As a kid were you ever convinced that you HAD to be adopted?
I mean, really: how could you be related to your big-mouthed brother when you are so reserved and quiet? . . . Your math genius parents could never have produced your brain — a brain that can’t add up anything without using fingers and toes. . . . How can you be related when you can play almost any musical instrument and your sister is completely tone deaf?
As our personalities develop, as our individual quirks and oddities, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses reveal themselves, we begin to perceive ourselves as truly “different” from everyone else — even our closest family members. But that does not mean — even if you ARE adopted — that your family isn’t still your family. Despite all our differences, we are always connected at some foundational level.
As the “family” that was the first century Christian church took shape, it would be hard to find two more radically different personalities than Peter and Paul. Tradition says that both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome in 64 AD. There is even one theory that Peter and Paul may have been buried together in the same grave at Rome. (See Walter Lowrie, Peter and Paul at Rome [New York: Oxford University Press, 1940]).
But besides sharing death and perhaps burial in common, as well as a passion for Jesus, Peter and Paul were almost opposites. And this is in more ways than looks — if iconography gives us any clue, Peter is tall, stout and bushy-haired and Paul is small, thin and balding.
Peter was “blue collar” all the way. He was a small town fisherman with no friends in high places, and no education to speak of. Slow to comprehend at times, he was impetuous and emotional. Yet Peter was also one of those natural born leaders. In every list of the disciples we have, Peter is always named first. From the outset he is their spokesman. Peter followed Jesus with his whole heart, but not always with his whole brain.
Paul was what today we would call a “suit.” Yes, he had a trade, a marketable skill as an artisan leather worker who made tents. But that was not his identity. Paul was a Roman citizen, an urban sophisticate and a scholar: Civis Romanus sum: “I am a Roman Citizen.” Paul was a part of 3 traditions: Born a Roman citizen of Greek culture and Jewish faith. One of the most renowned Jewish teachers of the first century, Gamaliel, was Paul’s mentor. Paul even made a name for himself among those obedient and orthodox Jews known as the “Pharisees.” The love of Torah, weaving the minutia of God’s law as found in scripture into every facet of everyday Jewish life, was the heart of Pharisaism. Paul followed the Law with his whole being until that unexpected experience with the risen Christ on the Damascus Road. Then his zeal for the Law was immediately transformed by that revelation into an unshakeable zeal for Jesus the Christ, an evangelist to the Gentiles, responsible for the expanding the Christian faith to the ends of the Roman Empire.
It is one of the greatest ironies of church history that Peter, the unschooled, semi-observant fisherman became the apostle who blended Torah-obedient Jews into a new life of faith in Jesus, while the former Torah-terrorist Saul became the apostle who let the Law go in order to make the Lord Jesus Christ available to the Gentiles, to all the world, without restrictions. Paul, an urban cosmopolitan spends the rest of his life promoting a rural religion filled with images of sheep, lambs, harvest, trees, sowing and reaping.
The two most influential leaders of the first century church — and for the next twenty-centuries — were the “Rock,” Cephas (Peter), and the rock-thrower, Saul/Paul the Pharisee persecutor.
In today’s epistle text Paul ardently argues that his mission to the Gentiles, his revelation of Jesus, came directly to him from God. No matter how startling and stunning that message had been, Paul recognized it as divine truth. He would do nothing to compromise that message’s purpose and power.
But others would and did. There were Jewish Christians who were arguing that Gentiles needed to become both “Jewish” and “Christian” in order to be fully accepted members of the faith community. These “Judaizers” insisted that all the tenets of the Law still held true and held sway — despite the new reality made possible by Jesus’ sacrifice. Paul could not have disagreed more.
But Paul’s divinely revealed mission was a world changer. His experience showed him that the death and resurrection of Christ, and the grace of God’s new work through Jesus’ life, had taken this world of the Law and turned it upside down. Suddenly there was a differential between Torah Law and the “New Commandments” of Christ Jesus.
