The Questor

The Wild Gospel ..…

….. Letters

By the time Paul was executed around AD64, The Message of Jesus had reached the whole of the Roman Empire and beyond. This was no easy environment in which to be a Christian. Moral and ethical standards of the day were quite at odds with those which the Christian church promoted. So it’s not hard to imagine the difficulty the fledgling Christian communities had in making the step into a completely new life.

Many of the communities had been brought into being by Paul during his long missionary journeys. And, as he travelled, he got messages from various sources which gave him an insight into how they were faring. Some of the messages were pleasing and some were upsetting. So you can understand Paul’s desire to get in touch with them to encourage those who were doing well and to get the others back on track.

He couldn’t phone them or hop in a car or on a plane. So he wrote letters. Imagine him as he travelled hundreds of miles, thinking what he would like to say to them. And then, in the evening, writing his thoughts down or dictating them to a scribe.

We have the text of some of those letters in the New Testament in the Bible. Most of them are quite long – far more than could have been written by Paul or dictated to a scribe in one go. So it may be that the ones in the Bible are compilations of many shorter letters – or that Paul saved everything up and sent it in one go.

We read these letters as though they’re pieces of scripture – as they are. But they’re more than that. They’re Paul’s own words and it might help us if we close our eyes and imagine him saying those words to us in our own communities. Just like when we get a letter from a person we know well–we can imagine them saying the words on the paper.

At the end of his third journey, it was Paul’s intention, after going to Jerusalem, to go to Spain and to call in at Rome on the way. That would have been his first visit. So he wrote the Letter to the Romans to prepare the ground for his visit. It’s a long and quite theological letter and it’s only possible to pick out a couple of key points here.

First of all he says that “Religion can’t save you”. By that he means that obeying a bunch of laws and being circumcised, as was the case for the Jews, isn’t the point. None of us can become perfect by our own efforts so we can’t possibly make the grade. What really matters is that we enter into a loving relationship with God, earnestly ask for forgiveness and have the slate wiped clean – clean to the point where there is no record of our past mistakes. That was the Message that Jesus brought to the world.

The second point follows from this. It is that we shouldn’t become so well adjusted to the culture of our time that we fit into it without thinking. It’s important that we make every effort to be a good citizen and we should cultivate good relationships with those around us. But the way we live and relate to other people must reflect the relationship we have with God.

Paul had invested a lot of time and effort in establishing and nurturing the church in Corinth. So it was upsetting for him to hear that they had gone off the rails. As a result we have two Letters to the Corinthians. If the letter to the Romans was, to a degree, of an intellectual nature, the letters to the Corinthians are full of emotion.

Corinth was a very challenging place to live as a Christian. The city was known for its hard drinking and sexual promiscuity. This had its impact on the fledgling church and soon factions developed and morals degenerated. The first letter therefore is a kind of pastoral letter in which Paul expresses his affection for them but, in a firm and clear way, takes them by the hand and goes over the old ground again, reminding them about God’s saving love and how that should be reflected in love for one another. The high point is his love poem in chapter 13.

The criticism in the first letter annoyed the Corinthians so they wrote back in strong terms questioning his motives and his authority. That really upset Paul and so he wrote a second time to defend himself. He reminds them of how much he had suffered in order to bring the Message of Jesus to people like them and how much love he had shown to them when he was with them. He almost wonders whether he should have sent the first letter at all.

There’s nothing new under the sun is there! We still criticise our clergy and religious leaders, causing them hurt and a feeling of rejection – when we should be doing all we can to support them.