Archbishop Mark’s podcast series “The Birth of the Church: Why the loser won” continues with Episode 6 following Paul as he crosses the Dardanelles and into Europe for a mission that would impact modern history.
Episode 6 – Paul spreads the word in Europe:
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- Episode 6: Paul spreads the word in Europe - Transcript
Episode 6: Paul spreads the word in Europe - Transcript
Author: Archdiocese of Brisbane
So welcome back as we continue the epic story not just of Saint Paul. That in itself is fascinating because he’s such an endearingly fascinating figure. But also the fascinating story and the historically crucial story of the birth of the church from the womb of the synagogue. Because you can’t tell the story of Paul without also telling that quite dramatic story.Last time we saw that Paul had made it into Europe, the other side of the Dardanelles, leaving Asia behind and crossing into Greece, as we would say, the northern part and landing in Philippi. Which was the first of the European communities that Paul founded, keeping in mind that these communities were his ultimate credential in the face of all the criticism that he faced. He could point to the communities and say, look at these, as the fruit of my mission.
And again, we need to keep in mind just how controversial Paul and his mission had become by this stage of the story. So, we’re in Philippi and we’re told in Acts Chapter 16 that they went outside the gate to the riverside. Where we thought there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women. Note it’s the women. Who had come together. One of them who heard us was a woman called Lydia from the City of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods who was a worshiper of God.
Now, Lydia is a fascinating figure. And she’s the key figure in many ways in the founding of this first of the European communities of the Pauline mission. She’s got a Greek name and she’s called a worshiper of God. Now, this means that she was a pagan who was very drawn to Judaism but didn’t become Jewish. She attached herself, as it were, to the margin of the synagogue. And hence being at this prayer meeting by the river.
So, this group of the theoseboumenoi, as they were called, the worshipers of God. They weren’t Jews, but they were very drawn to Judaism for many reasons. They are a crucial group in the founding of these early Christian communities.
The other thing we know about Lydia, because she was in the purple dye trade, was she was rich. Now, these rich women, often widows, in fact, were another key element in the establishment of the church around the Mediterranean world. You see it in Rome. Where the Catacomb of Priscilla, as it’s called in Rome, is built below what would have been her large house where the house church had gathered.
Now, Priscilla was rich and so too was Lydia. So rich widows, we don’t know for sure that Lydia was a widow. But she may well have been. And women had not long before this, acquired the right to inherit. So you did have rich widows. And they were an important element in the founding of the early church. And again, we see how the early communities weren’t just all poor people. They were they cut through all the various categories and classes of Greco-Roman society. So, you had rich and poor, men and women, all those barriers are knocked down in Jesus. And you find these early communities combining people in a way that was most unusual in the Roman and Greek world of this time.
So, Lydia we’re told, that the Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul. And when she was baptised, so finally, she’s baptised, walks through the door of faith with her household. She urged us, saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. So, Paul and Silvanus and Timothy go to stay at Lydia’s house, which must have been fairly large. Again, she was wealthy. So, they stay with her.
Now there is immediate success in the Pauline mission on European soil. However, the constant theme of his mission from go to woe emerges is almost immediately beyond this. Because Paul immediately faces, and his team, face persecution, rejection. Mainly because they’re undermining without intending to perhaps but undermining the economic base of a place like Philippi. And the story is told in the Acts of the Apostles, where this girl has a divining spirit, an evil spirit, as it turns out, and she’s making a lot of money for her owners. Paul drives the evil spirit, the spirit of divination out of her. So, she’s no longer big money for her masters, and they get very upset. So, time and again, you’ll see through the stories told in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul and his team are seen to be threatening the economic base, or some elements of the economic base of the world that they encounter.
Now as a result of this tumult in Philippi, Paul is put in prison with Silvanus. And they are eventually by the power of God freed from prison. So again, persecution never has the last word in Paul’s mission. In fact, imprisonment will become a major theme in his story. And in the last half of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul spends a lot of his time in prison, which might seem strange when Luke in Acts is trying to tell the story of the triumphant progress of the Word of God in history. He has Paul in jail. As we see here in Philippi, immediately.
