

Whereas the Christians of Paul’s day were apparently making distinctions among themselves on the basis of such matters as the practice of circumcision (a requirement for Jewish men according to biblical law), Paul refused to allow such differences in bodily practice to mark a boundary between those who had been justified by God and those who had not.  Everyone has sinned and so needs to be justified before God; but all human beings, including both Jews and Gentiles, “are now justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).  Thus in Paul’s view Jewish Christians have no reason for “boasting” (3:27), as some of them seem to have been doing, about the fact that they practice the “works” prescribed by the law.  Each person alike is in need of being made righteous by God, but ultimately “a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (3:28).  Since “God is one,” God “will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith” (3:30).