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Some words to savour from N.T. Wright on Romans 5:12-21

The overwhelming impression left by these verses is the superabundance of grace. However much theologians and preachers know this with their heads, and explain it as a theory, it remains strange and surprising that it should actually be true, that it should be the central characteristic of the world in which we – even theologians and preachers! – are called to live. Surrounded as we are day by day with so many signs and symbols of sin and death, and living in a culture that has invented a secularized version of the doctrine of Original Sin under the guise of the hermeneutic of suspicion, all our instincts tell us that life is hard, cruel and unfair. If there are signs of life and hope, they tend to be those we make for ourselves. Our culture thus oscillates between despair and self-salvation.

Into this world the news of grace, of the undeserved gift of abundant life, bursts again and again, in the message of Jesus, offering a radical alternative, an entirely different way of construing reality, a new way of conceiving our whole experience of the world and indeed of God. At every point where the seeds of wickedness have been planted, bearing deadly fruits of all kinds, there the grace of God has been planted alongside, a vibrant plant that will take over the soil and produce a life-giving harvest. Of course, it takes faith to believe this and act on it; precisely the faith that believes God raised Jesus from the dead, and that therefore his cross was indeed “the free gift following many trespasses”, “the one man’s obedience”. But once the world has been glimpsed in this light, everything is different, not least Christian mission and the prayer that accompanies it.

Wright, N.T. 2002 Romans. Abingdon.