Why the Spirit Yearns

There are some problems in Theodore Jennings’s Outlaw Justice (note my comments here). But there are many, many insights in Jennings’s consistently political reading of Romans.

On the Spirit’s intercession (135), for instance, he writes, that “the traditional translation, [the Spirit] ‘helps us,’ is, I think, flat wrong – the spirit is a sharer, a partaker in this very weakness of groaning, of yearning.” He longs along with us because “How do we know how to say what we hope for or yearn for, really, deeply, truly? We don’t know the word that say or bring to speech that which has not yet ever been, that which is the deepest yearning of inanimate and animate nature.”

But, Jennings adds, in that very yearning is a glimpse of what awaits: “Somehow in this groaning and yearning, we glimpse the awaited solidarity of earth and humanity and spirit. The beginning of that solidarity for which we hope if we dared to speak its name is ‘already’ present . . . as groaning. . . . the praying/yearning of spirit seems like weakness but is already the joining together of what has been separated, and thus is a strange kind of power, that which raises from the dead.”

Or this, on Paul’s encouragement to us to address our God as Abba Father (128-9), a name that is both Judean/Aramaic and Gentile/Greek: “There is only once place in the Gospels . . . where Jesus calls God abba: in Mark’s gospel at the point of Jesus’s desolation prior to death as he struggles in Gethsemane.” There, Jesus is utterly alone with His Father, but through His death and resurrection He spreads His filial relation to His disciples by the Spirit of adoption. As Jennings emphasizes, though, the experience of knowing God as Abba is the same as Jesus’ own experience: “the adoption we experience is by no means an escape from the fate of Jesus/Joshua, who will be executed, who will face death.” We join in Jesus’ prayer as we share His sufferings.