Sometimes the Apostle Paul leaves you no room for maneouvre. LIke a playground tough guy he backs you to the wall and is in your face with his face. The same zeal and uncompromising demanding strictures that made him a persecutor of Christians in the first place, can sometimes make him sound like some spiritual absolutist, even a religious bully.
"I consider everything as loss for the sake of Christ" he writes, with a force that make you wonder if he snapped his stylus writing that. All the advantages and status of being a highly educated, publicly approved, validated and authorised religious policeman he now considers rubbish – and that word rubbish is a euphemism for what the older translation called, in a less sqeamish word, dung.
That's why reading Paul is an exercise in astringent theology. None of the soft theology of self-care masking our hunger for spiritual convenience; no concessions to the slow, the sensitive or the moderate who might be put off by too much promised discomfort; not a minute's consideration of those who might want to be reasonable and comfortable and at least take their time to think it through. No. Just the starkly stated absolutes. All. Everything. Nothing.
But the key to understanding Paul is to recognise that his greatest absolute was Christ, the one who apprehended him, arrested him, stopped him in his tracks, confronted him with the monster he was becoming with the question, "Why are you persecuting me?"
In most of his letters Paul takes off in flights of theological vision about this Christ who is cosmic in reach and grasp, eternal in purpose and perspective; this one who is equal with God yet surrendering all claims for the sake of a love that would stop at nothing to love a broken creation back to wholeness, and love God's alienated children back to friendship with God. Over years, Paul forged vast theological words like reconciliation, grace, redemption, faith, justification, sin, forgiveness, hope, kenosis, parousia and poured into them all the passion and pain of the story of God, revealed in Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen.
Late in life, by the time he is writing Philippians, Paul knows he's no longer playing a game of averages or varied options, as if there was the luxury of selecting a suitable worldview from the supermarket of Greco-Roman religions and philosophies. He's on trial for his life, and when that happens most folk, Paul included, begin to wonder what that life has been about, what matters and what matters most. Hence the strong words and unyielding conviction. Christ is everything, and since that absolute reversal of direction on Damascus, he has known that he absolutely belongs to Christ. His whole life meaning is derived from that hinge moment of soul interrogation – "Saul, Saul why are you killing me?"
Ever since, all faith-seeking and faithful and even faith-struggling readers of Paul are likewise questioned about their seriousness of purpose, faithfulness to calling, and responsiveness to the One whose death makes other lives, like ours, worth living. He discovered something cross-carrying Christians inevitably come to know. It is Christ who turns work into service, career into calling, vitality into vocation. It is the life of Christ lived in us that transforms personality, shapes and conforms character to Christlikeness. It is the love of Christ that constrains us, compels us, controls us so that there is a Christ echo in our voice and words, a Christ image in our actions, a Christ love in our relationships, hints and clues and glimpses of God at work in ways beyond our own ability, touching us with grace and teaching us of hope and peace and forgiveness. In other words, slowly and maybe reluctantly, sporadially but repeatedly, we are learning in our own way to say, "For me to live is Christ."
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