It sometimes strikes me that the Lord sometimes picks some mightily unlikely messengers. We are all flawed in our ways, true, but it’s easy to think there are those flawed more than ourselves. In part this is the whole beam in the eye problem of perspective we find in Matthew 7. But the parable of the Lost Sheep recorded in Luke 15 suggests that some are more lost than others:
What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
One of the best-known examples of the formerly-lost sheep is the apostle Paul of Tarsus. We first learn about him as Saul, a Pharisee who actively persecuted the early church. The story of the the light of heaven interrupting his journey to Damascus is really key to understanding Friends understanding of the Light as judge and instructor (it’s also the source of one of my favorite line in the Johnny Cash oevre “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”!).
But I always wonder what the other Christians made of the post-conversion Paul. We get a little of their reaction from Ananias but I imagine there was lots of talk and anger, jealousy and confusion all swirling with whatever joy they could muster that another soul was saved. A man who had “slaughtered” them was soon to present himself as a major leader, taking sides in the great debates over how Jewish the Christian community needed to be.
How do we react when God uses an unlikely messenger to spread the good news? None of my blog readers are likely to have seen their brethren slaughtered but it’s safe to say we’ve all been wronged and mistreated from time to time. One of the great mysteries I’ve experienced is how God has seemingly used other’s disobedience to do His work. Knowing this requires a scale of love that’s hard to imagine. People do wrong can still be somehow acting of God. People who have done wrong are sometimes especially chosen of God. Heaven rejoices more for that one saved sinner than all the rest of us trying to muddle along in faith. Even secret anger is akin to murder.
We Friends are rightly inspired of 17th Century New Jersey Friend John Woolman’s exceptional compassion and ability to see outside the prejudices of his day, but even this “Quaker saint” considered himself the unlikely messenger, the lost sheep of the Luke story. He wrote of a dream:“Then the mystery was opened, and I perceived there was joy in heaven over a sinner who had repented [Luk 15:7] and that that language John Woolman is dead meant no more than the death of my own will.”
How do we hold tight to love, even for those we don’t like? When we greet even those who have disappointed us, we need to bear in mind that they might have traveled their own road to Damascus since last we met. They might be one of those God chooses to teach.
(Thanks to Esther Greenleaf Mürer’s Quaker Bible Index for the Woolman connection.)
Thanks for the post, Martin. It is good to be remembered the God often (almost always?) picks the most unlike people to do his work. They are often unlikely not just because of their previous actions against the Church (like Paul), but also because they are so often called from the margins of society and seen as not being important or good enough. Just looking at the Christmas story you get a unwed teenage mother, a podunk carpenter, a homeless child, a smelly riffraff of shepherds and some foreign New-Agey stargazers with weird ideas of what makes a good gift for a small child. The only put-together and powerful character, King Herod, misses the movement of God completely.
It is a good reminder to us, as you state, that God can use us, even with our baggage, and we need to be prepared for God to use others, even those we deem beyond his reach.
I think the scripture that is on point is “he that is forgiven much, loves much”
I’ve got a special thing for that guy Ananias. This name shows up in two other places in Christian scripture and in another very intriguing source, the pseudepigrapha The Ascension of Isaiah, written probably some time in the first century. The first of the other scriptural Ananiases is the high priest who persecutes Paul (Acts 22:5, 12; 23:2; and 24:1). The second Ananias, along with his wife Sepphira, is central to one of the most bizarre stories in all scripture, at least in my eyes. They are both struck dead by God by Peter’s command for filing false financial statements in regards to the support of the poor.
I believe that this story records the first disownment or excommunication from the first community of Jesus’ followers. We know that the Essenes excommunicated using a mock burial ceremony, relying on Deuteronomy’s famous formula for choosing life in the covenant, versus death outside it. Even today, some orthodox Jews say that relatives who marry Christians “are dead to me.” Further on the Essene theme, we also know that “Damascus” was their code word for a center somewhere in Transjordan or southern Syria (though not in the city of Damascus itself, apparently), after the destruction of Qumran. So it’s intriguing to me that Paul may have been planning to visit this very Ananias all along, since he would have been a valuable informant: someone who knew the leadership well and had no reason to like them. Why else go so far away to gather information for your pogrom against the saints?
Then there’s The Ascension of Isaiah. This is perhaps the very first document showing signs of Merkabah mysticism, the devotional study of Ezekiel chapter one as mystical practice. The movement did not generate its own literature until sometime in the third century, if I remember correctly, but The Ascension has all the essential elements, and Paul himself is sometimes cited as the first known proto-Merkabah mystic, since his own mystical experiences follow a very similar pattern. The Ananias mentioned in The Ascension is one of three masters of the ‘techniques’ of ascension named in the book. Could it be that Paul was taught by the very first Christian heretic, and learned the emerging techniques for heavenly ascension that this early master was teaching, then went on to reconfigure the character of his ‘ascension’ experiences in the light of his own experience of Christ in the truly innovative context we now know as Pauline Christianity?
The question of other Christians’ reaction to Paul is quite complex. This is partly true because what we know as “Christian” is really Pauline Christianity – his invention and promulgation.
As we know, Paul didn’t covert until 50 or so years after the death of Christ. All the followers of Christ during Christ’s life and immediately after were undoubtedly Christians (interestingly, of course, they were the earliest Christians but yet they didn’t have any of Paul’s writing which seem to be the centerpiece of so many fundamentalist Christians today). History suggests that these early Christians – those closest to Christ – did not agree with much of Paul’s teachings and on that basis (and not his conversion which would have been relatively common in the early days) rejected him.
Indeed, one need not look to far to see that Paul’s writings diverge significantly from Christ’s. The love expressed in the sermon on the mount is quite different from the fire and brimstone Paul used. Of course, the most famous disagreement was between Paul and Peter was the incident of Antioch (which Paul describes at Galatians 2:11 – 14) and of course Paul’s interpretation won out in the end, even though Peter was most likely correct that Paul’s view was not consistent with what Jesus’s would be.
In sum, I think it’s relatively clear that Pauline Christianity has “won out” based not on Paul’s true calling, but rather his political savvy. Sorry for the rant, but I think this is often ignored by Christians. Those expousing to be like primitive early Christians (like Mary, the mother of Jesus, for example) would do wise to distance themselves from Paul and his invented version of Christianity.