North of the Shire

Here is one part of the Scripture reading for this morning’s mass (the fourth verse was omitted);

Ephesians Chapter 3;
[2] assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you,
[3] how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly.
[4] When you read this you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ,
[5] which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit;
[6] that is, how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

It struck me, when reading this passage this morning that if we meditate on it a bit, there are many implications beyond the obvious here.

In fact, it seems to me that there are a number of factions and tangents within Christianity that might do well to pause here and meditate as well.

The obvious point is that St. Paul is reminding the Ephesians of his credentials as an apostle. This was important to St. Paul and it makes us wonder why he brought it up, on the face of it, looking back from this distance.

But at the time, there were already competing heresies, and factions, and the way in which anything was determined to be the true Catholic faith was by reference to the teaching of the apostles. That was the measure, and we may say, still is the measure of catholicity of any teaching. At the time there were few, if any, writings, and only in the hands of a few until they could be transcribed.

Thus, when we say that the Catholic Church is apostolic, we mean it both literally, by direct line of ordination, and spiritually, by direct line of teaching. The one guides and preserves the other. Without orthodoxy, ordination is not possible. But without ordination orthodoxy is lost.

But back to the main point at hand. St. Paul is reminding the Ephesians that he had a special revelation from Christ and was taught the truth of the faith through it. He also, we might recall, spent time with the Christians and learning their practices, as well as spending time with Kepha himself, the prince of the apostles and first Pope. But his point here is at least two-fold. Yes, he is saying that he is just as much an apostle as the others, having met Jesus Christ himself on the road to Damascus, but also that he received the same revelation that St. Peter did in a dream, that the Gentiles were to become fellow heirs with the Jews in this new covenant.

Here then is the setting for this revelation. There had been Judaizers in the Church from day one. Before we hasten to condemn them, remember that they had been raised in the Jewish tradition and law and Christ had been a practicing Jew as well. There was nothing strange in the idea that anyone who would follow Christ should also comply with the Jewish tradition as well, ie. circumcision, dietary practice, and so on. What was new and strange to them at least, was that God would accept the unclean Gentile without becoming a Jew first. Even though they understood that the substance of the faith, the Way, the path of Jesus Christ was the inner renovation of mankind, not just the practice of law, they could not separate it out in their thinking.

But remember, there are two sides to that issue. That is why St. Paul was uniquely qualified. We sometimes forget that St. Paul was the student of Gamaliel, the pre-emminent Rabbi of the time. St. Paul was as qualified as a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, as was any Jew of the time. Had he not become Christian he might have been considered the succesor to Gamaliel. When he spoke of the Law, which he did at great length in his epistle to the Romans, he knew what he was talking about.

So how does this come home to us today? Are there still Judaizers in the Church? Some would say there are. In fact, that is the substance of the Sola Fide critics of the Catholic Church, if not the language they use. It is couched in terms of faith and works.

Moreover, and this is the point of my discussion here, they tend to see a dichotomy between St. Paul and Jesus. Some would even suggest that the Sermon on the Mount was just Jesus speaking to the Jews of his time, before his passion, death and resurrection and afterward, under the New Covenant, while that was nice teaching, it is not really a serious aspect of salvation. Besides which, the Gentiles, of which most Christians are, were exempted from Jewish law, the Law, as St. Paul variously designates it, and so those teachings of Jesus are not really applicable to us, right?

This fragmenting of the faith is not what St. Paul was about at all. His preaching against the Judaizers, when taken by itself, could understandably lead someone in that direction, but when we look at his teaching in totality, there is another picture that emerges. Without going into all of that, and incidentally it is all contained in the epistle to the Romans if we look carefully, it is enough for the purpose of this meditation to look at what he says to the Ephesians.

He is saying to us today that he is an apostle through direct revelation from Jesus Christ. Who else received their direct revelation from Jesus Christ? The twelve, headed by St. Peter. So St. Paul is implying directly that he is in solidarity with the other apostles. He is not preaching a different gospel from St. Peter or St. John the Evangelist or any of the others. That is critical for us to understand. When catholicity is understood as determined by the teaching of the apostles, St. Paul is on board with that. He has not thrown off the womb of Christianity to be discarded in the dust-heap of history, just as we do not, as Catholics, toss aside the woman who was the mother of Jesus.

Jesus himself said that he came to fulfill the Law, not to abolish it. If we read the epistle to the Romans carefully we see that St. Paul is right in tune with Jesus’ teaching. How is it that we can be “perfect” as Jesus told us we must be? What is it to be perfect? Does not the Law tell us what that looks like? And is it not grace that can enable us to be perfect? Is it not grace that saves us, through faith and through the working out of our faith in fear and trembling, as St. Paul says elsewhere?

