Paul

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and re-imagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop.

Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter draw the water he needed.

Perhaps the “thorn in the flesh” was the continuing resistance to the gospel on the part of people he loved dearly, though speculation has been rife as to whether it was a bodily ailment, a recurring temptation, or even the recurring nightmare of the stoning of Stephen, in which he himself is standing by giving his grim approval.

Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)

he is recognizing that human society, even in the radically flawed non-Jewish world, could and did aspire to live wisely and well.

A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.

Only by going deeply into the scriptural story of Israel and the events concerning Jesus, reflecting from many different angles on its full significance, could such a community keep its identity, its integrity, and its nerve. Who did Barnabas know who had that kind of knowledge and the eager energy and the way with words that would communicate it? There was one obvious candidate.

Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal community with mutual responsibilities.

Anyone who thinks that having right “feelings” doesn’t make people proud is singularly blind to the currently fashionable notion that what matters is a correct “attitude” on the questions of the day. But that doesn’t make the caricatures any the less powerful.

If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah. Or to put it the other way, if God has declared, in the resurrection, that the crucified Jesus really was and is the Messiah, then God is also declaring that Moses could only take them so far.

If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money,” we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus. The first two are obvious, but need to be stressed. Sexual holiness is mandatory, not optional, for followers of Jesus.10 What that means in practice Paul will later spell out in his first letter to Corinth. But already the reason for this rule is made clear. Unbridled, crazy, and inflamed lust is a sign that one does not know God. Sexual holiness isn’t just a “rule,” an arbitrary commandment. It is part of what it means to turn from idols and serve the true and living God. It is part of being a genuine, image-bearing human being. Paul will emphasize the same point again in the later letters Ephesians and Colossians, but it is already crystal clear in this passage, however briefly stated.

Sex and money are important, but they are not to be worshipped. Sexual purity and financial generosity were to be built into the Christian DNA from the start.

Onesimus was not going to set off to Colossae with a spring in his step, imagining everything was going to be easy. There had been reasons why he ran away, and those reasons, whatever they were, would have to be confronted. Philemon would be astonished and quite possibly angry to see him return; he would also realize the delicate balance both of what Paul had said and of what he was being asked to do. As a policy statement about slavery, the letter falls short of what we would want. As an experiment in a one-off, down-to-earth pastoral strategy, it is brilliant. And it seems to have worked. Fifty years later the bishop of Ephesus is a man called Onesimus. The young slave, now an elderly Christian leader? Or a name already respected within the early community?

“Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians. As always, Paul wants people to learn to think—not simply to imbibe rules and principles to learn by heart, but to be able to grow up as genuine humans, experiencing “all the wealth of definite understanding” and coming to “the knowledge of God’s mystery.”25 All this will happen as they realize that it is Jesus himself who reveals that “mystery.” The Messiah himself is “the place” where they are to find “all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

The book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” which in Hebrew is a single word, bereshith. The particle be can mean “in” or “through” or “for”; the noun reshith can mean “beginning,” “head,” “sum total,” or “first fruits.”

If this poem were less elegant, one might say that Paul was shaking his fist at the powers, the powers on earth and the powers in the dark realms beyond the earth, the powers that had put him in prison and crushed his spirit to the breaking point. But he is not. The theological effect is the same; he is invoking and celebrating a world in which Jesus, the one through whom all things were made, is now the one through whom, by means of his crucifixion, all things are reconciled. This is not, of course, the world that he and his friends can see with the naked eye. They see local officials giving allegiance to Caesar. They see bullying magistrates, threatening officers. They see prisons and torture. But they are now invited to see the world with the eye of faith, the eye that has learned to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus.

But Paul stood firm. All he was doing was expounding Moses and the prophets. It was they who had said—and if Paul got the chance, he would eagerly give Agrippa chapter and verse—two things in particular. First, the Messiah “would be the first to rise from the dead.”37 There is Paul’s theology of the two-stage resurrection, as in 1 Corinthians 15, in a nutshell, in which the Messiah’s own resurrection inaugurates a new period of history and the resurrection of all his people follows later. Second, the Messiah “would proclaim light to the people and to the nations.”38

The dark powers have done their worst. Once again Paul has put his faith in the God who raises the dead, the God who wins the victory over the forces of evil, the God of the Exodus. Once again, though he and his companions are just as tired and wet as everybody else, they are at least alive.

When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation.

Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents.