Unless the bearer of the Good News is transformed by what he or she proclaims, the word will be stillborn, says Kieran J O’Mahony OSA. We still need St Paul, he says, because the ‘future Church’ will have to be a place of passion, intelligence, transformation and encounter.
One potential advantage in celebrating the Year of St. Paul is that the second reading at Sunday Mass may at last be the inspiration of the homily. Not that there are no problems with the excerpts read at Mass: the short selections come from long, often complex mosaics of persuasion, and just as in a real mosaic, the pieces make sense only when we see the full picture.
And then Paul is difficult, as was noted very early on in the tradition: ‘So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand’ (2 Pet 3:15-16).
So, do we still need St. Paul today? Let me outline why I think he is an essential guide to the Christian life.
In the West at least, the mainstream Christian Churches are in rapid recession. The one exception is the dramatic rise of the Pentecostalist movement. One of the reasons, surely, is that the Pentecostalist Churches give significant space to religious experience and are not afraid of the emotional dimension of belief.
St. Paul was first and foremost a man swept away by his experience of the Risen Lord. As an observant
Jew, he was always a person of prayer. The big ‘turning’ in his life occurred because of a revelation, as he himself tells: ‘God was pleased to reveal his Son to me’ (Gal. 1: 15-16). In a unique personal note, he tells us: ‘And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20).
To use his own words, nothing could ever separate him from the love of God, revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:39). A great teacher of faith, he knew the truth of the Gospel and it was not for him a speculation but a fact, a fact of experience: the reality of being loved and loving in return. The regeneration of the Church, if it is to happen, can have no other genesis.
After two thousand years of ‘Church’ it can be difficult to picture the earliest experience of ministry, which must have been significantly different. What happened when St. Paul arrived in a new city, for instance, in Thessalonica? How did he start? How did he convince?
A clue may be found in an expression which he uses in his writings: ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ’ (1 Cor 11:1). I understand this to mean that Paul could not simply tell people about the Good News in Christ. In order that they might sense it or feel it as something genuine and real, he would have had to model the Good News for them in his person and in his behaviour.
Paul – so much against any vaunting of self – is not boasting when he says, ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ’; he is simply describing his actual ministry, as an elderly confrere of mine used to put it, ‘in all humility, but with an emphasis on the truth’. It is not too much to say that Paul had to be what he proclaimed, otherwise it would have been mere words.
This does raise a question about the core of ministry in our own day. Unless the bearer of the Good News is transformed by what he/she proclaims, the Word will be stillborn. The increasing professionalisation of ministry, among both clergy and pastoral agents, may be necessary but risks being beside the point.
In the end, we are looking for Christlike figures – a very demanding ideal, but should any of us be satisfied with less? Perhaps the now distant ministry of Paul can bring us nearer to the heart of proclamation in our own time and place.
The loudest complaint among those still going to church is about the quality of homilies. It is no secret that a renewal of preaching did not accompany the renewal of the liturgy. Not that we lack for resources: never were more books, commentaries, Internet resources and the like at our disposal. And still…
For myself, I suspect we have been betrayed by two trends in the last thirty or forty years of preaching. The first trend is to have ‘one idea’, leading to the gross simplification of the Christian project. The second trend is to make morals the connecting point with people’s lives.
Can we learn from St. Paul – who candidly confirms the assessment of the Corinthians: ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’ (2 Cor 10:10)? I think we can.
St. Paul regularly trusts his audience with the strong meat of his deepest convictions. The apostle always persuades, that is, he lines up real arguments in structured sequence, hoping to move by conviction, not force.
Perhaps the most daunting example is the whole letter to the Romans. Paul honours his hearers and readers, then and now, by offering us his deepest reflections and by not making things which are difficult, superficially easy.
He does, of course, give advice – moral, spiritual and practical – but the advice is always in the light of the Gospel. Nowhere is this more clear than in the first letter to the Corinthians. This letter contains lots of advice, but framed by the Cross (1 Cor 1) and the Resurrection (1 Cor 15). These are, to change metaphor, the bookends of the Christian proclamation, so that whatever advice is given, is held up by the core reality of what God has done for us in Jesus.
Is there not something to be learned here for our preaching today? Should we not show the same joyful seriousness and depth? Can we not trust our hearers (or is it ourselves?) with the strong meat of deep conviction and effective persuasion?
There are two tremendous challenges to Christian faith today. The first is the awareness of all the other possible faiths in the world, an awareness which can lead to a sense that they are all the same, really.
The second is internal to our faith: we are not sure how to talk today about God in Christ and Christ on the Cross. These are not topics on the periphery! As part of the task of finding new language, we revitalise our perspectives by dialogue with the ‘greats’ who were there at the start and pre-eminently among them, Saul who became Paul.
As you will have noticed, the religious experience of Paul was the Risen Lord, when he proclaimed he himself was being transformed by Christ, ‘who loved me and gave himself for me’. In his persuasion, everything comes from and leads to Christ. We, too, are invited to trust our experience. We are also called to allow ourselves to be loved. We too, are invited to let our whole lives and selves be shaped by faith in the Lord Jesus.
While aware that God is working through all the other faiths, Christ stands at the centre for us. While aware that God is saving through all the other faiths, the Cross, paradoxical and radically different, is our ‘still turning point in time’.
The words of the first encyclical of Benedict XVI come to mind: ‘Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction’ (Deus Caritas Est §1).
This encounter has the potential to transform our lives, while opening a new horizon of understanding.
St. Paul expresses it poetically: ‘But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture – “I believed, and so I spoke” – we also believe, and so we speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God’ (2 Cor 4:13-15).
We still need St. Paul, because the ‘future Church’ will have to be a place of passion, intelligence, transformation and encounter.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (February 2009), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