Now, the reason for this is given by Paul himself, when eventually he’ll write to the church at Philippi. This is some time later, he’ll write a letter. We know it as Philippians, of course. And in that letter, he says something that is absolutely crucial for us to understand. He says, I want you to know that what has happened to me has served to advance the gospel.
Now, Paul was put in jail to as it were, shut him up, to stop the gospel, to stop his mission in its tracks. But what emerges is that it only gives his mission greater impetus. So, the attempt to stop him and silence him, only gives him a greater impetus and a greater eloquence. And this is where Paul begins to see, as his mission unfolds, that he is to use his own words again in Philippians, reproducing the pattern of the Lord’s death. And what is the pattern of the Lord’s death? It’s a death that produces unimaginable life, the resurrection.
So here are these attempts to silence Paul, to stop him. That only give him greater impetus and give the word that he proclaims greater power. And this is a crucial factor in understanding why the loser won. Or even while Paul kept going. Why didn’t he just go home and say it was all a bad joke? It was just not worth the trouble.
What he begins to see is that every attempt to stop him only gives him greater impetus. And this is evident from the very first experience of persecution in Philippi, where he eventually goes home and with the jailer and converts the jailer and his household. So, again, what has happened to him? The imprisonment has served to advance the gospel, not to stop it in its tracks.
From Philippi. Once he escapes from prison, he heads down the coast, the Greek coast, heading south to Thessalonica. Now, here again, he founds a community. But here again, he has trouble, particularly from the Jewish community in Thessalonica. And keep in mind that in all of these large urban settlements around the Mediterranean basin at this time, there were Jewish communities. The Jewish diaspora was a very large and complex phenomenon. So, the Jews with whom he makes contact in Thessalonica and to whom he preaches the gospel, again, rise up against Paul. And Paul eventually has to hightail it out of Thessalonica.
Now, this was something that clearly troubled him. Because in the letter that he writes later to the Thessalonians, this community in Thessalonica. You see he has to, as it were, explain why he hightailed it out of town. He says this, you know, brothers and sisters, that our visit to you wasn’t in vain, but though we had already been, we had already suffered and been shamefully treated in Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God, to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. Here he is really justifying his departure from now on. For our appeal does not spring from error or uncleanness, nor is it made with guile.
But just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Gospel, so to speak, not to please human beings, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never used either words of flattery, as you know, or a cloak for greed. As God is my witness. Nor did we seek glory from human beings. Whether from you or from others. Though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of a children. So being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the Gospel of God, but also our very own selves, because you had become very dear to us. In other words, when we hightailed it out of town, we weren’t like all these religious charlatans who are simply using religion as a way of making money. We weren’t frauds who as soon as the going got tough, decided to hightail it out of town. That Paul says, we weren’t charlatans of that kind. There were plenty of those plying their trade around the Mediterranean. We were not among them, nor are we simply concerned with human approval. And as soon as we didn’t get it, we decided to move on. We gave you our very selves. We didn’t just pass on to you a message, we gave you our very selves.
And fascinatingly, Paul, who is often thought to be a very macho sort of a figure. Here, talks about himself as a nurse tending to this fledgling community, this infant community. Because you had become very dear to us. So, in other words, don’t think that we don’t give a damn about you. You are very, very dear to us. And we didn’t hightail it out of town simply because the going got tough and we were only interested in making money or winning human approval, on the contrary. You have become very dear to us. And you are still. So, there is the community in Thessalonica. So, Philippi success, Thessalonica success, albeit with persecution in both places.
The accusation made against Paul and his team in Thessalonica is that they have turned the world upside down. Now, if you’d said that to Paul, have you turned the world upside down? I imagine he would have said, no, I haven’t turned the world upside down. I’m bringing it to a point of fullness. But in fact, in many ways, the gospel, as Paul proclaims it, does turn the world upside down. So, there was truth in what his opponents were saying.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ will always turn the world upside down. So, that was the accusation made from the first against Paul and his team. Once you say all are equal and in Christ there is no Jew, no Greek, no male, no female, no slave, no free. That’s turning the world upside down. It was then, and I have to say, it still is in the world that we know.
