Sermon: Conversion of St Paul

Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Colossians 1 (v 28)

What we lack at Matins on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul is a reading of the narrative of the Conversion of St Paul. In one sense this is a great pity, for if the feast is of the Conversion, then there is an argument for having the Conversion read and celebrated at all our services - and there are as many as three occasions in the Acts of the Apostles when the story is told. And there is little point in saying that it will be read at Holy Communion at 11.15, for not all of you will be there.

On the other hand, the absence of the narrative at this service enables us to recall it as we remember it. And that is no bad thing, for all texts resonate with us in different ways depending on who and when and where and how we are. It also draws attention to the fact that stories, texts and narratives always hover in the background of our lives; and we can never be absolutely certain that what we remember is the actual truth of the matter; there is always an element of ambiguity.

And it is the ambiguities of Paul's story that I should like to dwell on this morning.

The first is the ambiguity of his conversion itself. Was it a 'conversion'? The word is generally used now of a change of religion - that is what the verb 'convert' means: 'to change'. But was it that for Paul?

The word is not found in the New Testament in association with Paul's own mission. Rather, as the New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl suggested in 1976, what happened to Paul was not so much a conversion as a call - the call to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. Stendahl points out that Paul himself clearly regarded his task as similar to that laid upon many of the prophets in the Old Testament.

He also notes that, in the Acts of the Apostles, it is not the case that Paul's name changed from Saul at the time of his conversion; rather, that happens in Acts 13.9, when Paul first comes into contact with a Roman official. The emphasis is thus not on his conversion, but on the call to his mission, which is to lead eventually to Rome.

Thirdly Stendahl notes that Paul did not become an apostle of Jesus Christ as a result of any sense of dissatisfaction with his life as a Jew. On the contrary, he was a happy Jew, fully believing himself to be fulfilling the requirements of the Law and the demands of his faith. This is clear from what he says in Philippians 3:

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

This view of Stendahl's was subsequently developed by another scholar, Ed Sanders. What happened to Paul was not a resolution of any problem, but rather the setting of a problem. And the problem was this: if the Jesus whose followers he had been persecuting had appeared to him and called him to take the good news of his resurrection to the Gentiles, then the resurrection clearly had happened! He therefore had not alternative but to respond to this call, recognize that he had been wrong about Jesus, and accept that the preaching of the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles was a proper development of his Jewish faith.

The second ambiguity is the ambiguity of his message - and that is why my text is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We rightly associate Paul with the doctrine of 'justification by faith'.

Now that is one profoundly important aspect of the teaching of Paul. To state it very briefly, it means that a person who believes in Jesus Christ is accounted righteous, even though he or she is a sinner. That 'accounting' is on the basis of the perfect righteousness of Jesus, who, as God incarnate, made of himself his own offering for sin in the place of the human race, so that his righteousness might be reckoned as being shared with those who trust in Jesus.

But it is by no means certain that this is what was at the centre of Paul's thinking. Albert Schweitzer argued in 1930 that 'justification by faith' was one crater in a wider landscape which was Paul's broader understanding of life 'in Christ'; the doctrine of justification was elaborated in response to particular issues which arose for Jews in the context of Paul's preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles. Those issues centre upon the significance of the Torah, or Law.

The thing about Torah is that 'Law' is an inadequate word for it. It means much more than 'Law' in our sense; rather, it has to do with 'direction'; and it was not some kind of imposition laid upon the people of Israel as a set of requirements by which they might earn their standing before God; rather, it was a mark of God's favour towards and choice of them as his own people. That explains both Paul's glorying in it as a Jew and his continuing ambivalence towards it as an apostle of Jesus Christ. The Torah, the Law, was the direction that the Jews were to take in order to continue their walk, their relationship, with God.

So there is something ironic about our reading of Ecclesiasticus 39 today, for the verse with which our passage really begins is at the end of chapter 38, and it is all about the activity of the scribe and it says, How different the one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High!

In a sense, of course, Paul did devote himself to the study of the law of the Most High - and that in two ways: first, in the sense that this Law was fulfilled in Jesus Christ; and second, in the sense that, maybe inadvertently, he became a scribe: we know him by his writings!

