Conversion of St Paul
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 27th January, 2008
I was given the other day a list of some of things that young children wrote in their religious studies test at a church school. Solomon, wrote one, was one of David’s sons and had 300 wives and 700 porcupines. Christians, declared another, have only one spouse and this is called monotony. Lot’s wife, continued one small boy, was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night. And here is one rather suitable, perhaps for today, St Paul eventually cavorted to Christianity. He preached holy acrimony which is another name for marriage.
Now, people have strong views about St Paul, not always very positive ones. He´s often charged, for instance, with being the one who made Christ into Christianity, made the passionate man into a heavy religion. Jesus preached the Kingdom and the Church arrived. But who was he?
Paul was born in Tarsus, Cilicia, around the same time as Jesus but, remember, he never met him. Paul began with a Hebrew name, Saul, for he was of good Jewish stock and would have gone to the synagogue as a boy and learned the traditions and the Law of the Jewish faith. He was taught by an eminent rabbi, Gamaliel, and consequently rose through the ranks a bit himself. One thing we know of Saul at this time – he hated Christians, these subversive troublesome people who had arrived on the scene challenging the religious status quo. He took it upon himself to exterminate them if he could, to persecute them anyway. And then, probably around 33AD, something happened and that something is what we celebrate today.
We’re not sure exactly what happened. In Acts it is a bright light on a road and a voice, in other letters he refers to some sort of epiphany or understanding he had, given by God, but whatever it was he changed. More than that, he transformed, from Saul the persecutor of Christians to Paul, the influential teacher and missionary who shaped Christianity for all the years that followed him. He saw his new life very clearly. He had a special task – to take the message of Christ out of the purely Jewish arena to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, and this is exactly how he spent the next thirty or so years of his life, establishing small Christian communities across Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, hoping to get to Spain, (early Christian communities were usually in cities). Fortunately he wrote letters and someone collected, edited and published some of them and it is those letters that you still listen to today from that lectern. In those letters you get a good glimpse of the man – full of flash and fire, passion and vigour, wit and charm, pride and humility, enormous self-confidence and fear and trembling. In other words he was a bag of contradictions, just like us. By the grace of God, I am what I am, he wrote. He also talks about having a“Thorn in the flesh�: we´re not sure to what this refers but you can imagine what people have come up! By the way, people are recorded as saying that Paul wasn’t physically impressive nor was he a very good public speaker.
Paul was probably what we would call middle-class, trained for secretarial sort of work (he boasts of being able to work with his hands – rather like some suited worker dads like to boast they are good at DIY) but he had got a trade. He was a tent maker (if you could afford a tent you didn’t use the public inns that were full of vermin) and he would have travelled around setting up shop as it were, and probably in his transactions, and meetings, would have started to talk about his new found faith. He usually had an assistant with him. Sometimes he was looked after and given rooms by a patron, and sometimes he got himself into terrible trouble with the authorities for speaking as he did. He got put in jail several times, and got whipped, five times he says he received the usual 39 lashes. Or as he himself writes: “toil, hardship, sleepless nights, hunger, thirst, in cold and exposure�. However, as he also wrote, nothing could separate him now from the love of God he had discovered in Christ.
Now, its easy to have a go at Paul. He was a person of his time in many ways, he thought the world was going to end soon so we don´t find a social programme to change to society in his letters, he was shaped by his society as we are and many of those things that shaped him no longer shape us, in fact we find many of them unpleasant or wrong. And he himself says that we see only in part, dimly, “in a riddleâ€?: he knew he was fallible. But at the heart of what Paul was saying was something rather radical. He said he was not eloquent but he was preaching God’s wisdom – which sounds foolish anyway. He said his weaknesses were his strengths because that’s where God helped him and pushed him most. “When I am weak, then I am strongâ€?. He preached a God with whom “there is neither Jew, nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesusâ€?. He knew that there are three things which last for ever, faith hope and love and the greatest of these is love. He knew that nothing we do can ever earn God’s love, you can’t buy favour by religion, ethics or anything else. It is only God and his grace that can pick us up and restore us back to a wholeness and that though our outward nature is wasting away, our inward selves are renewed every day by him. Christ the risen one was a resurrector.
Xns in Jersualem needed money (nothing changes) and Paul took collections from his churches around the place and decided to deliver it himself, at great danger to himself (a practical sign that the Church was one though). He had enemies, was accused of taking a Gentile into the temple, was imprisoned and eventually sent to Rome for trial where it appears he was then executed by having his head severed or as part of the general persecution of Christians by Nero (savaged by dogs, lit as torches, thrown to lions). Hideous suffering for Christian faith that makes me in my complacency blush. You can hear Paul in Prison now writing, hearing the prison keys clink as they come to lead him to his death: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ, shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor things past nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And that’s why we remember him, for that is the very heart, the core and essential, of our faith. And Paul knew that a human life is called to reflect that nature of God, hard though it is: I may speak in the tongues of men or of angels but if I am without love I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I do not have love, I am nothing.
