Within the coming year, by June 2023, a fixture of society I have known all my life since elementary school may be on the chopping block. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court may declare against the use of “affirmative action” in decisions about hiring, college admission, etc.
I ashamedly confess that when I was old enough to learn what affirmative action is, I resisted it. I used the term “reverse discrimination” to describe a practice I felt might be taking opportunities away from people like me, white and male. It’s taken me a long time to see how wrong I was.
The practice of preference based on race or gender directed at correcting the imbalance and injustice of preferential treatment that had long run in the other direction is a good thing. And it has a biblical basis.
Jewish readers of Paul’s letter to the Romans very likely supposed him to be giving unfair, preferential treatment to Gentiles. That concern is at the heart of the whole letter, Paul’s attempt to show how God is actually just and fair to both Jews and Gentiles, while at the same time showing incredible grace toward the latter. Our text for this Sunday, the first in Lent, Romans 10:8b-13, contains one of the most well-known verses in Scripture, often used in helping people come to faith in Christ, Romans 10:9:
“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Paul’s discussion and the actual Jewish response to his theology is much more complex, but a useful simplification for my purposes is to suggest that the average pious Jew might have responded to that verse with the feeling, “That’s too easy!” For those who have lived lives of deep devotion, prayer, sacrifice, and giving of aid to those in need, Paul’s theology of simple confession and faith might even have seemed insulting. Surely Gentiles would not be admitted to the saving grace of God without at least some form of the kind of piety which marked good Jewish people.
The argument of all of Romans is meant to show that God can in fact be just while bringing Gentiles into His kingdom as easily as Romans 10:9 suggests. Part of that is the arc of the whole letter, the occurrence of the phrase “the obedience of faith” at the beginning and the end, which makes it clear that a salvation based on faith still includes a transformation toward obedience.
Therefore, there is no basis for the use of a phrase in verse 12 in our text, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek,” to disparage present day calls for “equity” rather than “equality” in regard to race or for misuse of a passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream,” speech to argue that the correct approach to race is a supposed color-blindness which treats all people in every way the same. God’s exceptional grace to Gentiles demonstrates that such blindness to people’s actual situation in the world is not at all how God operates.
No, the “no distinction” here is the announcement that God is gracious to both Jews and Gentiles and that both come to Him on the basis of faith, though by different paths. In being particularly gracious to Gentiles, God is not abandoning His chosen people, nor even expecting of them more than that “obedience of faith” which He expects of all people.
Thus our text in verse 13 concludes with the same quotation from Joel 2:32 that the apostle Peter used in his sermon on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:21, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” There are plenty of distinctions in our world. Justice demands that we not be blind to those distinctions, that we allow those distinctions to leads us to greater compassion for those most in need or for those most oppressed. But like God’s own similar compassion for Gentiles, the ultimate result is no distinction in love for them versus the Jewish people. The rest of verse 12, after that “no distinction” phrase, is, “the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.”
The distinctions are there. Just as in God’s salvation they demand that people be treated differently, with more grace and even preference for those who fall lowest in society’s framework. But that gracious preference is only that there might ultimately be no distinction in the end, no distinction in the experience and enjoyment of the love of God in Jesus Christ.