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ONE – Paul

Paul was a good Jewish boy: properly circumcised, having been born in Jewish blood in the tribe of Benjamin, he was determined to maintain this head start in his own choices, and he was the perfect pedantic Pharisee in the keeping of the law. He had every right to be proud, and he knew it (Philippians 3:4‑5). This is all so very ONE.

No doubt Paul observed every detail of the Old Testament food regulations (Matthew 15:11‑12), tithed mint and dill and cumin (Matthew 23:23), criticized anyone who defiled the Sabbath by plucking grain or healing the sick (Luke 6:1‑11), and never ate with sinners (Luke 15:2). The trouble is, this supposed level of perfection is humanly impossible to maintain. Those who seek to present themselves as perfect and righteous in the eyes of the law may or may not manage its minute practical details, but no human being ever achieves a perfection justifying self-righteousness in ‘the weightier matters of the law – justice and mercy and faith’ (Matthew 23:23).

And this is the torment for ONEs. Their determination to be on their best behavior will serve them well in so many situations, but it is always on the brink of letting them down, when their inevitable imperfections show through and become a blot on the public image.

One attempt to resolve this is to try ever harder to achieve that perfect image – to tithe mint and dill and cumin, and in Paul’s case, to persecute the followers of Jesus with more zeal than anybody else (Philippians 3:6). But the more ONE comes to rely on the perfect image, the more conscious ONE becomes of the imperfection within. Eventually, in some crisis moment, ONE will realize that the facade cannot be maintained any longer: as directly engaging gut types, ONEs cannot ultimately maintain any mask between their ‘inner self’ and the outside world.

The moment of crisis comes for Paul on the road to Damascus – and by God’s grace it becomes his moment of conversion (Acts 9:1‑9). Paul is changed – but still ONE.

Paul now applies his methodical perfectionist ONE – with its limitless energy in the service of an ideal – to the task of proclaiming the good news he has found in Christ. The energy for all of this is coming from his gut: anger at the wasted years under ‘the law,’ anger at those who still promote the law – and inexpressible delight at the removal of that heavy burden, at having become ‘a new creation’ (Galatians 6:15). Head logic and heart compassion are not always his most prominent gifts – but Paul is full of gutsy determination and energy in the service of his new ideal, and he has a kind of raw clarity in describing it.

Paul’s gospel of ONE is this: that human perfection before God will never be found by human striving, but only through God’s gracious work in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, received by the believer through faith. This thesis is set out in systematically ONEish style in the first four chapters of Paul’s carefully honed letter to the Romans.

God is indeed wrathful – ONE would be very much aware – not only at the lawlessness of the Gentiles (Romans 1:18‑32) but also – Paul now realizes – at the hypocritical and judgmental proponents of the law at the other extreme (Romans 2).
There are benefits in a good Jewish background, but they are not sufficient – notes ONE – for salvation (Romans 3:1‑20).
Having established our need, Paul presents God’s answer to our need: the gift of God is righteousness for all believers, by grace, through faith – not through works or the law, lest any should boast – and for Jew and for Gentile alike (Romans 3:21‑31).
Living before the law was given, even Abraham was justified by faith and not by law (Romans 4).

The same argument makes up the whole of the earlier epistle to the Galatians, spelt out there with less of the tidy theology and far more passion, addressed as it is to one particular church in the wake of Paul’s stand-up row with Peter in Antioch (Galatians 2).

Back in Romans, thriving now under the pressure of the task, Paul finds his FOUR, and writes four wonderfully poetic chapters celebrating the new life in Christ.

We can rejoice in the assurance of salvation, which is reconciliation with God (Romans 5:1‑11).
We can rejoice that the new life means freedom: freedom from sin and death, with Christ as the victorious second Adam (Romans 5:12‑21); freedom from sin and self through union with Christ (Romans 6); and freedom from the law (Romans 7) – ‘we are discharged from the law, which held us captive – we serve not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit’ (Romans 7:6).
And we can rejoice that the Christian life is lived in the Spirit, is destined for glory, and makes us children of God (Romans 8).

Paul actually struggles to find the language to describe the new life in Christ. He knows that both utter lawlessness and total dependence on law are wrong, but he has no word for ‘good ethics’ – in which he believes – apart from the word ‘law’ – which he rejects – and so he struggles throughout his writing with the word and with the concept, as in Romans 7. In chapters 9 to 11 he struggles again with the relationship between God’s promises to Israel and justification and salvation in Christ – forever seeking clarity – all so ONE.

