Dear Parish Family,
Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!
Today on the fifth Sunday of the Paschal Season once again as on the First Pascha, for Us Faithful Orthodox Christians it is again; The Feast of Feasts, The Holy, The Glorious, and The Radiant Holy Pascha, The Glorious Resurrection of Our Great God and Savior Jesus Christ; Pani Christyn and I greet you all with over flowing joy in our hearts and tears in our eyes and we cry with the loudest voices possible: "CHRIST IS RISEN!!!" "INDEED HE IS RISEN!!!"
On this Most Glorious and Joy Filled Day of The Sunday of The Samaritan Woman who found the Messiah by the well of Jacob, we continue to celebrate with great joy in our hearts Holy Pascha the eight day of the Lord! This Sunday I would like to share with you my reflections on the Great Apostle and Missionary to the Gentiles; The Great and Holy Saint Paul the Apostle.
Saint Paul The Great Missionary
In order to fully understand Saint Paul as the Great Missionary of the Church, and his calling, we need to first understand Paul’s Commission as an Apostle of Jesus Christ. The word Apostle can be defined in the following manner; An Apostle is one sent on a mission: such as: one of an authoritative New Testament group sent out to preach the gospel and made up especially of Christ's original disciples. Saint Paul himself was the first prominent Christian missionary to a region or group. An Apostle can also be defined as a person who initiates a great moral reform or who first advocates an important belief or system. (Adapted from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary) We must look closely at the meaning Saint Paul conveys when he speaks of himself as an Apostle. Let us refer to the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians for our answer to this mystery of Paul’s Commission of Apostleship. “Paul an Apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.” (Galatians 1:1) Saint Paul, as a Missionary of the Church, is defined in this singular statement from his epistle to the Church of the Galatians. Paul’s Mission would have no value if he were not called to be an Apostle first, for this happened to him on the road to Damascus. In this “Christ Event” that Paul experienced in his conversion he underwent a inner change of heart for he saw with his own eyes the Risen Lord and heard His Divine Voice crying out to him to change his heart from stone to flesh and become His Apostle to the Gentiles. “Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am Apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them.” (Romans 11:13) Saint Paul’s vision of the Risen Lord is the same vision the Apostles saw in the upper room that first Paschal Night when they beheld the Glorified Lifegiving Body of the Risen Lord Jesus. The four Gospels, and likewise the preaching of Saint Paul, are the real living experiences of Jesus Christ, they are not simply historical documents. “Galatians 1:1 makes two key points. First, Paul underlines the fact he is one sent, the apostle of Jesus Christ and God the Father, and not the emissary of some human being, no matter how exalted. Paul will focus on this factor in even great detail in 1:11-2:21. The second point that Paul makes in Galatians 1:1 is that God the Father raised Jesus from the dead. What had been expected to occur at the end of time in Jewish eschatological expectation, namely, the resurrection of the dead, has broken into time and space now in the resurrection of the Jewish Messiah, Christ Jesus.” (New Collegeville Bible Commentary: New Testament; Daniel Durken, pg. 585)
It is of the essence to cite Saint Paul’s qualifications to be this great Missionary of the Church. Saint Paul was a Pharisee and a Jewish Aristocrat who had the privilege of holding Roman Citizenship. As a Pharisee he called himself a “Hebrew of Hebrew” because he saw himself to be more zealous and more well educated in the Mosaic Law by the hands of Gamaliel. As a Pharisee, Paul was seen as member of a very strict sect of Judaism based in strong rabbinical tradition, and they would have interpreted the Torah for the common people in the synagogue. By the fact that Paul was taught by the great Gamaliel, he was recognized as a teacher, and Likewise he may have been prepared to be a rabbi like his great teacher. But in any case Paul definitely possessed a strong and strict rabbinical mind as we can see in both the Acts of the Apostles and his own epistles to the various Christian communities. Saint Paul was born into a very wealthy family of Tent-makers in the City of Tarsus. He was a member of a family of Nobles who could trace their lineage back to the tribe of Benjamin, thus we can see Paul’s pedigree as a full blooded Israelite being from the seed of Abraham, as Paul mentions in his second Epistle to the Corinthians; “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I.” (2 Corinthians 11:22) Saint Paul’s original name was Saul which was the name of the first King of Israel meaning “one who is asked of Yahweh,” this further displays his noble birth. Paul is different in this sense then the other Apostles like Peter, James, and John, who were simple and poor fisherman. Paul belonged to a ruling class in Israel, which further explains why he was so zealously defending Judaism and it’s faith on an official level as a Pharisee.
