The Power of St Paul

Propers: The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 18), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Paul is one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the early Church, indeed of the New Testament, much of which he wrote. Critics sometimes claim that Paul took the apocalyptic faith of Jesus and turned it into Christianity. Now, I don’t believe that’s true. But it’s hard to overestimate his impact.

In many ways, he was the perfect person to spread the Gospel. In a time when many religious Judeans were fighting a philosophical battle against Greece and a political battle against Rome, Paul was all of the above. Deeply educated in the Hebrew Scriptures, he was also fluent in Greek, both linguistically and culturally. And as proud as he was of being Judean, a strictly religious Pharisee, he was equally proud of possessing Roman citizenship.

Paul was Roman and Jewish and Greek. And unlike most people in the time of Jesus, he did not see these identities as contradictory. They all together made up Paul. And this allowed him to move between worlds in ways that Peter or James could not.

In his letters, Paul likes to describe himself as a tentmaker, as someone who works with his hands. And I’m sure he did. I’m sure he made a tent or two in his day. But he was no blue-collar worker. He wasn’t even really in the artisanal class. Paul was wealthy, and moved in circles of power. He had been taught by the highest religious authorities in Jerusalem. He had royal family ties to the Herods. At one point he was given a guard of 400 soldiers and 70 horse.

How does a tentmaker merit such clout? Certainly not by selling tents one or two at a time. His family probably had contracts to supply large quantities, and the likeliest bulk purchaser of tents would have been the Roman army. Paul probably supplied tents to the Legions. We begin to see now why he was entrusted by officialdom with hunting the early Church.

He thought he was doing God’s will. He thought he was doing his duty, both as a Roman and a Jew. Jesus, after all, had been a false Christ who threatened the very existence of Judea through His grandiose claims—both blasphemer and rebel. Or so the story went, until Paul was blinded by a vision on the road to Damascus, and this persecutor of Christ’s Church became His most ardent Apostle. Such would set a pattern, that the enemies of one generation would be the Christians of the next.

Invigorated—indeed, resurrected—by his encounter with the Risen Christ, Paul enthusiastically preached the Good News that in Jesus Christ God had come down, breaking through the celestial spheres of archons and angels, down into this world of darkness, in order to raise us all up to light. This broken world, Paul believed, had been separated from God in sin, enslaved to death, decay, injustice, entropy, ignorance, the fallen powers of a fallen cosmos. And in Christ God had conquered them all! In Christ all things were being set right.

And now the Good News, the Gospel, was that all the cosmos, all of humanity, all of Creation, would be subjected to the rule of Christ, that God at the last shall be all in all. It was a message of inclusion, ecstasy, joy, and radical grace. And it was for all peoples: Roman and Jew, Greek and barbarian, male and female, slave and free, all are one in Jesus. As all had died in Adam, so all now rise in Christ. Ah, the might of that message, the radiance of it! Good News indeed!

Paul used all his power, all his wealth, all his connections to travel the known world, from Judea to Spain, Rome to Galatia. He always began in the synagogues. He was, after all, a Judean, as were all the early Christians: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, James, John, Peter, everybody, every biblical author with the possible exception of Luke. The Jews were the people of God, the people of the promise, entrusted in Abraham to be a blessing for all the nations of the earth. They knew to look for the Messiah. They knew the sacred Scriptures. So of course, Paul started with them.

But a funny thing happened, funny for Paul at least. While many Judeans accepted his Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, many others did not. Meanwhile, the Gentiles—that catch-all term for non-Jewish peoples—clamored to hear more. How bizarre! Why would the people on the outside, the uninitiated, be more receptive to this Good News than the people to whom it of right belonged? The question in short was not simply why Gentiles wanted in, but why so many Jews did not.

This bothered Paul, deeply. Because he loved his people. He was a proud Judean, and rightly so. It just seemed so clear to him that Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures, in a way that even Moses and the angel atop Sinai could not. Thus he couldn’t understand why those most primed to recognize the Christ did not see Him as the Christ. What had gone wrong? What did this mean? (Of course, it had taken a miraculous vision to convince Paul, but never mind that.)

The Epistle to the Romans is in many ways Paul’s magnum opus. Here he is writing to a Christian community that he himself did not found. The Gospel preceded Paul into Rome. And he is introducing himself to these Christians by laying out the Good News as he understands it. He’s putting it all on the table. And one of the things that bothers him, as it likely bothers the Jewish Christians of Rome, is why more of their brothers and sisters were not flocking to the Church.

He wrestles with this for three whole chapters. In Romans 8, Paul full-throatedly declares the victory of Christ over all powers and principalities, all angels and archons, all of sin and death and hell. For nothing in all of Creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ! Hallelujah! Then in Romans 9 and 10, the section from which we read today, he makes hypothetical arguments—hypothetical, mind you, “What if … ?”s.

What if God has chosen some and rejected others? What if He made some vessels purely for wrath, destined for destruction? Does God not have the right to have mercy on whom He chooses, and to harden the hearts of whom He chooses? Think of how many times throughout the Hebrew Bible God inverted the values of the day to elevate the younger over the elder brother, the slave over the Pharaoh.

That’s what Romans 9 and 10 are about, Paul wrestling with this question, working it out on the parchment. Has God rejected the Jews in order to elect the Gentiles? Has He abandoned His people, His promises, and if so, what right have we to protest? And the scary thing is that a lot of Christians read these chapters in isolation and think, “Yeah, that’s how it works. God saves some and damns others, and it’s totally arbitrary. He rejects His people to claim a new people.” And horrors thus ensue.

Yet in the very next chapter, in Romans 11, Paul blows all of that out of the water. “I ask then,” he writes, “has God rejected His people? By no means!” And he goes on to speak of mercy, infinite mercy; of how the younger brothers in those stories were not elected for the elder to be rejected, but so that the elder might know the greater grace. Ishmael is blessed with Isaac. Esau is blessed with Jacob.

This hardening of hearts is temporary, Paul insists. This is the working out of salvation. People may stumble, but God will not allow them fall. How much more their inclusion will mean! “All Israel will be saved,” he writes, as clear as day. “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that He may be merciful to all.” Now I ask you, could the implications be any clearer for our own day and age?

It’s no secret that the Church in the West has come to an ebb in the tide. It isn’t simply organized religion that’s on the wane, but all organizations, all voluntary society. Our congregations are smaller, our people isolated. The public mood is against us. Do not be discouraged, Paul tells us. None of this affects the Good News. None of this in any way diminishes the triumph of Christ. If hearts are hardened now, it is only so that mercy might abound the more. Grace everlasting is the triumph of our God.

Paul, recall, was stoned, imprisoned, shipwrecked, whipped, and ultimately executed, all for preaching the Good News that in Jesus Christ has God now saved this world. And none of it diminished his joy. None of it dampened his fervency. God had loved Paul at his most unlovable, redeemed him at his most irredeemable, forgiven him in the depths and violence of his sin, and by God, nothing in heaven or hell or all of Creation was going to stop Paul from loving this world right back.

That’s what resurrection looks like. That’s what the faithfulness of Jesus Christ gives: a fire we cannot quench, a mercy we can’t deny, a love that burns right through the heart of this world and cannot be defeated by loss or pain or death or hell. Christ has come to save us all, and nothing and no-one can stop Him.

That’s Good News.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

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