Romans 12:1-8 (NRSV Updated Edition)
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
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"In writing to the Romans, Paul admonishes them to follow Abraham out of the idolatrous empire in which they live: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom. 12: 2) And what does this transformed people with renewed minds look like? Paul has just told the Romans that such people present their bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is [their] spiritual worship.” (Rom. 12: 1)
"The imperial culture is all about using power to make sacrifices of others for the sake of the Empire. The culture of Christ is all about making a sacrifice of self as did Jesus, so as to make all of our lives an act of self-sacrificial worship. Although emperors always think more highly of themselves than they should, Paul warns us not to think more highly of ourselves than we should, “but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” (Rom. 12: 3) Paul then goes on the enumerate the measures of faith as a distribution of gifts of the Holy Spirit so that each of us makes our bodies living sacrifices of worship in various ways, making up the Body of Christ.
"Being transformed by the renewal of our minds entails a radical makeover. It’s not just a matter of changing one’s mind about what book to read next. Paul is writing about a radical turnaround in one’s attitude to power. The first step is to be very vigilant about the power we happen to have in relation to other people and how we use it. Even if some of us have rather little power we need to be acutely aware of how we use what little we have. Do we try to get an upper hand against other people one way or another rather than looking for ways we can lay down our selves in service to them?"
- Andrew Marr, from blog post titled "The Rock From Which We Are Hewn" (https://andrewmarrosb.blog/2020/08/20/the-rock-from-which-we-are-hewn)
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"Romans 12:1-2 opens the ethical section of the letter by placing the image of sacrifice as a rubric over the discussion. It is, therefore, not substitutionary sacrifice that the image has in mind but rather self-dedication to God. Sacrifice is a metaphor for moral self-dedication and not a ruse for shifting responsibility on to a substitute. Thus the logic of substitution has been reversed, and instead of being a device for escaping responsibility, sacrifice is here a metaphor for the acceptance of responsibility before God. The metaphor is based on the “thanksgiving” element in sacrifice as an image of the moral dedication to God that acknowledges the creator as the “other” who constitutes the self by relationship.
"The noetic element is prominent in the passage — such self-sacrifice is reasonable (logikos) and renews the mind (anakainosis tou noos) — and this gives the following exhortation (Rom 12:3-8) — to maintain the proper order in the community — a moral rather than a sacral basis. In the realm of the ['religious'] Sacred, order is the effect of the filtered violence of ritual and prohibition; here it is to be the result of moral discernment by the renewed mind. Its mark is precisely the rational curb on rivalry by the responsible acceptance of the differentiated functions of an ordered society.
"In this Christian community the differentiation that is normally achieved by the threat of the vengeance of the god institutionalized in the law is to be achieved by rational self-restraint (phronein eis to sophronein — Rom 12:3). Therefore, not only the explicit image of sacrifice but also the deep logic of the passage attests the dialectical influence of the logic of the ['religious'] Sacred. The passage is in dialogue with sacrificial logic, correcting it in the light of the Cross, and redescribing sacrifice as self-sacrifice in thanksgiving, and order as the free acceptance of prudential constraints, rather than the fearful observance of divine sanctions."
- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 150-151
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"As death loses its power, so commitment to the flourishing of what is fragile and precarious becomes possible, and our relationship with time changes. ... If time is not your enemy, then what you achieve or don’t achieve ... is secondary, and whatever you have will be for the flourishing of the weak one for as long as it takes, since you know that you will be *found there*. Being on the inside of the life of God looks like being decanted, by a generosity you didn’t know you had in you, into making a rash commitment which makes a nonsense of death, of worry, and of the panic of time, because you know that you want to be found in loving proximity to what is weak and being brought into being. Wanting to be found there is a huge statement of joy at the power and gentleness of One for whom it is the apparently weak and futile things that are going to be enabled to be brought into being. Being given the daring to be able to lose yourself in being found there is recognized as a privilege to be greeted with praise.
"This, I think, is ... what St Paul would describe as “rightly reasoning worship” (Rom 12:1-2). That God is the One who brings into being what is not. And dwelling on the inside of the life of God means being prepared to lose sight of all the apparently important things that are and to give yourself away in extreme gentleness and tenderness towards that which is apparently not, and yet which is being brought into being out of the brink of nothingness by one not ashamed of mingling with the least important of all, one who has nowhere more important to be (1 Cor. 1.22-29)."
- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pg. 550
[Source of link to Andrew Marr's blog and quotes from Robert Hamerton-Kelly and James Alison, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper16a/]
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