Sunday, August 24, 2008AD
21st Sunday in Greentime
Meet St Paul – Part 11
Whenever there is a baptism, wedding or funeral here at St Patrick’s, the usual custom is to offer a few provisos about worship. One of them, simply, is that the God Whom Catholics worship here is the God Who Self-revealed to Moses at the time of the liberation of the Chosen People from slavery in Egypt the Sacred Name, YHWH. This God further Self-identified in the Incarnation of God the Son made human, our Lord Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus teaches us in His Paschal Mystery that our God is the God of Love. God is Love and the ones who abide in Love abide in God and God abides in them.
The second proviso that we offer is that all language about God is ultimately metaphorical. God is like the….; God is like a… As St Thomas Aquinas taught 750 years, our God is always Deus major, God greater. God is always more unlike what we say about God than God is like what we say. God is the God of Mystery, infinitely knowable and therefore, infinitely unknowable simultaneously.
St Paul uses this familiar biblical argument today as he concludes the extended section of his powerful letter to the Romans in which the Apostle to the Gentiles (who remained a Jew until the day of his martyrdom in c.67AD) discussed the question of how Gentiles Christians and Jewish Christians could agree on basics. The great basic is that nobody can save himself or herself. All miss the mark; all sin. Salvation is a free gift (Greek word, charis, grace) won for us all through our sharing in the destiny of God’s Son made human, Christ Jesus.
St Paul was discussing the vexing question of why so many Gentile God-fearers (Gentiles who attended Jewish synagogues in Roma) were now becoming part of the Jesus Movement, while the Messiah’s own kinsfolk were not getting on the bandwagon themselves. St Paul’s tentative solution was that God was choosing to make the Jewish folks jealous that so many Gentile God fearers were accepting the Jewish Messiah.)
St Paul concludes his discussion with a three questions that every person tries to answer, “For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been the Lord’s counselor? Or who has given the Lord anything that he may be repaid?
It is particularly important for Armonk Catholics (indeed, most NY Catholics) to remember that most of us live in an atypical world. Life is different for us than it is for most of our contemporaries throughout the world. Still, all of us, at one time or another, experience the Left Hand of God, when we experience the painful mysteries of life. It is usually in the endurance of pain or in the realization that sometimes, things do not add up, that our worldview gets disturbed. It happens to all of us, even folks in the affluent suburbs. Unexpected negative things happen. Maybe, life is not so predictable as we thought.
This is what was happening to St Paul. He thought that he had cracked the Mystery of how Jewish Christians were missioned to be the light of the nations in their synagogues by providing the venue to proclaim the inclusive election of all Jews and Gentiles, by the Father of Christ Jesus. The Gentile God-fearers bought into Paul’s explanation; many Jewish Christians and Jews in general did not.
St Paul reached the point in his all-important conversion experience that things in life did not necessarily have to be pre-determined by him. Rather, through God’s Grace, he surrendered, let go and trusted the Holy Mystery at work in Christ Jesus. He was genuinely distressed at the lack of enthusiasm of his Jewish kinsfolk, but he realized that God’s ways are not our ways.
Sadly, frequently people for whom life seems to be going according to plan cannot cope with the reality that things do not always add up. Hopefully, a lifetime of closeness to YHWH, the God of Love, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, can make the difference in the acceptance of the disappointments, the rejections, the absurdities, the failures, the tragedies and the sorrows of life. For many good folks, life seems so charmed and predictable. Yet, bad things happen to good people. With God’s Help, in community, in Word and in Sacrament, we can come to realize that St Paul’s three questions today are ultimately unanswerable. When bad things happen to good people, Christ do not always have answers, but Christ does offer the gift of faith in God greater, Whose Mind we frequently cannot figure out. Then, in, with, and through Christ Jesus, we can arrive at the Holy Wisdom given to St Paul and St Thomas Aquinas (and to us for the asking) to surrender, let go and trust the Holy Mystery. 082408AD jfq