Saint Paul being a well educated Nobleman was subsequently a cultured Hellenistic Jewish man who would have known Greek and Hebrew from both his Jewish education in the rabbinical school, and in his merchant experience as a tentmaker in Tarsus where his family and the entire city spoke Greek. We can say also with certainty that Paul would have been taught by Gamaliel and other rabbis in Greek for that was the predominant language of the Roman Empire. In Tarsus the ruler Antiochus Epiphanes made the City into a Cosmopolitan center and thoroughly Hellenized the City. The City was a huge center of the disciplines of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Classic Education, and Paul himself is a product of this well rounded Greek education. To make the City even better Augustus Caesar awarded Roman Citizenship to its inhabitants. Many Hellenized Jews had both Greek and Hebrew names; Saint Paul’s Greek name was Paulos, this name functioned as his passport of sorts to travel throughout the Roman Empire. The Roman Citizenship of Paul carried with it many rights and privileges such as; when a Roman was tried in court and the ruling was cast for punishment, a citizen of Roman could not be flogged, tortured, or crucified, but only arrested and put in prison or under house arrest as was Saint Paul’s case later in his ministry. Therefore, Paul having be raised in this Hellenized Society writes and speaks Greek incredible well, for we can see in his epistles that his words are both cultured and carefully phrased. It is also noteworthy to mention that his writing style possess traces of the Rhetoric of the Stoic Philosophers. Needless to say Saint Paul is well acquainted with the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, and from all his Greek education and learning he was able with great poise and elegance to address the sophisticated and well learned Gentiles in the Areopagus in Athens Greece, where he preached his great sermon about the “unknown god” who he told them was Jesus Christ! So Paul, standing in the middle of the Are-op′agus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you…” (Acts 17:22-23)
Being blessed with these two very important religious and cultural differences, Saint Paul was the perfect combination of both an educated religious leader and a Hellenized Aristocrat, therefore, he was perfectly prepared and able to be this Great Missionary and Apostle to the Gentiles. Saint Paul belonged to the two most literate cultures of his day, through the Jewish Culture, Paul experienced the Word of God through Yahweh’s own Divine self-revelation and through the Greek Culture, Paul possessed the literary word that was the support and backbone of civilization. Therefore, having these valuable tools at his disposal Paul was able to do the impossible by drawing these two irreconcilable sources of strength together in order to convert the world to one faith in Jesus Christ. “Having grown up in a Greek City (Tarsus) as a Roman citizen (Acts 22:23-29), Saul was no doubt well prepared to communicate effectively in cosmopolitan terms. Thus, the persecutor of the Church had become one of Christ’s apostles; the “apostle to the Gentiles.” As a sign of his special mission to “the nations,” the converted Pharisee ceased using his Hebrew name and used instead its Greek equivalent: Paul (Acts 13:9) It was through the mission of St. Paul that Christianity, originally a small Jewish sect, became a world religion. (The Message of the Bible; George Cronk, pg. 198.)
In regards to the “Commission as an Apostle,” I would like to refer to Galatians chapter one to illustrate for us the vision of Saint Paul’s Apostolic Kerygmatic Mission. “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it; and I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace,was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus.Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.” (RSV Galatians 1:11-17)
Saint Paul was a gifted exegete and a prophet. A man of many talents, he possessed an intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures. As such, he used the Law, the prophets, and the psalms when he preached to argue that Jesus was the Messiah. Saint Paul also viewed his own life through the prism of the Sacred Writings, and it was through the Word that he came to understand his own prophetic calling. Upon meeting Jesus face to face on the road to Damascus, he straightaway journeyed into Arabia to meditate on the Scriptures so he could understand the encounter he had had with the Risen One. It was the Holy Spirit who lead Paul into the desert to prepare him for his ministry as an Apostle. We know that Saint Paul was more than an Apostle he considered himself to be a prophet, like the other great Prophets of the Old Testament Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah, and John the Baptist. All of these Prophets of old went through a period of preparation and purification in the wilderness at the urging of the Holy Spirit before they began their missions. Saint Paul was fully aware of the divine nature of his Calling and Commissioning to be an Apostle. We can see in verse fifteen of the above quoted passage that Paul portrays himself to be like the prophet Jeremiah, set apart to preach the word of the Lord before he was conceived. “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace,was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles…” (Galatians 1:15-16)
This a direct parallel to the first chapter of the Prophet Jeremiah;“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (RSV Jeremiah 1:5). Paul was more than a prophet. His calling by the Lord ordained him to be a missionary to the new people of God. Returning from Arabia, he stepped across the threshold of the synagogue in Damascus to preach Christ crucified and risen. “There follows an argument in defense of Paul’s claim to be an apostle: that he is such can be clearly seen from his life story. From a persecutor and destroyer of God’s Church (v.13) he became a (commissioned) preacher of the Gospel before having met any of the Apostles and thus without consultation with, or approval from, Jerusalem (vv. 16-19), and he continued to act as an Apostle before any formal discussion of the matter with any (other) Apostle or Jerusalem (vv. 21-24). To use scriptural terminology, he must have been chosen by God Himself (Commissioned as Prophet) just as the other Apostles were (v.15), and consequently the Gospel he was preaching was clearly from God and not his own human fabrication (vv.11-12).” (The New Testament Intro: Paul and Mark; Paul Tarazi, pg. 38)
