Made Able to Stand

I have read Romans 14 many times. Its admonition not to cause any brother to stumble was a cornerstone in the communal church in which I was raised. But cornerstones themselves are made for stumbling, as it implies elsewhere. In my growing-up church, this passage was an oft-repeated warning against doing anything to give offense. It upheld the status quo on any matter, because any deviation from the status quo would surely offend some weaker brother.

But as this passage was read in the Epistle lesson at my current church recently, I noticed the fourth verse of the chapter which must have been added after I was long gone from my old church: "Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand."

The Lord is able to make him stand.

Far from its use to monger fear among the saints and to maintain conformity in all things, and beyond the instruction to mind one's own business when it comes to judging each others' spiritual lives is the assurance that, as regards that weaker brother, the Lord is able to make him stand.

Who is the weaker brother? In the church in which I grew up, the weaker brother was one who, given a liberty, would surely take it. But in Romans, the weaker brother is one who, given a liberty (eating meat) would surely be afraid to take it. I was raised believing the weaker brother would fall in to sin by not observing boundaries and conforming to rules. We all had to follow the rules so as not to cause him to stumble. No one ever suggested the weaker brother was the one who wouldn't let go of the rules.

Paul says the weaker brother falls into legalism by not being able to see past the rules: by setting boundaries for himself in fear. (That fear is a litter-mate of the fear that hounded the servant in Jesus' parable: the servant who buried the treasure the Master had given into his stewardship.) We are not constrained to the boundaries a brother sets for himself out of his timidity. Love certainly leads us not to flaunt our liberties in his face. Respect for our common master leads us to respect the weaker brother and not to judge him. But we do not need to bow to his anxiety. The Lord is able to make him stand. In time, he will stand and cross his own boundaries to discover now-unimaginable freedoms.

In the mean time, we have our own fears to face. We have our own fear-born boundaries to cross. And we have the same hope that He will make us stand, too, and lead us into freedoms we can not now ourselves imagine.