Friday, January 23, 2009

Hecker Lecture 2009: The Gospel of St. Paul: A Challenge for Our Country Today

Father John R. Donahue, S.J., was the keynote speaker for the annual Hecker Lecture, held Jan. 23, 2009, at St. Paul’s College in Washington, D.C. He is the Raymond E. Brown Distinguished Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at St. Mary’s Seminary and University and presently Research Professor in Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. Father Donahue is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association, a frequent contributor to America magazine and author of many books on Scripture, including the award-winning Hearing the Word series of Liturgical Press.

Named after the founder of the Paulist Fathers, the Hecker Lecture is an annual tradition at St. Paul’s College/North American Paulist Center that goes back as far as the 1960s. The lecture aims to share the Paulist spirituality and mission with others, especially the Catholic academic community of Washington, D.C., and to “show that there are people doing significant work in a specific area of Paulist mission and present an opportunity to speak about,” said Father Steven Bossi, C.S.P., the Paulist director of formation.

Opening remarks

I am both honored and intimidated to offer some reflections on St. Paul as part of the Isaac Hecker lectures. For the last month I have actually been reading more about Isaac Hecker than St. Paul (I have taught the letters of St. Paul for 30 years), and have tremendous admiration for him as a giant in U.S. religious history and as a missionary and holy priest, who is now formally “a servant of God.” This admiration extends to the community, “Congregation of the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle” (better known as Paulists) founded 150 years ago by his inspiration and which continues his vision of bringing the riches of the Catholic tradition to the United States of America. As we end this week of prayer for Christian Unity we all are grateful to the work of early ecumenists especially to the Paulist, Fr. Thomas Stransky, C.P. who worked with Cardinal Augustin Bea at the very birth of the Secretariat for promoting Christian Unity, and with whom I shared many insights and even more stories during our nine years together on the Roman Catholic Southern Baptist dialogue.

I envision my reflections as a triangle bringing three things together, aspects of the life and teaching of St. Paul recognized as the paradigm of Christian missionaries, echoes of Paul in the life of Isaac Hecker, and challenges to our country in this time of new beginnings and old problems.

Introducing Paul

Paul has inspired saints and provoked opponents throughout history “tolle, lege, tolle lege” “ pick it up read it,” twice heard in a sing song voice by a young Roman rhetorician on the fast track to success. St. Augustine of Hippo then opened Paul’s letter to the Romans, and his life was turned around along with theology in the West (Confessions, VIII, 12). Centuries later a troubled Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, after reading the same letter, wrote: “I raged furiously and with a confused conscience. Then, thanks to God’s mercy and meditating on it day and night, I paid attention to the context . . .I began to understand God’s righteousness as something by which the righteous lives as by God’s gift, that is, by faith.”1 On Wednesday, May 24, 1738, a young John Wesley went to a meeting in Aldersgate Street where Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans was being read and remembered that “About a quarter before nine, while he [Paul] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strongly warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for my salvation.”2 Teresa of Avila was consoled by Paul when reflecting on her spiritual trials: “ But while I was in an oratory, in great affliction, and not knowing what was to become of me, I read in a book, which it seemed as if the Lord had put into my hands, those words of St. Paul, that God is very faithful and never allows people who love Him to be deluded by the devil”3

Yet Friedrich Nietzsche called him the “dysangelist” (herald of bad news), George Bernard Shaw, the “monstrous imposition upon Jesus,” and he has been pilloried as the first Christian misogynist, an advocate of slavery and an apostate anti-Semite. 4 Will the real Paul please stand up? Paul of Tarsus is truly many things: apostle, missionary, theologian, martyr and virtually every element of subsequent Christian faith emerges from his letters.

I would like to highlight four aspects of his life and letters that can speak to our world today. I do this in the spirit of a saying attributed to Mark Twain, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The topics for reflection are: (1) Paul as a missionary to the nations; (2) Lived experience of the Eucharist (3) Paul’s vision of community of the baptized (4) Hoping against Hope and the theology of Paul. I will conclude then with some tentative suggestions about how Paul challenges our lives today.