In Colossians Paul comes to the heart of how he understands his faith. He speaks of rejoicing in [his] sufferings for [the] sake [of the Colossians], and completing in [his] flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his church. In other words, he sees himself as identified with the passion of Jesus because that is the nature of his call.

The whole church is called to that. To follow Christ is to take up the cross and enter into his redemptive sufferings and death. So a church planter, a church leader, cannot help but give expression to it. But it is a suffering that will issue in redemption: Christ in you, the hope of glory.

The third is the ambiguity I want to consider is the ambiguity of Paul's reputation.
There are strong grounds for reckoning Paul to be the founder of Christianity. It was he who took seriously the implication of the resurrection of Jesus that the kingdom of God was for all.

It was he who argued with the Jerusalem church that ways had to be found of incorporating Gentiles fully into the Christian movement.

It was he who set out an understanding of baptism which went beyond the baptism which John the Baptist preached and practised, and which involved a sense of identification with the suffering, dying and resurrected body of Jesus.

It was he who first wrote a narrative of the Last Supper and drew implications from it about how Christian believers should behave at the Lord's Table.

And it was his mission that ensured that, with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a version of Christian faith survived that was able to carry the church into the second century of consolidation, of separation from Judaism and through the fires of persecution.

Yes, Many will praise his understanding; it will never be blotted out. His memory will not disappear, and his name will live through all generations.

But on the other hand, we have him to thank for a number of negative aspects of Christian tradition and teaching.

First, we may take the example of authority. It is quite clear that Paul regarded himself as able to give instructions to and to assume authority over the communities he founded, without any sense of accountability to anyone other than his own conscience: he says as much in 1 Corinthians 2: Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Such an sense that the leaders of the church have the right to require the intellectual submission of church members is far removed from the open, questioning, story-telling attitude to life, community and the gospel which Jesus himself set out.

This is to be seen quite clearly in Paul's treatment of the issue of sexual immorality in Corinth, where he actually tells the community to hand the offender over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that
his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Now that is a terrible thing to say; and it has formed one of the bases of cruelty ever since, not least in the treatment of so-called 'heretics'.

We might also refer to his attitude to women and to slavery, both of which, we might think, simply make him a man of his time; but when these are coupled with his ill-thought views on authority, they become - they have become - treated as laws for the life of the church for all time.

So what are we to make of all this?

I have no desire to denigrate the reputation of such a great man as the apostle Paul; but I once heard a great New Testament scholar, Robert Grant, say, Of course we all know that a saint is simply an inadequately documented sinner.

The saintliness of Paul - just as with all the rest of us - is nothing to do with moral perfection or with always being right. Rather, it has to do with the degree to which the saints draw attention to Christ. That is why I chose as my text, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Because, for all his ambiguities, Paul's passion was Christ; so much so that he regarded himself as participating in the passion of Christ.

And also because it is in Christ that the ambiguities are addressed. That is to say, the differences are acknowledged as real and valid: there is no papering over the cracks, there is no ignoring of the issues, there is no avoidance of the tensions.

But also, those ambiguities are resolved - if that is what they need - and integrated into life. All of us have a calling as Christian people, and for all of us that calling is ambiguous: our understanding of it is partial, our growth into it is gradual, and our motives for following it are profoundly mixed.

All of us struggle with the complexities of believing: sometimes we are consistent and give a good account of the gospel, when we are asked; but at other times we are incoherent, wondering what on earth we have taken on and how it all fits together and makes sense of the world.

And all of us leave behind us a great trail of inconsistencies between what we preach and what we practise; without exception we are all pilgrims, on the journey and not yet arrived, struggling with faith, with holiness and with goodness, and aware that we fail.
But the good news is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is in Christ that our calling is secure; it is in Christ that our faith finds coherence; and it is in Christ that our forgiveness is promised and our end assured.

In a moment we shall sing the hymn: We have a gospel to proclaim. That statement is not wrong - so long as we acknowledge that, prior to that, we have a gospel to hear: to respond to and to be thankful for. And we have it because of the Conversion of St Paul and his consequent insight: Christ in you, the hope of glory.