The Debt That Remains

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Romans 13:8–14

Owe no one anything, except to love one another. — Romans 13:8

Those of us who follow the Revised Common Lectionary sometimes forget how much work went into it. Its predecessor, the Common Lectionary, was published in 1983, three years before I entered Duke Divinity School. Many of us used that lectionary during my years at Duke. After two complete three-year cycles of testing and extensive feedback from participating churches, the Revised Common Lectionary was published in 1992—three years after my graduation.

Selecting its readings was no easy assignment. The Bible is much too large to be read in its entirety during Sunday worship, even over a three-year cycle. Passages had to be selected, divided and paired with other passages. Every choice involved judgment; many involved compromise.

We encounter one small but consequential choice in this Sunday’s Epistle. The appointed reading begins with Romans 13:8. The preceding verse is omitted:

Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. — Romans 13:7

Paul, of course, did not number his sentences. Our familiar chapter and verse divisions came centuries later. What we call Romans 13:7 and Romans 13:8 are successive sentences in the same argument, and reading them together affects what we hear.

Verse 7 concerns obligations that can be discharged. A tax is assessed and paid. Revenue is collected. Respect and honor are rendered to those to whom they are due. Paul then turns from those obligations to one that can never be marked “paid in full”: the obligation to love one another.

“Owe no one anything” is not a command that Christians purchase their homes without the use of mortgages. Nor is it a blanket prohibition against every loan, installment account or ordinary commercial obligation. Read in context, Paul’s instruction instead is that we should render what is due and leave no legitimate obligation deliberately unpaid.

Paul identifies one debt that must be handled differently. As NT scholar David Bentley Hart evocatively translates, “Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another….”

Love is an unusual sort of debt. Paying a mortgage reduces the balance. Eventually, one hopes, the lender records the debt as satisfied and returns the note. Love produces no such closing rendering. However faithfully I might love my neighbor today, I shall still owe that neighbor love tomorrow. I may have fulfilled love’s demand in a particular moment, but I have far from exhausted it.

Paul stresses that love is not some warm feeling. Indeed, the commandments against adultery, murder, theft and coveting are gathered into one instruction: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does not replace those commandments by making conduct irrelevant. Love fulfills them by doing what they were intended to require—seeking the neighbor’s good and refusing to do the neighbor harm.

That makes love both simpler and more demanding than any financial ledger. A ledger clearly tells me the amount due. Love requires that I pay attention. What does this person need from me? Does he need patience? Does she require honesty? With regard to this loved one, is my forgiveness required today? As to that child or grandchild, do I need to show restraint? In all these cases, and in countless more, there is no universal invoice, and no receipt proving that I have finally done enough.

Paul closes the passage by adding urgency. “You know what time it is,” he says. It is time to wake from sleep, to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the Lord Jesus Christ [13:11]. Paul is essentially telling us “to get dressed.” Do the next thing love actually requires of us, today, and trust that this is what wearing Christ looks like on an ordinary Wednesday. The obligation to love is not something to be acknowledged in principle and attended to later, when professional deadlines have been met and life has become less crowded. Love is already due.

I confess that this is not the most convenient word for me this week. Every year, from the middle of August through the second week of September, five separate writing deadlines converge on my desk at once, and this year has been no exception. Each one can be finished, submitted, and struck from the list. There is genuine, uncomplicated satisfaction in closing an account like that.

But, Paul reminds us that the most important account remains open.

Taxes can be paid. Manuscripts can be delivered. Mortgages can eventually be satisfied. But no faithful life reaches a point at which love is no longer owed. It is the debt that we pay each day—and find waiting for us again tomorrow.