Paul Called to Be An Apostle and Missionary to the Nations:

Though Sunday’s feast is called “the conversion of St. Paul the Apostle,” “conversion” is an inaccurate description of Paul’s life-changing experience. He understands himself in the heritage of the great prophets of Israel. While confronting those in Galatia preaching “another Gospel,” Paul retorts “the gospel preached by me is not of human origin. For I did not receive it from a human being, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ,” (Gal 1:11-2), and later he thanks God “who from my mother’s womb set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles,” a clear echo of Jer 1:1. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you” (see also Isa 42:1-6). Ultimately Paul’s call is rooted in a deep experience of grace and love, “I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:20) and he rejoices in his new identity, “I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8). This experience drives him to proclaim the Gospel from Antioch to Rome.

The immemorial description of Paul as “the apostle to the Gentiles,” arises from his own self designation in “Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I glory in my ministry,” (Rom 11:13) and his summary of the Jerusalem agreement that we should go to the Gentiles and they [James, Cephas and John] to the circumcised (Gal 2:9). But, if Gentile (Greek ethnoi) is understood as pagans in contrast to Jews, it does not capture the true nature of Paul’s ministry. Paul’s normal practice as described in the Acts of the Apostles is to begin his preaching at Jewish synagogues. Among his first converts in Corinth are a Jewish couple, Prisca and Aquila who then instruct another Jewish convert Apollos, a Jew from Alexandria who was learned in the Scriptures. Timothy, one of Paul’s staunchest co-workers had a non-Jewish father and Jewish mother, while Titus was among the “uncircumcised.”

Paul’s letters would be virtually unintelligible to someone who had become Christian directly from pagan religion. They are replete with references to Israel’s history and the whole Christ event is in fulfillment of the Scriptures. This brief catalog is meant to claim that the majority of people in Paul’s communities were either converts from Judaism of from that group called in Acts and elsewhere, “God fearers” or “worshippers” of the God of Israel. At the time of Paul the majority of Jewish people lived outside of Palestine in the major urban and trade centers of the Greco Roman world: Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth and Rome.

Many non-Jews were attracted to Judaism by its monotheism, its high moral code (for example, infants and older people were not left to die) and its stress on community. They studied the Jewish scriptures, uttered Jewish prayers, but did not accept circumcision so were not formally Ioudaioi, Jews. Coupled with this, the Hellenistic world was a society in transition with much of the belief in the older pantheon of gods crumbling or used by the imperial power for propaganda purposes, and there was a proliferation of various cults and rituals. It was a world filled with people trying out different forms of religion. Structures of celebration were yielding to structures of liberation. A second century novel, the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, which St. Augustine referred to as The Golden Ass describes the religious quest of Lucius experimenting with different religions before ending up as a devotee of Isis.

Simply put I would argue that Paul was a missionary to such religious seekers and he adapted the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus to the quests of their hearts. His communities were multi-racial and multi-ethnic, and for their sake Paul became all things to all people.

Paul leaves a mandate to our church today to reach out to such people. The United States represents a multi-colored tapestry of religious belief and practice and the Catholic community itself is composed of religious seekers who often seek God elsewhere. Isaac Hecker himself was an “earnest seeker” and his missionary strategy was directed at similar earnest seekers in the United States5. The legacy of Paul and of Isaac lives on.

The lived experience of the Eucharist

Paul wrote no theological essay, nor did he outline any missionary strategy. He sent letters to communities in response, most often to problems in the community. The letters are a substitute for personal presence and are replete with terms of affection and requests for prayer. Yet significant insights arise as he addresses concrete problems. Today the principal sacraments of Christian life are baptism where we die with Christ and walk in the newness of life and the celebration of the body given for us and the blood of the new covenant at the Eucharistic celebration. I would now like to cite two instances in Paul’s correspondence which capture his profound reflections on these acts of God in Christ.

