WHO HAS SINNED MORE PRODIGIOUSLY THAN PAUL OF TARSUS? NOT YOU AND NOT ME.

10/8/18

Tomorrow’s readings include a selection from the first chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which Paul says he

“…persecuted the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it…”

and that the churches in Judea

“…kept hearing that ‘the one who once was persecuting us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’”

One doesn’t have to be a fervent Christian, or even have much more than a cursory familiarity with the New Testament, to know the story of Paul of Tarsus, who carried the Gospel beyond its early geographic and ethnic roots in Judea north to Macedonia and west to Rome, proclaiming the beyond controversial message that salvation was not constrained by ethnicity, language, or religious origin but, rather, was intended for everybody.    By spreading Christianity beyond the Holy Land, St. Paul was a major actor in the development of western civilization.   I recall a text in world history that, in its treatment of Christianity, discussed “its founder, Paul.”   Clearly, that is overstating the importance of St. Paul in the context of Christianity, but it gives an indication of the importance of Paul even to historians who are not Christian or not even religious; Paul was a major figure in history.

We Christians know Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and through his letters, or epistles.   The Acts is perhaps my favorite book in the Bible…a swashbuckling tale of derring-do designed to tell the story of the perils faced and successes enjoyed by the early Church while (sometimes) subtly imparting the Good News of salvation even to those who are simply enjoying the story.   Paul’s letters were chronologically the first writings of what became the New Testament.   These letters are endlessly fascinating primarily for the theological and moral lessons they impart but also for the insights they provide into Paul himself, who was, to put it mildly, a curious character and quite the, at the expense of sounding sacrilegious, bad ass, but that is grist for another mill.

What we often overlook in considering Paul is not what he wrote but the lessons his life imparts.   As the above cited writings reiterate but put far too mildly, Paul was a sinner, a man motivated by his hatred for Christ and for all who followed him.   He was obsessed with his antipathy toward Jesus and His Christian followers, and spent most of his adult life directly attacking them viciously and incessantly.   There is not milder way to put it; nothing made Paul happier than torturing and killing Christians.   Then came his conversion on the road to Damascus, which, incidentally, did not involve falling off a horse, and the rest is history.   It is easy to say that without the Damascene conversion, Paul would have faded into history, just another misdirected Pharisee zealot obsessed with getting rid of, by any means possible, those despicable Christians were it not with the vigor, energy, enthusiasm, and utter hatred and ruthlessness with which he pursued those goals.   However, he was not just another Pharisee hell bent on destroying Christianity; he did stand out in his crowd as an exceptional hater and a superior sinner.

It is in this prodigious sinning of Paul that the primary lesson of his life lies.    Paul was the worst of the worst; you can’t commit more heinous sins than killing and torturing people simply because they believe in Christ and are willing to follow him.    However, it was this paragon of evil that Jesus chose to carry His word, His Gospel, or Good News, to the “ends of the earth,” or at least to the capital of the civilization of his day, from which the Gospel would reach the ends of the earth.   Hence from the greatest sinner came the greatest repentance and the greatest good.   God didn’t choose an exemplary individual to spread His word.   He chose the worst (baddest) of the bad (in more ways than one) to first, forgive and then to carry out what was the most important mission of the early Church.   Come to think of it, the adjective “early” may be extraneous in that last sentence.

So Paul, a great sinner, was chosen by God to become Paul, among the greatest of saints.   Before he wrote a word, Paul, or Christ working through Paul, imparts a powerful message to us:

No one is beyond salvation.   No one is beyond hope.  No one has committed greater sins than Paul; he mercilessly killed people, his own people, simply because they chose to follow Christ.   But Jesus chose to show mercy to the merciless, and from the greatest of sinners God selected the most productive worker in his vineyard.   We can all be saved, regardless of what we have done.   And sometimes we don’t even have to ask; Paul didn’t.    But it wouldn’t hurt to ask, of course.

God bless now and always.