By Robert Royal.
For many years, I found it hard to warm to St. Paul. I know I'm hardly the only one. St. Peter himself wrote: "His letters contain some things that are hard to understand." An understatement, to say the least. And then, there are the consequences of that difficulty, "which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." (2 Peter 3:13) Since the Protestant Reformation with its emphasis on sola fide, erroneously derived from Paul by isolating the phrase from other things he said, it's been even harder for a Catholic to approach the "chosen vessel," the great evangelizer of the gentiles.
But in mid-summer, you want a respite from the controversies that bulk so large during the rest of the year. And for some reason, as I followed the Sunday readings in Acts this Lent and Easter Season, I found myself drawn into trying to wrestle, again, with Paul's letters.
The only thing about him that is still clear to me is what a difficult case he is to get a grip on. (The Protestant scholar N.T. Wright is a good technical guide, but in the end is still faced with many mysteries.)
Other early Church figures are more "relatable," as we say these days: Peter is a bit dense (like most of us); the other Apostles are "human" (like us) in that they misunderstand the Master and instead seem ambitious, contentious, even (in their various ways) at times skeptical; the holy women who followed Jesus remind you of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, female friends that you've known.
Paul is sui generis. Still, I've been struck going through his writings and thinking about what we learn about him from Acts, by the realization that he - or someone like him - simply had to arise in the early Church.
Many people were converted during that first century by the great miracles and sheer power of the Apostles. And there was also the conspicuous holiness and heroism of followers of the Way, even under persecution and martyrdom.
Nevertheless, someone was also needed who could explain this new Spirit. And it would have to be a person deep and fluent in both the Jewish tradition and the Greek culture that permeated the Roman world of the day. That person was Saul (Hebrew name)/ Paul (Paulos, in Greek).
When I say he had to explain the Good News, I don't mean that he always succeeded or was even always good at it. It's just that his batting average (I'm guessing about an unreal .700) made him the Christian evangelizing GOAT.
And that despite the fact that there were people who regarded his amphibious cultural nature, which enabled him to move easily between the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean and the larger Greco-Roman world, as - to be blunt - certifiable madness. In a little-noticed episode, for instance, the Roman Procurator Porcius Festus shouts out as Paul, having been brought before King Agrippa, goes off on one of his verbal fusillades, "Paul, you are mad; your great learning is turning you mad." (Acts 26:24)
If you've never thought that while reading Paul, you've probably not been paying close enough attention. Almost every serious "intellectual" can feel at times that his learning, for which the world has little use, is indeed some sort of mania. But Paul's mania was unique.
Yet Paul was not only a fertile thinker and writer, he was a compelling speaker and an unignorable presence. You don't get yourself beaten with rods three times, stoned and left for dead, brought before authorities Jewish and pagan, and ultimately beheaded unless you have the power to move people, lots of them, for and against you.
So whatever you can say or think about Paul's influence, you have to admit that he was - to use the current jargon - a great influencer, even without benefit of social media. Everywhere he went, he stirred things up.
He didn't "make a mess." The mess was already there. You might say he helped to turn a topsy-turvy world right side up. And he did that by both knowing and engagi...