Now, from Thessalonica Paul goes again, heading south. He goes through a place called Berea, but he’s heading all the time to what was, to the city that was the spiritual, intellectual and artistic capital of the Hellenistic world, Athens.
Now, for Paul, coming to Athens would have been certainly a great moment in his mission, a high point. And if he could have the same kind of success that he has in Athens as he’s had in Thessalonica and in Philippi, this would be an enormous feather in his cap and his greatest credential.
The story of his time in Athens is told in Chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles. And it’s a fascinating story. Not only for what it says, but for what it doesn’t say. Paul goes up onto the Areopagus, which was just beneath the Parthenon on the Acropolis. And it was the place of public speaking. So, Paul, a man of high intelligence and powerful education, stands there at the very epicentre of the intellectual, spiritual and artistic capital of the Hellenistic world. And he preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, we’re told that when he talks of Jesus being raised from the dead, most of them laugh. I mean, again, in a place, as sophisticated as Athens the kind of thing that Paul was coming out with. You know, this man from the far distant world of Tarsus and a Jew to boot. It just seemed absurd and couldn’t hold a candle to the sophistication of Greek thought and culture. But he begins by enculturating is the word we would use today. He says in his speech on the Acropolis, as it’s reported by Luke, he says, while I was walking around the city observing the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription to an unknown god. This is true that in the Hellenistic world, they were always terrified of forgetting or overlooking one of the gods who wouldn’t be pleased at all by that. So, they had this altar to an unknown god to try and include all the gods lest they cop it sweet from the one overlooked.
So, Paul says, I proclaim to you this unknown God, and then he goes on to speak of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The one thing, however, is that he doesn’t mention the crucifixion, the cross. And this, I think, is the crucial fact about this speech in Chapter 17 of Acts. If they laughed at the thought of resurrection from the dead, they would have been absolutely scandalised, the sophisticates of Athens, by any talk of crucifixion. Keeping in mind the crucifixion was the most shameful death and the most horrible death really known to the world, this world at this time.
So, there’s no mention of the cross in this speech on the Acropolis. And that seems to be, at least as far as I can read the text. That seems to be why Paul doesn’t succeed in Athens, as he had in Philippi and Thessalonica. He’s not persecuted in Athens, but his laughed at and he’s not successful. And why do I say he’s not successful? Because there’s no evidence of a community being established in Athens, as there was in Philippi or Thessalonica. But there were some people who were struck by his words, it’s true. They say we must hear more about this. But we don’t have, for instance, a letter of Paul to the Athenians. And there is no evidence of a coherent and enduring community being founded by Paul at this time, in the same way as we see in Philippi and Thessalonica.
So, my sense is that Paul leaves Athens. He doesn’t seem to spend a long time there, he leaves Athens, a disappointed man. And he has to deal with the fact of failure. And the larger prospect of the failure of his entire mission. And of course, all his critics would have been hanging out for that and saying, well, we told you so, you were always doomed to fail.
But he heads down to Corinth. And he spends a considerable amount of time in Corinth. And I suspect one of the things he did there was ponder what had happened in Athens and as it were, what went wrong. And not by chance, when he eventually writes his two long letters to the church at Corinth. Because, again, Paul has great success in Corinth.
And we have these two letters to the Corinthian community to show that this was a mightily energetic Pauline community in Corinth. Corinth was that kind of place. It was rough and tumble compared to Athens. It was a port and so on. So, Paul has a success in the sense of founding a community with incredible energy, but also with all kinds of shadows and dangers and a community that, as his letters show, that has problems of just about every kind. I mean, we think the church has got problems today, but just have a look at 1 and 2 Corinthians sometime and you’ll see that the church, even from the earliest days, was wracked with problems of all kinds. So, there’s nothing new about a church that is in strife.
