Romans 14, Part 1. On the brother Christ died for.
By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died.— Romans 14:15
The Bible is a book of treasure. We usually mean by that the treasure of salvation, the word that gives us eternal life. But the same book is just as concerned with something closer to the ground: how we are to walk with God, and how we are to live with each other. How a brother and a brother nothing like him can stay in one room. How the world God made at the beginning, the one He called good, can begin to look like itself again among people who believe.
Romans 14 is one of the places Paul writes about exactly that. Over the next few days we will stay in this chapter and let it teach us how conflict between believers is meant to be handled, and what a beautiful relationship in Christ actually looks like. This is the first.
Rome’s believers had a history most churches never have. Around AD 49 the emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from the city. Luke mentions it in passing, because that is how Priscilla and Aquila ended up in Corinth (Acts 18:2). For several years the house churches of Rome were run by Gentiles. Then Claudius died, the Jewish believers came home, and many scholars read Romans 14 and 15 as Paul writing into that reunion.
Two groups, one table. One side, mostly Jewish believers, kept the food laws they had kept since childhood. The other, mostly Gentiles, had learned to eat anything. Paul calls the first group the weak and the second the strong (Romans 14:1–2; 15:1), and the labels are about practice, not blood. Paul himself, a Jew, counts himself among the strong. The two sides clashed on nearly everything. What to eat. Which days mattered. Whose way was the Christian way. The question under the whole chapter is not who was right. It is how two people who differ on almost everything can share one table in a way that pleases the Lord (Romans 14:18).
Paul tells them where he stands. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself (Romans 14:14). That is not his opinion. It is Jesus, who said nothing going into a person can defile him (Mark 7:15), a saying Mark glosses with a single line: Thus he declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). On the question of the menu, the strong were right.
And then Paul turns on them.
Let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, he writes to both sides, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother (Romans 14:13).
Two words sit under that verse. Proskomma (πρόσκομμα) is the thing your foot catches on. Skandalon (σκάνδαλον) was originally the stick that springs a trap. Paul is not describing an accident. He is describing a mechanism, something set in a brother’s path that brings him down. And it is the strong who are setting it.
Jesus had been blunt about this. Whoever causes one of these little ones to fall, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the sea (Matthew 18:6). Not a hand mill. The kind turned by a donkey. Better to die that way than to live having tripped a brother.
So Paul gives the strong a new way to see the weak. Not “the one who is wrong about meat.” The one for whom Christ died. Before you exercise a freedom, look at who is across the table. There is a price on him, and it was paid at a cross. Set your steak beside that and see what it weighs.
Paul, who was free, did not exempt himself. It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble (Romans 14:21).
Two dinner tables can teach this. Where I grew up, a guest who eats heartily and leaves an empty rice bowl honors the cook. In a neighboring country the custom runs the other way. A host lays out more than anyone could finish, and if the guests clear it all, the host is embarrassed. An empty table means he was stingy. Food should be left over. Both customs are love. One says thank you by finishing; the other says welcome by abundance. Someone from one country watching the other could easily conclude that those people have no manners. They would be wrong. Nobody at either table is being rude.
Paul’s churches were like that, only the stakes were higher. Difference was never the problem. Contempt was. Paul’s word for what the strong felt toward the weak is despise, and for what the weak felt toward the strong, pass judgment (Romans 14:3). Both are ways of looking at a brother and seeing an obstacle.
Somewhere in our church there is probably a person we have filed under the problem. Too rigid. Too loose. Too different from us. I almost wrote “in your church,” and then remembered where my own list is kept.
Paul does not ask us to agree with that person. He asks us to see the price on them. Christ did not die for our position. He died for the one across the table.
That is where this chapter begins. Tomorrow we go further into what Paul asks of us next.
Nothing is unclean. Someone is precious.
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