Today is the last day of the week of prayer for Christian Unity, and if it weren’t a Sunday we would be celebrating the feast day of the conversion of S. Paul, in that memorable encounter of his with Christ, on the road to Damascus, where Paul had planned to massacre the local Christians.
Christ had other plans.
Paul was being a good Jew; he had spotted what he saw as a community of heretical Jews, who had declared a certain Man to not only be the long-expected Messiah and Successor of David the king, but also to be God Himself in the flesh. Extraordinary blasphemy. What else should a good Jew, who had a licence to kill from Jerusalem, do? But God almighty had a different destiny for this level of zeal. He who loved holy religion and would kill for it would now love holy religion and die for it.
There is a reason we have had preserved for us so many of Paul’s letters in the New Testament. It is quite clear from the history and tradition of the Church that this indefatigable man did more to spread the Church throughout the Roman world than did any other of the Apostles in their own missions. And with his grounding in the philosophical tradition of the Greeks (he was a native of Greek Tarsus), and the legal tradition of the Romans (he was a citizen of that empire), Paul was both a pharisee – zealous for the Law of God – and a man of the world. It would be hard for any of us to to be what Paul was. He was in a class of his own. But we can be inspired by him.
We can be inspired by his attachment to his Jewish identity and his love for his fellow-Jews; he said in his letter to the Romans that he would give away his own eternal salvation if it would purchase that of his nation. We can be inspired by Paul’s great love of Scripture, which after his conversion spoke endlessly to him of Christ his love, of the order of salvation history, of the affection of God not only for His Chosen people but for all the rest of us as well. And in this time of ours, when every bishop seems to be talking about mission, and even about mission in these former Christian lands (now so badly fallen from Christ), we can be inspired by Paul’s desire to build the Church and win more souls for Christ.
We need never see the result of our work; we must only need do our little bit to further the work. As Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians, he plants, Apollos his cooperator waters, but it is God who gives the growth. And that growth can then appear long after Paul and Apollos have gone to their rest. So we work hard, we build our foundation of prayer and devotion, standing firmly upon Scripture and tradition, both of which Paul insisted upon, alongside the Apostolic authority of the Church which Paul deferred to soon after Damascus-road conversion.
“Only I entreat you, brethren, as you love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, use, all of you, the same language. There must be no divisions among you; you must be restored to unity of mind and purpose. The account I have of you, my brethren, from Chloe’s household, is that there are dissensions among you; each of you, I mean, has a cry of his own, I am for Paul, I am for Apollo, I am for Kephas, I am for Christ. What, has Christ been divided up? Was it Paul that was crucified for you? Was it in Paul’s name that you were baptized?Thank God I did not baptise any of you except Crispus and Gaius; so that no one can say it was in my name you were baptised. (Yes, and I did baptise the household of Stephanas; I do not know that I baptised anyone else.) Christ did not send me to baptise; He sent me to preach the gospel; not with an orator’s cleverness, for so the cross of Christ might be robbed of its force.”
First letter of S. Paul to the Corinthians, 1: 10-17 [link]
S. Paul’s emphasis in all that he endured for the sake of Christ and the Church was always on love, on charity. Our second reading this weekend (above) is from his letter to the Corinthians, and he urges reconciliation and forgiveness among the faction-ridden Corinthian Christians. The spirit of charity would unite them in a common belief and practice, and it would also give them a common purpose – even the mission work that the bishops are urging upon us in our own times. We too can often be discouraged by politics within the Church, and this has been rife for sixty years and more. But we cannot be for this priest or for that, for this bishop or for that, for this pope or for that. We are simply for Christ, Who should be our primary focus, our great Light.
As it says in our first reading this weekend and in our gospel reading, the great Light rises out of the darkness of pagan unbelief in the former Hebrew territories of Zebulun and Naftali, and He makes disciples and apostles, to bring His way of life to the ends of the earth. This land of Zebulun and Naftali had become known even in the time of Isaiah as ‘Galilee of the Gentiles,’ Galilee of the unbelievers. But the Nazareth and Capharnaum of the Gospels lie in the middle of Galilee. And, similarly, our churches and communities, our families and we ourselves – we temples of the Holy Ghost – we lie in the middle of a Galilee of our times – a land that has forgotten its origins in the covenant with Christ, but is yet waiting to discover them.
Let us then be a light in the darkness, to bring Christ anew to the people around us.
“After this, hearing of John’s imprisonment, He withdrew into Galilee. And now, forsaking the city of Nazareth, He came and settled down in Capharnaum, which is by the sea-shore, in the country of Zabulon and Nephthalim, in fulfilment of what was said by the prophet Isaias: The land of Zabulon and Nephthalim, on the sea road, beyond Jordan, the Galilee of the Gentiles! The people that abode in darkness has seen a great light; for men abiding in a land where death overshadowed them, light has dawned. From that time onwards, Jesus began to preach; ‘Repent,’ He said, ‘the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ And as He walked by the sea of Galilee, Jesus saw two brethren, Simon, who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea (for they were fishermen); and He said to them, ‘Come and follow Me; I will make you into fishers of men.'”
Gospel of S. Matthew, 4: 12-19 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 