So, he eventually writes what we call his first letter to the Corinthians. And I think not by chance the first two chapters are an unforgettable proclamation of the cross of Jesus Christ. Where he says the only thing we have to preach is the cross. The word of the cross, he says, is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power and the wisdom of God. And so on, he goes. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever and will thwart. Again, shadows of Athens emerge at that point. That it’s the cross of Jesus, upon which Paul focuses in those memorable first two chapters of his first letter to the church at Corinth. And I again suspect that that was in the light of his reflection upon the experience in Athens. That what Paul comes to see through failure is that the cross is the only thing we have to talk about. It’s not something we have to apologise for or occlude in any way. It is the only thing we have to proclaim, the glory of the cross, which was the ultimate paradox in the Hellenistic world, the glory of the cross. Something so shameful, in fact reveals the glory of God.
From Corinth, eventually Paul heads back across the water, the Dardanelles, into what the Roman world knew as Asia. He pops into Ephesus, which will be an important part of his story. But he’s really heading towards Palestine. He wants to head back to Caesarea, which is the port on the coast of Palestine. And then eventually back to Jerusalem.
Now, the question can be asked, why was Paul keen to go to Jerusalem? Given that he’d been so controversial there after the brawl in Antioch, where he’d fallen out with Peter and with Barnabas and certainly the James party who were based in Jerusalem. Paul would have been again regarded as a sore loser, a lone ranger, an empire builder by many in Jerusalem. So, you would expect perhaps that Paul would keep his distance from the mother church in Jerusalem. But no.
He wants to go back to Jerusalem, at least in part, because he would say, look, I am still in communion with others, disagree I might, and have established my own mission yes. But this does not mean that I am establishing another church. In other words, it’s a costly and I’m sure much pondered gesture of communion, because Paul comes to understand that this communion in Christ is at the heart of the Gospel. The word in Greek koinonia. It’s a crucial word in his letters. In other words, Christ knocks down all the barriers and brings to birth this communion, this koinonia.
So, Paul can’t just go his own way. So, it’s his way of saying I’m not just a sore loser, a lone ranger, an empire builder. And he will even bring a collection of money from his communities to support the poor saints of Jerusalem. There were economic pressures and troubles in Jerusalem. So again, the collection in his communities for the poor in Jerusalem was another diplomatic gesture, but not just diplomatic. It was a sign of that communion that comes to birth in the encounter with the risen Christ.
So, from Jerusalem, we’re told he goes to Antioch and then back through Asia. But at this point, you see how Paul’s apostolic mission, once it comes to birth, is an experience of ceaseless journey. Sometimes people talk about the three or four missionary journeys of Saint Paul as if they were discrete voyages or missions. But as far as I can see, once he establishes his own mission, Paul is on a trajectory of ceaseless journey.
And the only things that ever interrupt his ceaseless journeying are the weather or imprisonment or ill health. And he has trouble with each of those three. But if the weather’s okay, if he’s not in prison and if his health is good, Paul’s on the move pretty well the whole time. And it’s estimated he covered over 20,000 kilometres, something like that in his apostolic journeying. And that’s an extraordinary feat given the difficulty of travel in those days. I mean, sea travel was impossible at certain times of the year, it was always risky. And travel overland was, is often quicker, but certainly uncomfortable and slow by our standards, obviously. So, you’re dealing with a man who not only has fire in the belly, but he has power in his legs.
So here he is back in, he goes back to Palestine, to Jerusalem, he pops into Antioch, where again he had begun, as it were. And back to Jerusalem again, but this time, he strikes trouble. And he is arrested for his own sake, really in Jerusalem. Because if he’d become a controversial figure in the early church, you can imagine how controversial he was among the Jewish people who would have had vivid memories of him.
He is arrested in Jerusalem, and he is taken down to Caesarea and imprisoned there for quite some time. He languishes in jail because there’s a change of authority. So, Paul falls between the cracks, as it were, but eventually in Caesarea on the coast, in prison, he decides, and he’s done this before, it’s a good tactic. He decides as a Roman citizen, and keep in mind, that’s what he was. And this could be very useful at times. As a Roman citizen he would appeal to the emperor in Rome. Any Roman citizen had the right to appeal to Caesar to be judged by the emperor. And his appeal is admitted. And Paul then it is decided he will go to Rome, where he will be judged by the imperial courts.
So, at that point we shall rest it for this podcast. We’ve got Paul languishing in prison, but on his way to Rome and in the next and final podcast, we will look at Paul’s journey to Rome and what happens to him there.