What we see is that if we are to be true to the faith we must be faithful to the teaching of the apostles. If we are to be faithful to the teaching of Christ through the apostles we must be where we can hear and practice that teaching. And where is that? In the Church that is truly apostolic, in ordination and teaching.

If we say, well, we have Scripture so we don’t need those apostles anymore, where do we suppose the teaching that is contained in Scripture came from? The Apostles. St. Paul is here reminding us that he is in solidarity with the other Apostles. He is not preaching a different gospel. Moreover, his teaching is from Jesus Christ.

Let us think mathematically, logically for a moment. If A = B and B = C, then it follows that A = C. Therefore, from our perspective today, far from separating us from the other apostles and Jesus Christ, St. Paul is saying that his teaching is Christ’s teaching and his teaching is the teaching of the other apostles. Indeed, the other apostles are also teaching the teaching of Jesus because as we pointed out earlier, the test of catholicity was the teaching of the apostles.

So there is no disunity here between St. Paul and the others. They are all of the same teaching. This is important to understand when we delve deeply in the epistles of St. Paul. If we find that it appears that he is teaching something contrary to the handed on faith and practice of the Church, we must first look at the context and then consider the distinct possibility that we are the ones misinterpreting what he is saying. Remember that he is standing in solidarity with them.

And, we do St. Paul and the gospel a disservice if we try to drive a wedge between St. Paul and the others, between St. Paul and Christ. How many times have we heard the aha! of the one who wishes to denigrate the position of leadership given by Jesus to St. Peter when we see St. Paul pointing out that he had corrected St. Peter on his practice of not eating with Gentiles.

Was St. Paul then perfect? He himself says that he does the very thing he shouldn’t do and does not the thing he should. But his teaching? That is another matter. He is in solidarity with Christ and the twelve. Of that he wants us to be sure. And that again is the point of apostolic succession. The faith is handed on purely. Christ made the promise to St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church and he also promised that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth. That is the guarantee. We need no further assurance because it is backed by Jesus himself.

So we say we love Jesus but we wish to toss away his teaching in the gospels? We say we love Jesus but we want to follow St. Paul? Was it not St. Paul who gave us massive lists of do’s and don’t’s for the Christian life? Did he not come down hard on almost every church that he wrote to regarding their bad habits and bad morals? And what is that but moral law? And what is the teaching of Jesus Christ but a sharp sword to the heart of every moral matter, casting away legalism and pointing out that in order to follow him he must first change us after we have given up everything to him? Where is the dichotomy?

Jesus came to fulfill the law, not abolish it. We are now under grace, but as St. Paul says, not to do what we want but to do God’s will. We have been set free, washed clean, so that we can follow the law, and be the kind of people that God wants us to be, pleasing to him, from the inside out. And Jesus reminds us that if we do not persevere to the end, we cannot expect to be saved. We are talking about a life here, not just a moment in time.

St. Paul here is just the man for his time and for ours as well. In the period of the Church, after the passion, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus he bridges the gap in himself between the old covenant and the new. He is the transition man par excellence after Christ himself because he knows the law and has met Christ. When Christ says he fulfills the law, St. Paul can truly understand what that means.

For those who would trust St. Paul above all others because so many of his letters constitute the New Testament Scripture, hear what he has to say. He teaches Christ, as an apostle, in solidarity with the apostles. He leaves us no room to do our own thing, to start a new Church, to fragment the Body of Christ.

And for those who would inversely want to toss out St. Paul and keep the words of Jesus Christ contained in the gospels, remember our equation. The apostle’s teaching, St. Paul’s teaching, and Christ’s teaching are one and the same gospel. You can’t have one without the others. (I have heard this line of thinking to justify homosexual practice, because, it is said, Jesus didn’t mention it whereas St. Paul did. I have also heard this in the feminist context by some who have rejected St. Paul’s discourse in 1 Corinthians on the role of women, saying that St. Paul was just a man talking.)

Was the person and work of Jesus Christ the supreme act of God to save mankind? Absolutely. He is the center point of all human history, before and after. Does that then mean that the old covenant was just wasted time? Was it just God putting in time with the Jews until the right time when Jesus came into the world? That was not and is not the thinking of the Catholic Church. Christ fulfilled what came before, brought it all into focus, made sense of it all, distilling out the central moral code from the way of life that marked the chosen people and bringing a new covenant and the means by which the new covenant could be kept. God is not capricious and does not play games with mankind. He loves us too much. Why he does is too much for us to fathom. Enough to know that he does.

And just as God in the person of Jesus Christ was the perfect one, the only one, to bring about the New Covenant, how fitting it was that he chose St. Paul to be a messenger of that New Covenant, one who could bridge that divide and show that New Covenant hidden in the old and show the fulfillment of the old in the new.