Sheringham: St Peter

Could Paul go to Heaven? It’s quite a flippant question and deliberately so. If you were to join a group of the earliest Christians, shortly after the death and resurrection of Christ and asked them, I expect they would find that much harder to answer.

How would they react to the idea that someone like Paul could be forgiven?

Because I don’t imagine that many of them would have been particularly pleased.

If you look at the book of Acts Paul is described as “ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women”, he is “breathing threats and murder against the disciples” and he is involved with the execution of Saint Stephen. Our early introduction to Paul does not present him as a nice man. Hardly the sort of person you would expect to find making such a vast contribution to the church, yet the fact that he does demonstrates just how big a change was coming. Paul’s contribution to Christianity is vast. He is undoubtedly the author of seven books of the New Testament with a further six up for debate. Even if those six were not by him, such was his importance that their authors did their best to emulate him. Saint Paul’s writings even give us the earliest reference to Christians remembering the Last Supper.

But Paul comes to us from the position of being an oppressor of those who believed in Christ. It’s important then that we recognise that God in Christ saw something in Paul that the earliest Christians would have struggled to. God saw to the future, beyond all our possible imaginings.

It all seems to have been a challenge for Ananias, who questions the Lord when he is sent to go and heal Paul. It must have been an incredibly difficult time for Ananias. He was a disciple of Jesus from Damascus, a city that was now seeing early Christian refugees from Jerusalem. He knew of Paul’s actions; he probably, personally, knew some of those who were persecuted by Paul.

Yet he did as he was asked, greeted Paul as ‘brother’ and healed him. A remarkable demonstration of forgiveness, love and faith. A remarkable acceptance of the coming of change. This is what I find particularly interesting about Ananias. He takes this action after being told God planned to use Paul to bring the Good News “before Gentiles, kings and before the people of Israel”. In other words, things were going to change, and Paul was going to be spearheading it. Christ’s love was to be spread to all people, even those who had no cultural, religious or familial links to the faiths of Abraham and Moses. It must have given Ananias a feeling that mixed both excitement and fear.

The change comes. And it’s big. Paul’s letters demonstrate just how widely and how quickly Christianity spread across the empire. Everything was opened up to all people in ways that hadn’t been seen before. Let’s take a small example, which is a description of Christianity by the governor of Bithynia and Pontus in the reign of Emperor Trajan. He describes Christians gathering on a fixed day to chant verses in honour of Christ. To bind themselves by oath to refrain from sins and share food “of an ordinary, harmless kind”.

There is even the description of the torture of two slave women “whom they call deaconesses”.

Let that sink in for a moment. The early Christian Church wasn’t just opening itself up to the Gentiles: those who were slaves were on an equal footing with the Roman citizens. Women could even serve as clergy, a thing unheard of in the rigid and tradition-based structure of Temple Judaism (something that the church seemed later to forget in a somewhat pointless and protracted act of patriarchal oppression and self-harm).

This is the radical faith that Saint Paul would help bring to people. A church that can and would change to ensure that the love of and worship of God was open to all. Change that aims to bring in and include everyone. It is a process that is never finished and is always ongoing. That process of change might be painful, confusing or hard to bear. It would have been at the time, and Paul’s letters are full of examples where he was trying to sooth relations between different groups.

It is still difficult even today. We still have churches who will not allow women’s ministry. We still have churches who try to block anyone celebrating the love between LGBT couples. We still have churches who exclude disabled people, the elderly and children.

Yes, change can be painful, but change is what the Church must always be capable of doing to fulfil its mission and purpose.

To share God’s love with as many as possible. To be open and inclusive, just as that early Church with the slave women serving as deaconesses was. Just as Ananias was in obeying the call of God to baptise and heal Paul. Just as Paul was in opening himself to being transformed by God into a champion of the same church he had worked so hard to oppress.

Paul’s story of conversion and transformation is an example of Peter’s declaration in today’s Gospel of leaving everything to follow Christ. And he reminds us of Jesus’s response: that our focus should be not on the things of this life but on the forthcoming Kingdom of Heaven and the love God has for all . The Revd Iain Grant

Sheringham: St Peter

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