Romans 10:5–15
This passage from Romans gives us an ancient formula: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”
Before we began this MWD Lectionary project, we ran a similar series, the Abolition Lectionary, on my website Christians for the Abolition of Prisons. When I wrote about this passage for that series, I focused on how the promise of salvation here is the promise of new, abundant life together with one another, a promise for the reality of life in community that we build together here as well as for the world to come:
“I am particularly struck by the doubled motion of “believe” and “confess” in this formula in Romans. If we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, then we also confess that he is Lord. If we believe in the power of God to accomplish resurrection, then we also must confess — in the public sphere as well as in private devotion — Jesus’ victory over the powers of sin and death, which include the death-dealing systems of incarceration and punishment. Our belief in Jesus’ victory over death may justify us but, according to this passage, it is our confession that saves. Salvation is tied to the articulation of Jesus’ lordship, of God’s power to redeem and save us from the powers and systems of oppression in our world, so that, as Paul concludes, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ And in our current context, abolition is one such concrete articulation of what it means that Jesus is Lord. Abolition declares that Jesus’ victory over death is real, that it has concrete consequences for our world today as well as the world to come, and that the nature of Jesus’ lordship promises the transformation of our communities and political systems from systems that bring death to those that give life. Abolition gives us a way of describing in practical and material terms one consequence of saying Jesus is Lord, and a way of expressing that fundamental theological reality in terms that make explicit its consequences which challenge us and our presuppositions about how the world works.”
What I said about abolition applies to the context of immigration as well, especially in our current political situation, where immigration detention has become the driving source of mass incarceration in the United States. Jesus’ lordship promises the transformation of our communities from ways that bring death to those that give life. One form of this life is liberation for migrants, not subjecting them to the tortures of incarceration or rendition back to places of danger.
Furthermore, this passage in Romans declares, again, that the promise of renewed life in community that comes with Jesus’ salvation transcends ethnic differences: “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him” (10:12). There is no distinction between native-born and foreigner, between citizen and immigrant. For those who have migrated from one place to another, the promise of Jesus is the promise of abundant life, a life of dignity, wherever their journeys have brought them. When we believe with our hearts, we confess with our mouths the truth of this new life together in community, new life which makes room for all.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026).