Paul also struggles to find words to express the revolutionary change that comes about when this new means of salvation in Christ is received by the believer. To describe the contrast, and the ongoing struggle within the believer, he tries ‘old self’ and ‘new self’ or ‘old nature’ and ‘new nature’ (Ephesians 4:22‑24; Colossians 3:9‑10), but slips most easily into using the Greek concepts ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ to mean ‘bad self’ and ‘good self,’ ‘old way’ and ‘new way.’ Many Greek philosophers really did believe that the flesh, the physical world, was bad, and the spirit, and all things non-physical, were good, but this dualism was not Paul’s intention – indeed he would hardly have been able to grasp the concept. As a scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures, he would have been versed only in their view of the human being as fully integrated, body and soul – indeed the mark of God’s covenant for Hebrew males is made ‘in the flesh.’ He saw salvation as won in the flesh and blood of Christ. He saw salvation as integration into the body of Christ. He promoted baptism and Eucharist and the laying-on of hands. And particularly as a gut type, nothing could be more artificial for Paul than the idea that body and spirit be considered separately, one saved and the other condemned. Paul simply adopts the words that the Greek philosophers use to mean ‘bad self’ and ‘good self,’ and he uses them to mean no more and no less than that.

We have other examples of Paul finding his poetic FOUR in Philippians 2:1‑11 – the song of Christ’s glory – and in 1 Corinthians chapters 12 and 13 – the image of all Christians making up one body, and the hymn to love. The emphasis on union and love reveals the compassionate TWO wing. We see Paul’s NINE wing in the prayer and the longing that people may have peace in their hearts and with one another (Romans 1:7; 12:18; 2 Corinthians 13:11 and elsewhere) – and ultimately know the peace of God which passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7). And Paul’s SEVEN, once part of the driving force for excess zeal in persecution, is everywhere in the new Paul where he rejoices or tells us to rejoice, come what may (Acts 16:25; 1 Thessalonians 5:16; Philippians 4:4 – and Romans chapters 5 to 8 above).

Interestingly, in 1 Corinthians 2:1‑5 Paul makes the point emphatically that he is not FIVE, which would be the diametric opposite of the ONE-and-NINE he there claims for himself: he has no lofty words of wisdom and his speech is imperfect, so he keeps the message simple – and the message is the embodied, gutsy message of Jesus Christ crucified, backed up by a directly engaging ‘demonstration of the Spirit and power.’

Paul remains ONE. The final justice of judgment at the return of Christ remains important to him – it is a major theme of both letters to the Thessalonians. Paul is endlessly arguing to justify himself – as in 1 Corinthians 9, and 1 Thessalonians 2, and at his most indignant in 2 Corinthians 10–13. He works out new laws and recommendations for the New Testament era (on marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, on the Roman government of the time in Romans 13:1‑7) and he offers advice on awkward issues of conscience (as with food offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 8). He can bear a painful grudge like a true ONE (Acts 15:38), and he still likes his occasional slightly dissonant lists of who will be judged and condemned (1 Corinthians 6:9‑10; Galatians 5:19‑21). At least he balances them with methodically ONEish lists of the gifts of the redeemed (1 Corinthians 12:4‑11; Galatians 5:22‑23).

On a very personal and intimate note, Paul describes the struggle of ONE quite perfectly, quite beautifully, in 2 Corinthians 12:7 – that a ‘thorn in the flesh,’ an imperfection, a torment, prevents him from running away with any sense of his own perfection, any self-righteousness. To do that would be a sin, of course, so he gives thanks for the imperfection – he gives thanks for the very torment of being ONE.

God’s message to Paul, and through Paul to all ONEs, is this: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’ – so Paul will now gladly boast of his weakness, that the power of Christ may rest upon him (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Paul’s journey is the journey of ONE. He has to rebel against the internal critic – in his case ‘the law’ – and how surely he does that. He stands up against it and asserts his freedom. And the perfection he has sought all his life he finds not in ever-greater effort – where it would never be found – but in the broken body and poured-out blood of the cross, the very symbol of failure and condemnation, but gloriously, miraculously transformed now, because God is there, God is in it, God is in the very brokenness of our broken humanity, in our life and in our death, and is now the pioneer of our resurrection.

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