Paul is for a large number of Catholics a closed book. We are used to the Jesus of the Gospels, which are usually the Scripture of choice for Sunday homilies. But the dense, almost indigestible chunks of Paul that form the main content of the Sunday Second Reading? What does he really have to say to us?
It is hard for us to conceive that Paul’s letters predate even the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, by at least five years. Paul was the great missionary, the one who spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, throughout the known world of his time. The Church, which wrote the Gospels between about 60-95 AD, had already been brought to faith in Jesus Christ by Paul’s missions and, his missionary letters which date from about 51 AD, which is when his earliest one, 1 Thessalonians, was probably written. When the Gospels, which we rightly reverence specially amongst the books of the New Testament, were written, they were received into a Church which had already been formed and won over to Jesus Christ by the great missionary work of Paul.
Paul’s language is dense, often difficult. Like the rabbi he once was, he thinks and argues in circles, coming back to the same ideas over and over in the course of a single passage. Yet it is Paul who holds so many of the keys to our faith. The Protestant churches are far more at home with Paul than we are, and very often, when Paul is preached in the Catholic Church, it is a Protestant convert who does so.
For Paul, Faith and the Holy Spirit are closely linked, since it is the Holy Spirit who convinces us in faith, and gives us an understanding of the Scriptures. But this power and wisdom also brings us into salvation. By being convinced of the truth in Scripture through the Holy Spirit, we are saved. And for Paul, faith is not some vague kind of belief, like the modern idea of “believing in yourself”. It is faith in “Christ Jesus”. This faith, as we have described it, is what brings us to bear fruit, the fruit of “every kind of good work”. This is important: it is this profound conviction of faith in Jesus Christ that brings us to bear the fruit of good works, not the other way round.
Paul calls us, in the same way, to stand firm in our faith, to believe in the truths of faith we have been taught from our youth. He calls us to allow the Holy Spirit to empower us with utter conviction that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, is Lord, and to be his unflinching witnesses in and out of season. He calls us to attend to the Scriptures that can teach us, refute error, correct us and discipline us.
If we are ever to the convince the world that Jesus is Lord, we have to believe it ourselves, and witness to it at all times. The world, though it might hate us, must be able to say of us, “they really believe in something” – or rather, “someone”. In the world in which we live today, it is time for us all to put aside the easy compromises we so often make, to lay down the exceptions to the Church’s teaching about faith in Jesus Christ which we reserve to ourselves. We all, lay people and priests, have to turn from our often half-baked faith and the indifferent, lukewarm witness it gives, and become, like Paul, utterly convinced. God will give us that gift of faith through the Holy Spirit, if we really ask him because we truly want this superlative gift he gives.
Let us all stand firm in that which have been taught, of which we are convinced. In the world in which we live, in the era in which we are called to witness, one which is not so different to Paul’s, that is our only hope.
Fr. Phillip
