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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Saint Paul was a complex person. Seen one way, his conversion was amazing. Seen another, he simply encountered the fulfillment of what he had always believed.
Understanding Saint Paul
We need to understand the world of Saint Paul. Or probably more specifically, the world of Paul, just in terms of what his faith life was like before he encountered Jesus, and then how he interpreted that call in terms of what he was supposed to do.
So when Paul describes his early upbringing, I think the easiest way to understand St. Paul is that he came from a type of Judaism that really was seeking to regain the strictest sense of observance of the law. To pull away from the world so as not to be associated with anyone that might contaminate this true and pure and authentic observance of the law.
Paul was hard core. He came from a family that was likely hard core. Now it wasn’t that he couldn’t deal with people, he was a tent maker, and so he had to be able to interact with people to sell his product. But the idea was that the world had so gone astray that the only solution was to pull back into this kind of hard core version of Judaism, which has its strain throughout all of the Old Testament.
There’s always this tension between the degree to which followers of Yahweh, followers of God, should engage the world. St. John the Baptist was very similar. He felt the world had gotten so awful that the only solution was to go out into the desert. And he was hard core as well. Then Paul encounters Jesus. Now it is not the case that he didn’t know God before. He was very authentically faithful. But he encounters Jesus.
And as N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop, says, it’s not so much, even though we call this the conversion of St. Paul, and on some level he did have a conversion, it’s not completely accurate to say that he had a major conversion as much as it is when he encountered Jesus, he saw the fulfillment of everything he believed.
That the promise given in the Old Testament, Paul now had fulfillment of in the Lord Jesus himself. And so when Paul is speaking about just about anything related to Jesus, he’s speaking of it deeply entrenched in what it meant to be Jewish. He still in some ways thought of himself as being Jewish, but the long promised Messiah had come.
Once he had that encounter, we get to the Gospel. And this, quite frankly, it’s interesting, you know, Jesus really is pretty simple in what we’re supposed to do. I think sometimes we don’t like it, and so we don’t do it. There’s the strain of Jesus’ teaching that is in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Give drink to the hungry, food to the poor, etc. We know that well.
This, however, in the Gospel of Mark that we get today is the other strain. Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. So it’s those two things. It’s this act of kindness and recognizing that all human beings are made in God’s image and likeness. But then it’s to go out and share that with everyone.
You know, you’re going to hear me say this over and over and over again, because I think we’re in the age that if we don’t, in the United States, recognize that we have to go out to every creature and share how our lives have been changed by the Lord Jesus Christ, we’re going to, as a church, get smaller and smaller. And interestingly, the things that might get us excited or worked up, if we look at countries that get excited and worked up about the same thing, the faith is not very prevalent.
I’ll pick Germany, because demographically, Germany is very similar to us. On almost every level, the Catholic Church in Germany is a mess. That’s nothing about what they do or do not believe. It’s just truth. It’s a mess. Because I think we’ve lost our way. Just like St. Paul lost his way for a while.
He couldn’t see. He needed to be led. Jesus is longing to encounter you today. I’ve never had an encounter like St. Paul. I haven’t had bright lights and loud voices and whatever. But some have. Others, God comes in kind of the way God came to Elijah, in this kind of tiny whispering sound. However it is that God comes to you, hear the voice of Jesus and share what he says
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