Throughout 1 Corinthians Paul addresses different questions raised by the Corinthians. In chapter 11 Paul turns to problems in the liturgical assembly. The first is an enigmatic section urging women to wear head coverings when prophesying (1 Cor 11:3-17). In the second, longer part of the chapter, he treats a serious problem surrounding the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. At Corinth the Eucharist was celebrated in the context of an ordinary meal when Christians gathered in the evening at the end of a long working day. The only place with enough space for a community gathering would normally have been the home of one of the more prosperous members of the community.

Paul addresses the problem directly. “I heard that when you meet as a community (as a church), there are divisions among you,” and then gives his initial judgment on the situation, “When you meet in one place, then, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper, for in eating, each one goes ahead with his own supper, and one goes hungry while another gets drunk. Or do you show contempt for the church of God and make those who have nothing feel ashamed?” (1 Cor 11:22-23). Apparently the more prosperous members of the community simply became hungry and tired waiting for the small artisans and day laborers to arrive after a working day which stretched from dawn to dusk. They began the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and also ate special food and drink which they had prepared for themselves rather than sharing it with others.

Paul reacts strongly to this practice, “Do you not have houses in which you can eat or drink?” (1 Cor 11:22) and highlights the evil effect of this practice: “Do you show contempt for the church of God, and humiliate those who have nothing” (the Greek here is literally, “the have nots”). Paul is in effect saying that those social distinctions between upper class and lower class people which are part of the fabric of the Hellenistic world have no place in the Christian assembly. One might recall here Paul’s early statement to the Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female (Gal 3:26).

After this initial programmatic assault on the position of those who were shaming the have nots, Paul cites the tradition of the institution of the Eucharist, which is parallel to accounts found in the Synoptic Gospels, and very similar to the Words of Institution used at Mass today. For Paul the words of institution make present again the self-offering of Christ, “my body for you.” The “you” are all the Christians equally. As Paul has noted in other places, the death of Jesus is an example of one who did not choose his own benefit but that of others, and that Christ died for the weak or marginal Christian brother or sister as well as for the powerful. The practices of the Corinthians are a direct affront to the example of Christ. By preferring their own good, and shaming other members of the community of lower social and economic status, they are making mockery of the Eucharist. This explains Paul’s harsh judgment: “it is not the Lord’s supper that you are eating.”

When Paul goes on to say that the one who eats without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself (11:28), the “body” is a reference not primarily to the body of Jesus (as the later concept of sacrilege affirmed) but the community as the body of Christ (which he will discuss in great detail in the following chapter). Discerning the body for Paul means assessing the impact of one’s actions on the good of the community, especially in regard to its weaker members, and asking how the actions of the community re-presents Christ in the world. Therefore for Paul ethical decisions are consequent on a prior theological vision and religious experience. The vision is the Christ event; the experience is the new life and new way of acting which the Christian assumed when he or she puts on Christ in baptism.

Paul’s vision of the community of the baptized

The foundation of community for Paul is that those who have responded in faith to the Gospel (the proclamation of the Christ-event) and have been baptized are “in Christ” (used over 150 times in the letters). He reminds the Roman community: “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” In Galatians this newness of life means that “you have clothed yourselves with Christ. . . . [and] there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:26-28). The new life that every Christian shares transcends differences of religion (Jews and Greek), social status (slave and free) and gender separation.

Such a vision is a profound counter to the controlling ethos of the Roman empire of Paul’s day, which stretched from modern day Iraq to Britain. The population of the cities was stratified into a rigid social hierarchy, “where wealth is but one of several criteria which determined a person’s rank within the system.” Social mobility as we understand it was exceedingly rare. Wealth was also more associated with status than with economic power. For example, the technical Latin term for the wealthy was the honestiores (literally, those who had greater honor); while the rest of the population was the humiliores, or those of lowly status. St. Paul reflects and simultaneously rejects such distinctions in writing that not many of his community were “powerful or of noble birth,” but that God choose what is “weak in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor 1:26-29). The poor in the ancient world were looked on somehow as “subhuman.” Plato did not want the poor admitted to his ideal state. At Rome the poor were called leves [of no account], inquinati, improbi, scelerati, [polluted, dishonest criminals]. The Roman poet Horace wrote, “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance” and the Roman upper classes complained of an influx of immigrants captured by the satirist Juvenal, “The Orontes [river in Syria] flowed into the Tiber.”

