Rediscovering St Paul

8am Holy Communion & 11am Sung Eucharist

Acts 9.1-22; Galatians 1.11-16a, Matthew 19.27-end

When I taught men and women training for ministry at Westcott House in Cambridge, and later, when I was in parish ministry myself, I had a number of conversations with people who found St Paul, difficult, or, as we say these days about things we don’t much like, challenging. It might have been his insistence on women wearing hats in church, or not allowing women to speak in church, or his dismissal of same-sex relationships. Or perhaps it was the tone of some of his letters, where he can be rude, sarcastic, even a touch bullying. A lot of people don’t like Paul very much.

Today we are reminded that his conversion came from trauma, the trauma of meeting the living Christ on the Damascus road and being blinded by the vision and turned aside from everything he thought he believed and valued. The long term effect of Paul’s conversion is, if I can put it this way …us. That is, the fact that we are here, Christians, worshipping our Lord Jesus Christ instead of perhaps a cluster of nature gods or a nationalistic deity made in our own image.

We’re still in the Epiphany season and the wise men, representing the Gentiles, are still in front of the altar bringing their gifts to the infant Jesus. But it is Paul and his conversion who brought the gift we all depend on and brought Jesus to us Gentiles: Jesus, his life, his teaching, his meaning. Without Paul, we cannot know what would have happened to the message of Jesus the prophet of Galilee, whether his teaching would have remained confined to a Jewish sect, or whether someone else would have brought it into the wider world. Our faith depends on Saul, the Jew who was educated by a famous and learned Pharisee, Gamaliel; Paul who was proud of his status as a Roman citizen, Paul who approved of the persecution of Christians and actively consented to the death of Stephen; without him we might not be here. So it is hardly surprising that scripture presents the conversion of St Paul as an act of God’s providence, the result of a heavenly vision recounted in the Acts of the Apostles and retold by Paul himself in his letter to the Galatians.

There’s so much we owe to Paul. Think of the insight which brought him to see the centrality of faith over self-justifying works, an insight which sparked the Reformation. Or the pastoral wisdom which prioritised love over any form of cleverness, knowledge or technique. Read Paul’s letters and you’ll find the seeds of Catholicism. Orthodoxy, Protestantism in all their many forms.

And then remember the circumstances in which these letters were most probably written. There were no written Gospels when Paul wrote his first letters to the Thessalonians and to Galatians. We hear of his travels from the Acts of the Apostles composed twenty years or so after his death as the second volume of St Luke’s gospel. When I was at school in the 1960s our summer term scripture classes were often devoted to tracing the missionary journeys of St Paul round the Mediterranean with the aid of Biblical maps. His correspondence shows how he kept in touch with the churches he founded. He knew the leaders by name, he sussed-out the trouble-makers, he tried to settle disputes and to give advice. In all this he was simply extemporising what we now take for granted, the theological vision the church now lives by. He must have dictated much of his correspondence on the hoof, as he travelled over land or sea, or stayed with people he met on the way.

We know he could be critical and grumpy. He fell out with Peter and the Jerusalem Church, he later fell out with John Mark and his cousin Barnabas. Paul was complicated and often conflicted and Luke, in Acts, makes no attempt to whitewash him. Outside St Peter’s basilica in Rome there stand the two massive statues of Peter and Paul, reconciled for us, though it is not clear that they were ever reconciled in their lifetimes.

If we owe to Peter the institutional continuity of the Church, the rock-like solidity which has kept the faith going in spite of persecution, division and disagreements; surely we owe to Paul the sheer poetry of faith. Why is I Corinthians 13 still one of the most favoured readings at weddings? Because in spite of being composed by a complicated bachelor it speaks of what we all desire to become and to receive in our closest relationships. And then why is I Corinthians 15 so often read at funerals? Because Paul engages with our fear of death and connects us with the cycle of nature and the death of Christ; the seed lives on, and breaks into new birth. And why does our baptismal theology come from Romans? Because Paul sees baptism as the way we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection, just as realised he was in his own experience of baptism.

In the 8th chapter of his letter to the Romans Paul suggests that the whole creation is groaning for fulfilment and freedom and that our little acts of faith and trust in Christ are part of that great longing. Even our often pathetic prayers are evidence of the Holy Spirit praying within us and for us. Paul knows what it is to be mortal, to know hope and to suffer trauma and he brings us the good news that Christ shares all that with us.

How you dream all this up in a tossing boat, or in the back of a cart, or half asleep on someone else’s floor. I don’t know, but I am glad and grateful that Paul did it.

Because as well as his genius as well as his encounter with the living Christ, it is his imperfection which has given us a template for how our own lives might be ransomed, healed, restored, and forgiven, and how we might be set on the path to glory.

Like Paul we can be deeply irritating, prejudiced, wrong in our opinions, dismissive of others. But in our encounter with the living Christ our pathology can be transformed into our path through life; we find our true gifts and are able to offer them like the wise men, and we use in God’s service, and we give and receive a foretaste of the glory to which God has predestined us for in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour Emeritus