Sunday, August 3, 2008AD
18th Sunday in Greentime
Meet St Paul -- Part 9
St Paul realized that life was bigger than we are. Individuals and families and groups were influenced by factors hard to handle. Using the language of the time, he referred to powers of the air and principalities exerting influence on people’s lives. In today’s argot, St Paul might use words like Zeitgeist (spirit of the time) and conventional wisdom, or even the “system”. How many times do people say, “It’s the system and you cannot change it” It’s the way that “they” have always done it.
St Paul felt that Christ Jesus had beaten the system, through His death and Resurrection. Using contemporary language, the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection had created a sphere of influence, a vibrational or a force field, that effected everything in reality. The Christ Quantum ultimately has transformed reality, provided one has come, through the gift of faith, to believe that such had happened. (Recall the analogy that we used before that believers in the Paschal Mystery could be compared to resistance groups in France who knew that Hitler’s days were numbered and that they were on the winning side. Even now, but not yet.) Earlier in the Letter to the Jesus Movement in Roma in 55AD, St Paul wrote of Abraham, the first to believe, the Judaeo-Christian father in faith, Abraham believed hoping against hope in God, “Who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist.” (Rom 4.)
St Paul understood that individuals do not exist in a vacuum. He would have bought into the modern word, “Individuation”, viz., we are individuals who thrive in relationship with others. As Greek philosophers had said earlier, “Humans are social and political animals.” As quantum theologians tell us now, we effect and are effected in every experience and encounter of our lives (for good or for bad.)
At this point in his life, St Paul probably still believed that the world, as people knew it, would change radically soon, because of the effect of Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection. His strong faith was reflected in his missionary strategy of developing beachhead communities of the Jesus Movement in key cities around the Meditterrean Sea. His communities in various cities, such as Corinth and Ephesus, might have been composed of no more than 100 people (who met in small house churches of about 20 folks each).
The Jesus Movement believed that God had definitively acted in the death and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. As a result, as the Jesus Movement met, the faith of each member bolstered the corporate faith and the corporate faith bolstered the faith of each member. The Jesus Movement shared and nurtured the vision of a different Reality. Today, terms that would be used are an alternate worldview, an alternate universe, an alternate explanation, an alternate Gestalt, an alternate spin. Relationships matter!!
The Jesus Movement offered a different view of life. Every moment of life is immersed in the Creating and Saving God and the Creating and Saving God is immersed in every moment. The Paschal Mystery of Christ Jesus imbued all reality. Everything has been transformed. One needed the gift of faith to share the transformed reality. Using the familiar paradox, that the Evangelists used later in the Gospels (St Paul’s letters pre-dated the written Gospels!!), the Jesus Movement believed that they shared in the victory of the “Christ Quantum” even now, but not yet!! They (and we) live in an interim time.
Their creed which they professed is ours, “Jesus is Lord”. The word for Lord was kyrios . This very word had been used for YHWH in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures completed by the scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. The very word was used for the Roman Emperor as well as one of his favorite titles. Therefore, the primitive creed was a religious and political bombshell. While the Jesus Movement went out of its way to “stay off the radar screen”, they indeed lived a corporate consciousness ultimately on a collision course with the “System”.
The Jesus Movement was very conscious of their desire to live quietly in the midst of the society in the then capital of the world. St Paul later in his letter urges respect for government. “Pay to all their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, toll to whom toll is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another”. (Rom 13.7-8a)
However, what he does not say directly, he hints at indirectly in today’s second reading. The great Reality is the Paschal Mystery of Christ Jesus, in which all share through baptism. Therefore, “for I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the Love of God, not death, nor life, angels, principalities, present things or future things, not powers, not height, depth or any other creature.” (Recall that principalities and powers refer to such things as corporate conscious and/or subconscious, the Zeitgeist or Gestalt of the System subtly instills.) What St Paul says then (and now) is to take all Caesar’s hype with a grain of salt. Jesus is Lord and nobody and/or nothing else is. 080308AD jfq
