Enemy Mine

St Paul the Apostle as an RPG Cleric, by Wayne Reynolds

  

Propers: The Third Sunday of Easter, AD 2025 C

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

On paper, St Paul was a villain straight out of central casting. His resources, his connections, made him perfect for ferreting out the nascent Christian movement.

Firstly, he’s a Pharisee, which means right off the bat that he’s well-educated, scrupulously religious, and generally holds the respect of the common people, who viewed the Pharisees as a sort of middle-class vanguard against a corrupted Temple administration and the broader pagan Empire of which Judea was now an unwilling part. The Pharisees were the good guys; they had the heft of morality.

Secondly, Paul is fluent in Greek, steeped in Hellenistic philosophy, familiar with the Stoics and the Platonists, comfortable preaching atop the Areopagus in the heart of Athens, birthplace of democracy and other Western horrors. His ability not only to speak the Greek language but also to think Greek thoughts opens to him all manner of doors, including prison gates.

Thirdly, Paul is a Roman citizen; which at the time is quite remarkable, especially for a Jew. Paulus is a Roman name, while he is Saul in Hebrew. And citizenship has its privileges. Philippi, for example, was a Roman colony, a settlement of retired veterans; and when this city arrested Paul for kicking up a fuss—for an unauthorized exorcism disrupting the local economy—they gave him the standard how-do-you-do, beating with an iron rod. You know, due process. But once those big tough military types realized that Paul was a Roman citizen, they quaked with fear. And to rectify the wrong, Paul made the magistrates come to him in order to grovel personally.

Related to this, Paul’s rich! How do you think that he keeps travelling the Mediterranean, first to uproot churches, later to plant them? He calls himself a tent-maker, but come on. Tent-makers don’t have a deep education spanning everything from Merkabah mysticism to Pythagorean cosmogenesis. This is not a blue-collar man; his pockets are far too deep. What’s much more likely is that Paul is a military contractor. His family supplied tents at scale, and who needs more tents than the mighty Roman Legions?

Finally, Paul is probably an Herodian. He has some sort of connection, familial or otherwise, to the puppet-kings whom Rome set up to govern the various parts of the Holy Land. We know from Paul’s own letters that he has a relative named Herodion. We know from Josephus’s histories that Herod Agrippa had a kinsman named Saulus. And honestly, those ties to the Horrid House of Herod absolutely would explain a lot.

In summation, the first great villain of the Acts of the Apostles, the first nemesis of the early Christian Church, is a wealthy, intelligent, well-travelled, well-connected, highly educated multilingual Roman citizen with royal connections and impeccable religious pedigree. Paul is Roman and Jewish and Greek all at once, a foot in every world. We’re up against a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance. He could be our Dr No.

Worst of all, Paul is convinced that he is right; that the Christians follow a blasphemous and failed messiah; that they are a threat to good and proper order; and that to eliminate them, to drag them out of their homes, into the courts, is a righteous and holy endeavor. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, a bad man might eventually tire of cruelty, but those who torment us for our own good torment us without end; for they do so with the consent of their conscience. Paul was there when the first Christian was killed—and he approved.

Meanwhile, who all is he up against? Some fishermen, a tax collector, a few unmarried women? Brother, I don’t think they’ve got a prayer. Or rather, prayer is the only thing they have.

So now that I’ve painted a picture of exactly the threat that’s at hand—of whom the early Church must face—we turn now to the question of how God deals with those who threaten His people. What might we expect to happen to a villain such as Paul? Will he be struck by a bolt from the blue? Will his bowels burst open and spill forth worms? Will an angel with flaming sword bar his way and take his head? As it turns out, none of the above. For the way in which Christ shall chastise Paul is to claim him as His own.

Yes, God’s punishment for persecuting Christians is to convert the persecutor, to transform him into the very thing he hunts. And that’s wild. That’s justice and mercy at once. Paul is struck blind on the road to Damascus, and hears the voice of Jesus as the very voice of the divine. He’d thought that he was serving God, but God was in his victims. Yet this blindness is not permanent; this blindness has a cure. And that cure is to continue on to Damascus, there to humbly beg the ministrations of a Christian he’d come to arrest.

Oh, the irony, the poetic justice. Yet Paul’s is not the only conversion in this story. Jesus speaks to Ananias, one of the early Christians, and tells him to seek Paul out, to heal him of his blindness. Paul already knows to expect him, for he has seen it in a vision. And Ananias understandably responds: “Hold up. I’ve heard about this guy. He has done great evil to your people in Jerusalem, and has authority to bind us and to carry us away.” Indeed, who would want to heal their enemy, their greatest threat, in his time of need?

But Jesus tells Ananias, “He is an instrument whom I have chosen, to bring my name before gentiles and kings and all the people of Israel. And I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” Then Ananias, to his credit, goes to Paul and says to him, “Brother, Christ has sent me.” Brother! Can you imagine what it must have taken for him to have called Paul that? This evil man, this terrible foe, brother.

And then of course everything changes. Paul regains his sight and immediately begs for Baptism, after which he takes some food and learns from Christ’s disciples; learns from the very souls whom he had come to drag away. And once he is healed, and fed, and taught, he goes out into the synagogues proclaiming Christ as Lord. Thus the whole arc of the early Church is changed!

Most of our New Testament has been written by St Paul. His are the oldest Scriptures proclaiming Jesus Christ. In one fell swoop, one flash of truth, God transformed our greatest threat into our greatest advocate. All of his learning, his money, his connections and travels, his citizenship, his mysticism, his philosophical education, all of it now in service to the Christ! Little wonder that his writings are so filled with love of enemy.

For Paul, the grace of Christ is overwhelming and inexorable. Resistance to His love can only lead to our blessed defeat, to unnecessary suffering that nonetheless ends in salvation. For Jesus takes His enemies and purifies us with fire, with the flames of His own Holy Spirit, until all of our sin is burned out of us, and we shine like gold in the sun. This is why we love our enemies: because Jesus loves them, yes, but also because they won’t be our enemies forever. We shall all be one in Jesus, whether they know it yet or not.

It seems impossibly naïve, doesn’t it, to love all those who hate us; to love our neighbors as ourselves; to love even our worst enemies? Yet such is the power of God, the power of Jesus Christ, that our wickedest foes in every age are the Christians of the next. Imagine telling Peter that the Romans would be Christian. Imagine telling the Romans that the Franks would come to Christ. Imagine telling the French that soon the Vikings would be Lutheran! Imagine telling us that within a couple decades China will have the largest Christian population on the planet. Oh, the wily wonders of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Everyone and everything has come from God Almighty. Everyone and everything is sustained now in His grace. And everyone and everything shall soon return to God in Jesus Christ. We have no enemies, not from the view of eternity. We have only blinded brethren in need of mercy to open their eyes. And in so loving them, may we see Christ as well.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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