But for Peter, the fisherman, there was still a living division. Galatians gives us a glimpse of what was “in process” processes that were part of the life of faith for our ancestors, these first generations of Christians. There was a mission to the Jews, the Israelites who had a covenant with God. Peter an unschooled fisherman, as unlikely a leader for that mission as possible, was chosen to bring the word of God’s Messiah, Jesus the Christ, to those who were observant Jews.
Paul, a highly educated, sophisticated, Torah-steeped observer, was chosen by God to bring the redemptive person of Jesus to the Gentiles, to pagans, to people who had no notion of One God, to those who had no understanding of the laws that had governed the behavior of Israel for hundreds of years. Really it was like a track coach choosing a hockey player to give tips on running a 5000, or a baseball manager choosing a bowling champion to give his team tips on batting practice. You could not make this stuff up. And yet because of the transforming power of the risen Christ, it worked.
It worked because both Peter and Paul, despite their different backgrounds and different audiences, both had their eyes on one person — the person of Jesus. Peter knew Jesus personally, and there are hints in Matthew that Jesus would spend time going to Peter's house, meeting with his family and possibly living with them for a time. Peter walked and talked with Jesus on a daily basis, and was there for the big events in Jesus’ life.
As a strict Pharisee (Phil. 3:4-6) reared in a Jewish family who had very little interaction with Gentiles, Paul was taught that blasphemy was deserving of death. He was responsible for causing a tremendous tide of persecution of Christians belonging to the "Way" which resulted in their dispersion from their home city of Jerusalem (Acts 7:60-8:1). He asked for and received assistance in continuing his reign of terror against these new believers who were threatening to harm his beloved Judaism. He even received official approval for extradition of Christians from Damascus back to Jerusalem for imprisonment and probable death (Acts 9:1-2). That is until he met Jesus.
Everything changed when he met Jesus, and propositions of Law were trumped by a person of Love, the person of the resurrected Lord, Jesus the Christ.
A board chair ended his “state of the corporation” address to the annual meeting with these words: “Ladies and Gentlemen, these are my principles. Now if you don’t like them, I have others . . . .”
Peter the Rock and Paul the rock thrower found that principles come and go. Only Jesus remains the same, yesterday, today and forever. Peter and Paul never pointed people towards principles and points, but a relationship with . . Jesus. Jesus is . . .
The Bread of the World
The Light of the world
The Gate
The True Vine
The Living Water
The Good Shepherd
The Chief Cornerstone
The Lily of the Valley
The Bright and Morning Star
We could go on and on with dozens of others [this could be an interactive time with your congregation, asking them what images of Jesus have meant the most to them.]
When other religious traditions think of holy sites, like Muslim and Jews, for example, they think of places sanctified by some sacred event that occurred there and is recorded in their Scriptures. Christians have an entirely different view. From the very earliest times, when follower of Jesus went on pilgrimages, they journeyed not to pay tribute to a place, but to enter the presence of a person -to try to touch, even to take away a portion of, the clothing or dead body of a saint, or of Jesus himself. (For more see Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe [2012]). What united Peter and Paul, despite their differences, was their belief that Christianity centered not in a place, or on certain principles, but in a person, Jesus of Nazareth.
Walter Benjamin (20th century German‑Jewish cultural critic and media theorist) dreamed of a book that would consist of nothing but quotes. Ludwig Wittgenstein (20th century Austrian‑British philosopher) dreamed of a book that would consist of nothing but jokes. Peter and Paul dreamed of a gospel that consisted of nothing but Jesus. They wanted every disciple and the community of disciples to be that dream come true.
In too many churches Jesus is found either in blatant absence (at worst) or latent presence (at best). In the dream church of Peter and Paul, Jesus is found in manifest glory and grace. In the shared dream of Peter and Paul, every person, every church is a Jesus manifest.
Will you be a Jesus manifest, in glory and grace, to someone this week?
