Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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for all Paul does, and indeed of the man himself. You can look at this from a number of different angles. It will not be wrong to say today that this is the explanation of his conversion, what happened on Damascus Road. Here after all is the oddest of all the odd events in Paul’s life.
He sets out from Jerusalem with the settled determination to stamp out the Christian faith, and to do it by stamping out Christians. Any he can find in Damascus he will bring home to Jerusalem in chains, and they will be lucky if they get away with a better fate than Stephen’s. That is how he sets out, but it is not how he arrives. He has left in one of his own letters a note about the astonishment with which the Christians of Judaea greeted the news when it came back to them. “Our former persecutor is preaching as Gospel (for the noun is in Paul’s verb) the faith he used to try to destroy. The Gospel has got hold of the persecutor, it has beaten him at his own game. He is a prisoner of the Gospel now, and he will never get away from its service.”
This leads us to another point, as the familiar stories in Acts explicitly do. The Gospel is the explanation of Paul as an apostle. He is not the official of an organization. Such organization as there was, was always slow to recognize him. He was a rather upsetting person. He was not in the business for what he could get out of it; for the most part he had to earn his own living, and be an apostle in his spare time, and he got many more kicks out of it than half pence. He was not an apostle because he enjoyed public speaking, it was a terror and trembling to him. He was not an apostle because he enjoyed putting other people in their place, imposing his beliefs and ethics upon them. There is only one explanation of his apostleship; it was a task the Gospel forced upon him. “Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel.” Being a preacher, an apostle, was a hard life, but trying not to be one was worse.
Nothing in his apostolic career gave him more trouble than the Church. Wherever he went he founded churches, and nearly every time it gave him trouble. He can’t have founded churches like the one in Corinth because they are such fun to have! They came nearer to breaking his heart. Why did he do it? How can you explain Paul as a churchman? We have grown familiar with the answer by now. He founded churches because the Gospel demanded it. People came to new life because he had begotten them in the Gospel and he could not leave these members of his family to starve and perish in isolation. They had to be brought together, they had to learn to live together; they were the Church, whether Paul wished it to be so or not, created by the Gospel.
We come back to where we started. It is the Gospel that explains Paul the convert, the apostle, the churchman, but above all Paul the man. He behaves like a chameleon—among Jews as a Jew, among Gentiles as a Gentile, among strong or weak Christians as one of them. Why? For the sake of the Gospel. “If by any means I may win some of them for the Gospel, for Christ the author and theme of the Gospel.” What is it that makes him endure trials, hardships, dangers without number? ‘Five times I received the Jewish punishment of thirty-nine lashes, three times the Roman punishment of beating with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked.” And so the record continues. The man goes through life never considering himself, because his life is dominated and controlled by the Gospel. That is what explains him. But this is where we have to take another step. We have been talking about the Gospel and assuming we know what Paul means by it and how it controls his life. But what is the Gospel?
WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?
This is the point at which one could embark on not a new point or even a new sermon but a whole series of sermons or a pile of books. But it would be wrong to forget that Paul could define the Gospel in half a dozen words. It is, he said, God’s power leading to salvation. It was this for him and for the world, and the one thing that appropriated it was faith, trust in the God who made the offer. It was something God had made available simply on his own initiative, by sending his Son into the world to live, die, and then rise from the dead. God had done everything for those who deserved nothing.
That this had made a new man of Paul is true, but it is not the point that I am dealing with. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new act of creation. Old things have passed away, new things have come into being. We have died with Christ to sin, that henceforth we may walk in newness of life.” This is true but what I am concerned with is the way in which the Gospel controls the actions of the man Paul, who has come to know what it meant. Many things could be said about this—let me say two.
First, Paul knows “the Gospel is for me. Therefore, I must be grateful. The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me. There is therefore nothing I cannot do, nothing that is too much for me to do for Him. If God makes available to me, Paul, a right relation with himself—righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit, then imprisonment, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks all the lot are a small return. I can put up with this and much more in the service of the One who has done so much and given so much.” “The love of Christ,” says Paul, “leaves us no room for choice. Gratitude constrains me, and the Gospel itself makes possible the life of grateful obedience. I can do all things,” says Paul, “through Christ who strengthens me.” He is willing to accept any kind of situation—hardship, affliction, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, the sword, and in them all he discovers that we are more than conquerors, through him who loves us.
George Adam Smith was a Scottish Old Testament scholar of a couple of generations ago. He found himself once in an unexpectedly ecumenical situation, more surprising in those days than it would be today, travelling in the same railway compartment with a young Roman Catholic priest. They got into conversation and in spite of himself Smith found himself admiring and loving the young man. He was, it appeared, going home to say goodbye to his parents, before setting off as a missionary to a part of Africa where, at that time, a white man’s life was reckoned in months rather than in years. Smith was so impressed that he urged the young man not to go. Of course he had to serve Christ, that was obvious but at such a cost? When the priest left the train, Smith lowered the window and urged him to reconsider his plans. But the young man picked up the crucifix he wore and said, “He did this for me, what less can I do for Him?”
That is the picture; the crucifix is a picture. It may be nothing more than a picture. The reality behind the picture, Paul experienced when he spoke of always carrying around the dying and killing of the Lord Jesus. But I must move on to the second thing. Paul knew the Gospel is—for all. Therefore, it must be shared. Hence the curious behavior which is put before us in our passage in 1 Corinthians. “To the Jew I became as if I were a Jew, like those who are bound to the Law, but to those who were not bound to it, I became as if I had never heard of it.” Why? “If only I might gain some of them, gain some for the Gospel, gain them for Christ.” Do not underestimate what this meant for Paul. Here is a man brought up in the strictest understanding of the Judaism, a Pharisee among Pharisees, striving to keep every prohibition with the strictest scrupulousness. Only a shattering revolution could make him change his ways. But he did change them in order to go and be at home in a non-Jewish environment, so as to win the Gentiles for Christ.
But this was not the end of the story. Having achieved this revolution, the thought came to him, there are many of my own fellow countrymen, my brothers, outside the realm of the Gospel. I must pray for them, but I must also do more than that. When opportunity is there, I must go back to the old paths, pick up again still more faithfully the old customs I have so painfully discarded. F. W. H. Meyers makes Paul say, and it is fair enough, “O to save those, to provide for their saving.” It was perhaps harder not to perish but to go on living in this strange, homeless way. Looked on by Gentiles as a stranger, by Jews as traitor, at home only with God, and more or less in the society God was calling into being.
For here is another point. The Gospel is for all; therefore, it unites all and all must come to love one another. Hence the care for all the churches that Paul took upon himself, and his anxiety when converts failed to live in unity and godly love. The theory of it was clear; in Christ there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be neither male nor female. But in practice it did not have the effect of making all Christians identical with one another; perhaps it was not intended to have this effect, but Paul could never be content with gathering Christians into the fold, as an evangelist, without caring for them as a pastor.
I have spent long, perhaps too long, on what is after all history, though history is determinative