Sunday, August 10, 2008AD
19th Sunday in Greentime
Meet St Paul -- Part Ten
Recall that St Paul anticipated making a journey to Roma as a stopping off point on the way to Spain. He told Romans Christians in Rom 15 that he planned to stop off on his way to Spain to establish beachhead “Jesus Movement communities” in the Meditterrean basin.
However, apparently, St Paul had received some bad press from some Jews and some Jewish Christians in the Eternal City, where the Gospel had appeared as early as 41 AD, 11 years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus!! When controversy broke out between Jews and Jewish Christians in 49AD, the Emperor Claudius told them to “get out of Dodge”, (Roma) until they settled their disputes. In the interim, apparently, Gentiles who had attended the synagogues in Roma, even though they never embraced Judaism, became attracted to the Jesus Movement, which they correctly situated under the Jewish umbrella. Because baptism was sufficient for entrance into the Jesus Movement, these Gentile believers (called “God-fearers” by both Jews and Christians) started to become followers of the Jesus Movement, still considered part of Judaism at this early date. Tensions rose over the place of Gentile Christians in Roman house churches.
St Paul argued that both Jew and Gentile could never fulfill all that the Jewish Torah had prescribed. Everyone falls and misses the mark. Therefore, total Torah observance by Jew and/or Gentile was ultimately irrelevant because nobody could do so. As a result, the God of Israel acted definitively in the Christ Event, the Paschal Mystery of the death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus, in which all share.)
Judaism has always been ambivalent about the question of seeking new members. Even today, Jewish people do not actively proselytze, with notable exceptions of Sammy Davis, Jr., Ron Carew and Madonna. Still, in the Hebrew Scriptures, prophets, such as later Isaiah, saw Judaism as the light to the nations and that nations would ultimately come to worship on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Many within the Jewish tradition would think in terms of exclusive election, the “Chosen People” imagery. Such prophets such as Isaiah see Judaism’s role as one that proclaimed “inclusive election”, viz., that through the Chosen People, God would reach out to all people (Gentiles) and bring them to salvation. This view is the view shared by St Paul and other Jewish Christians who saw the Jesus Movement as the way in which YHWH would bring all people to election in Christ Jesus. Not all agreed.
St Paul, to the day he died, was a Jew (and proud of it) who professed his faith that the God of Israel had acted definitively in Christ Jesus for the salvation of all, not some. He even comes close to cursing himself if it would bring about his own kinsfolk into the Jesus Movement as well. He speaks of his own, “They are Israelites; theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship and the promises; theirs the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Christ, Who is over all, God blessed forever!!”
In the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII said, “We are all spiritual Semites!” Jesus was Jewish, as were Mary and Joseph, Peter and Paul, and many others. They worshiped YHWH. Their Bible was the Hebrew Bible (which we call the Old Testament); their worship was based on Jewish liturgies; their prayers were the psalms and Jewish canticles.
Even Jesus Himself apparently focused on His own people during His public life, but the implications of what YHWH had done in Christ Jesus shaped the mission of such visionaries as St Paul. As a result, we became the Catholic Church. (Catholic, recall, is based on two Greek words, kata – according to & (w)holos – unity, entirety, integration.) We have not always lived such a way with a universal vision, but our very name “catholic” is a corrective and an admonition to realize, as St Paul did, that Christ is for everyone, not just some. “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody’!” The Body of Christ Jesus is meant by YHWH to be the “light for the nations”. St Paul wanted the Roman house churches to fulfill their vocation; he would want NY house churches (paraoikias, it rhymes with karaoke) to do the same in Christ Jesus. Remember what Jesus, St Paul, Margaret Mead and Albert Einstein knew. Small groups can change the world. 081008AD jfg