Ancient authors often described the political community by using the image of the body. The Roman historical Livy writes of the famous “revolt of the plebes,” set in 490 B.C., but really directed at his period (first century A.D.). Livy recounts that the unity of Rome was threatening to break up, and the continued existence of the city was in danger. The plebians, compelled year by year to bear arms instead of cultivating their fields had been reduced to poverty and given over to serfdom. Consoled again and again by empty promises, they were finally not ready to bear their misery any longer. Returning from a campaign and still under arms, they demanded the fulfillment of the promises. Livy says that Menenius Agrippa was appointed as a mediator who when admitted to the armed camp of the plebian legions, told the following story:

At the time when not everything yet agreed in harmony within Man as it does now, but each single limb had its own will and its own power of speech, the other limbs were angry because their care, labor and service provided everything for the stomach; the stomach, at ease in their midst, did nothing more than make itself comfortable with the delights offered. They took an oath that the hands would bring no more food to the mouth, the mouth would not accept anything offered, the teeth would not grind anything. While they tried in their anger to break the stomach through hunger, at the same time the limbs themselves and the whole body were completely wasted away. By this it was shown that the stomach was not idle but gave its service and nourished as well as was nourished, because it shared round equally into the veins and gave back to all parts of the body the blood that gives life and strength, fortified by digestion of the food.

Livy’s use of the traditional story is deliberately ideological. The stomach represents the ruling classes while the serving members are the plebs.. This parable or a variation of it was repeated by a great number of philosophers and teachers in the classical world. It exalts the prevailing social structures in support of the upper classes.

In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul continues his criticism of social distinctions in the celebration of the Eucharist from chapter 11 and takes up this image of the body familiar to his hearers but stands it on its head when describing the community as the “body of Christ,” composed of different people of diverse social rank with different gifts and ministries. Paul begins his reflection by stressing that there are different gifts and different ministries but rejects a hierarchical division that would be familiar to his hearers and sounds a theme that permeates the chapter: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ” (12:4). He then uses the image of the body to stress the interdependent nature of the Christian community, where the weaker members are absolutely necessary to the whole body and are clothed with greater honor. He concludes this section of the chapter with a starting image of unity within the community, “But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If (one) part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy. Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Cor 12:24-27)

Paul’s Gospel of new life in Christ summons both our Church and our society to reject divisions of social and economic status and the misuse of hierarchical power.

Hoping against hope and the theology of Paul.

From the time of Martin Luther in the 16th century until the mid-twentieth century Paul’s statement that “the just person lives by faith,” divided Catholics and Protestants. Luther wrote in the margin of his text of Paul, “fide sola” (by faith alone) which spawned centuries long debates over faith and works, the effect of the sin of Adam, and the theology of the sacraments. Now we can not but be grateful to a generation of Catholic and Lutheran theologians and scripture scholars who paved the way for “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” signed on October 31, 1999, in Augsburg, Germany, by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, which articulated a common understanding of justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ. In simplified terms all agree that faith is a gift of God that leads one to baptism in Christ and bears fruit in love of God and neighbor.

The long debate on faith and works obscured, I feel, an equally important aspect of Paul. I would like to call this “justification, that is, being in right relationship to God and neighbor” through hope. Expressions of hope resonate through the letter to the Romans: Abraham who responds to God’s call and God’s covenant in Paul’s words, “hoped against hope.” In almost hymnic fashion Paul writes of the effect of God’s love and grace

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

As he concludes his three chapter reflection on the effects of the salvation brought by Christ this hope extends to the ultimate victory over the power of sin and death. We know, Paul writes in Rom 8:22-23 that “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”

A consequence of such hope is that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” and that ultimately no power or earth nor death itself can separate us from the love of god.

