Pentecost III: Learning from St. Paul

In today's gospel reading (Luke 7: 11-17) Jesus raises the dead.  It seems that he is constantly doing that, raising people from the death of addiction.  The death of substance abuse.  Death from greed, self-absorption, fear....all the things that separate us from God and kill our souls.   Jesus is in the business of saving lives.

No more dramatic example can be found than Saint Paul.  He is a devout Jew living in the diaspora far away from Jerusalem.   He has become engaged in suppressing "The Way,"  the Jesus Movement arising within Judaism, acknowledging Jesus as a radically different kind of Messiah, and introducing an odd eucharistic rite into worship.  At some point in time Paul has a sudden, dramatic conversion experience in which he understands himself to have been ordained an apostle directly by Jesus..  His experience is described symbolically  in a  revised versions of the Old Testament story about the conversion of Heliodorus.  Heliodorus was a Greek persecutor of Jews who was blinded by a great light, later converted to Judaism, and became a big promoter of his new faith.  The first-century Jewish reader would see in the story of Saint Paul's conversion the message that a new stage of religious progress -- from Judaism to The Way -- had nowbeen reached in human history.

After conversion, Paul becomes a kind of spiritual Johnny Appleseed, planting churches in many places.  One is in Galatia, a province founded by Celtic tribes, to whom today's epistle (Gal. 1: 11-24) is addressed.  Delegates from James's church in Jerusalem (where Jewish Christianity is norm) have arrived and advised members that Paul's policy of admitting gentiles into his congregations without a preliminary conversion to Judaism and ongoing expectation of compliance with Torah is erroneous and must be rejected by the Galatian church.   Here Paul asserts that his new Torah-free gospel was directly authorized by Jesus in a vision and is therefore valid policy.

What can the Pauline story tell us that would be relevant to our lives today?  First, never presume that God is not doing a new thing; our God is a God of surprises.  Second, don't presume to judge anyone else's experience of God.  Third, always be open to unfolding new revelation, ready to stand corrected when new information and truth present themselves.