COMMENTARY
Paul of Tarsus. He is the earliest witness we have to the life of Jesus. He is the author of the epistles that helped shape the church and change the course of history. His theology is the foundation upon which the bulwark of the Protestant Reformation was constructed. His testimony of a Damascus Road experience of the living Christ informed all the latter “saints” of the church
This legacy makes it hard to imagine Paul as someone who was trying to “break in” to the Christian circle of believers, as a newcomer who had to prove the legitimacy of his message. Yet in the first chapter of Galatians Paul is doing just that — writing to “prove” that he is an authentic witness to Christ’s resurrection and that he is the recipient of a unique message and mission to the Gentiles. In order to accomplish this Paul implodes the resume he had built up over the course of his life. All that Paul had known or taught before is gone, overwhelmed by a new trajectory. Now all Paul claims as his is the transforming experience of the risen Christ and his call to proclaim Christ to the world.
In this week’s epistle text Paul begins by asserting that the gospel he received was “not of human origin” (“kata anthropon”). It is not clear whether Paul was specifically being accused by some in the Galatian community of preaching a message he had learned from some other source. But the apostle is adamant about the origin of the message he proclaims — it is “through revelations of Jesus Christ.” Every component of Paul’s mission and message has a divine origin.
Now the apostle presents some autobiographical information to his Galatian audience. First, he recounts the laudable life he lived before he received this revelation. He notes that not only did he enthusiastically embrace his Judaism, but that he “violently persecuted the church” as a practice of that faith. Paul was, in face, determined to annihilate (“eporthein”) what he now knows to be the “church of God.” Paul describes himself as being “far more zealous” than his contemporaries, with his commitment to “the tradition,” that is, every facet of the Law, being so great that he deemed violent persecution of Christians a righteous act. This picture of Paul’s faithfulness is hardly that of a man who could suddenly be convinced by some other human teacher, some lively scholarly debate, that the Law was no longer the measure of the divine-human relationship.
Instead, Paul asserts, it was only when God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me” that he received his life transforming mission: to proclaim that Son “among the Gentiles.” It is through divine revelation that Paul receives the “call” that God had intended for this apostle, even before he was born. Paul is “set apart” for this special purpose, this Gentile mission. Paul goes on to deny that after receiving this call he hob-nobbed with other believers, either in Damascus or in Jerusalem, about the content of this revelation he had received.
Note that Paul not-so-subtly asserts his own claim as an “apostle” by describing the Christians in Jerusalem as “those who were already apostles before me.” There was no refining or retro-fitting of Paul’s call through the influences of others, for the newly called apostle immediately went away “into Arabia.” That geographical designation was fairly fluid during the first century, but probably here refers to the lands east and south of Palestine.
It is not until three years had passed from the time of his calling that Paul specifically seeks out one of those previous “apostles,” Cephas (Aramaic for “rock”), Paul’s usual way of referring to Peter. Paul travels to Jerusalem “to visit,” (“historein”) a verb that has the sense of a purposeful, fact-finding type mission, not just a casual dropping by. But Paul also stresses that this was a private visit with Cephas (although he admits to seeing James), not some sort of full blown apostolic conference. Furthermore, this visit lasted only fifteen days — hardly enough time to hammer out some new theological treatise. Paul’s point is that his mission to the Gentiles was not influenced by this brief interaction with Cephas. There is no sense that because of this visit the Jerusalem church had somehow “conferred” Paul’s mission upon him. The apostle then solemnizes all these claims by asserting that “before God” he does not lie about any of these details.
Paul now recounts the continuation of his missionary travels. He swiftly leaves Jerusalem behind and goes to Syria and Cilicia. According to Acts 21:39, 22:3, Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia was Paul’s birthplace. While Paul’s reputation as a persecutor of the church apparently was well-known, his face, his personal presence, was not so familiar. It is therefore on the power of the message he now preaches that those who hear him are amazed and “glorify God.” It is Paul, the one called by God, the one who received from God a revelation of Jesus Christ, who is now able to move others to faith in Christ and to reveal God’s glory.