While we tend to divide faith and hope into discrete virtues in the bible they are aspects of the same gift of God. Where faith primarily looks back in love and gratitude to what God has done for us, hope is almost always focused on the future. Hope is a gift for the long haul, a deep act of trust that the God who has been present in our lives will continue to shape them. For Paul hope is a source of constant joy as he expressed near the end of the letter to the Romans 15:13 “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Each age and generation seems to draw its strength from a particular aspect of Scripture. Hope has emerged as the gift of God most desired and needed in our world that is so fraught with evil and tragedy.

Fourteen months ago Pope Benedict issued the second encyclical of his pontificate, called, “Spe Salvi,” “Saved by Hope”. 6 Drawing on examples of people who “hoped against hope” in recent history, and integrating insights Scripture and theologians through the centuries Pope Benedict offers a moving and profound reflection on hope, but length and depth preclude easy summary. With an awareness of the social and personal challenges facing people today, the Holy Father writes of “the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But, then states, “ these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain”. “God,” he continues, “is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us” (No. 31).

Christian hope brings responsibility for both our present world and for our future. Followers of Christ are called on, Benedict notes, “become ministers of hope for others. . . Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well” (No. 34). This hope can and most often exists with suffering since Christian hope is often in conflict with the lust for power and scourge of greed in the modern world, as Pope Benedict is well aware when he wrote: “To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves—these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself” (No. 39)

The word “hope” has echoed through our airways and in our hearts in recent weeks and days. We now have a President who wrote a book with the title “The Audacity of Hope,” and in a keynote address at the Democratic convention July 27 2004, that catapulted him into the national consciousness, he described it: “Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.” Early in his inaugural address President Obama stated, “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord” and concluded by making his own the moving words of George Washington when the future looked bleak, “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)”

On this eve of the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul on the Campus of The Catholic University of America and a mile or so from the Capitol of the United States, we hear words of hope from both church and State.

Concluding comments

I suspect that my concluding comments may be your fondest hope at this point. I would like to bring together some ways that Paul challenges our country today with resonances of the rhymes with the life of Isaac Thomas Hecker. Paul’s life altering experience of Jesus’ did not invite him to throw off his past, but to reach out to his future, a life of faith in risen Jesus who met him on the road. Isaac Hecker’s quest that led to baptism was the result of a life-long quest for God and his decision to serve as a Redemptorist priest and missionary led him to transform the meaning of Catholic evangelization in the 19th century as he founded a new type of religious community. Catholics today, both individually and corporately are called to respond in new and creative ways to bring the Gospel to the “earnest seekers” with whom we daily rub shoulders.

Paul envisioned a “contrast society” to the ethos and norms of the world around him. Baptism was a sign not only of dying with Christ and walking in the newness of life, but of breaking down existing barriers that led to new ways of remembering and celebrating the life and death of Jesus that were inclusive. Often our church presents to the world a face turned inward more concerned about who can be excluded that welcomed. Even, given the shift in consciousness about the relation of Catholics to other denominations, while giving a eulogy for a friend, Jeremiah Cummings in 1866, Hecker in praising Cummings voices his own admiration of St. Paul:

He (Cummings) did not regard Catholic truth as a weapon to beat down an opponent with, but rather as the food of the soul, and he sought to prepare it with such skill that would entice those who were ahunger for its taste and its sweetness and be satisfied. He did not anticipate the gaining of the erring souls by threatening denunciations, but like St. Paul before the Athenians he began by admitting the truth that they partially possessed already.7

Hecker’s desire to move the proclamation of the Gospel beyond the realm of missions directed at Catholics remains a mandate for our time.

Finally, as mentioned, Paul himself is a model of hope and trust in the power of God. When criticized by his opponents at Corinth he recounts his many sufferings for the sake of the Gospel, imprisonments: beatings, and numerous brushes with death. Shipwreck, frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, and dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles; dangers among false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, hunger cold and exposure, and most of all the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches (2 Cor 11:23-26). And what is Paul’s response, “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me” . . . for when I am weak then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9) . Our church today may be entering a period when suffering and rejection will be a continuing part of the cost of discipleship, as it was for Isaac Hecker. And what is our response: to hear again and again the words of St. Paul, “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom 5:5)