Lection and Liturgy

Philemon is the shortest of all Paul’s letters. (That hasn’t stopped someone writing a 600 page commentary on its 25 verses!) In the Roman Catholic lectionary selected verses are read on the 23 rd Sunday of Ordinary Time in Year C. The corresponding Proper 18 in the Revised Common Lectionary, as so often, lengthens the reading to almost the whole letter, leaving out only the closing greetings.  While some of the precise details are obscure, the overall picture is generally agreed to be straightforward. Philemon seems to be a member of the church at Colossae, who found his Christian faith through Paul’s ministry. Onesimus is a runaway slave of Philemon who has ended up in Paul’s company, and been visiting him while Paul is under arrest. As a result of his contact with Paul, he has come to faith in Christ independently of the commitment made by his master. Slavery was everywhere in the Roman world. Picture via Wikipedia (public domain) According to their shared cu...

Icon of St Timothy. Via Wikimedia Commons . The Sunday lectionary reads selections from 1 & 2 Timothy through in sequence towards the end of Year C, 1 and uses a couple of short excerpts from Titus in the selections for Christmas Day. As I noted in my introduction to Paul’s letters, these three are sufficiently like each other to be grouped together, and sufficiently different from Paul’s other letters for many people to wonder if he wrote them. Although they are usually called, collectively, the Pastoral Letters, I think they might better be thought of as “organisational letters” written for those who have some responsibility for organising the church. Whether Paul did write them, directly, indirectly or not at all, they are in any case different in form. They are not letters to churches, but letters from a senior to a junior colleague. If Paul (as the letters say) calls Timothy and Titus his “sons” in the faith, we should remember that was not simply a relationsh...

I take both the letters to the church at Thessalonica together. Between them they have no more lectionary readings than the individual letters we have already looked at, and they cover much the same territory. Their key theme is how to live when you are expecting the end of the world as you know it. While living in expectation of Christ’s appearing remains a significant theme in Paul’s letters, it is at its most intense here. It also seems to be an expectation that is not fully understood by his Gentile converts in Thessalonica, who lack the grounding in Old Testament texts to fully appreciate it. Unsurprisingly, given this emphasis, the majority of readings from these letters comes in the Advent season. These letters were (at least if they are both by Paul) probably written fairly closely together. According to Acts, Paul visited Thessalonica early on his second missionary journey (Acts 17), and these letters seem to have been written fairly soon after that, making Fir...

A small number of passages from Colossians crop up several times over the course of the lectionary. Selections from the letter are read through in the earlier summer weeks of post-Easter Ordinary Time, in Year C. The hymnic passage extolling Christ as the centre of both creation and its restoration as new creation (Col 1:15-20) is also read on Christ the King (again Year C). And the opening of chapter 3 is also read on Easter Day (Year A). The letter as a whole reads a little like a first rehearsal for some of the themes we have seen developed in Ephesians. The story of human redemption is told on the same cosmic scale. In his description of Christ as “the image of the invisible God”, Paul seems to be echoing Wisdom chapter 7, especially verses 23-27. If Jewish thinkers increasingly saw Torah as the repository of divine wisdom, Paul leads the way for Christian thinkers in seeing Christ as wisdom’s true incarnation, a theme that is developed in John’s gospel. The Arch ...

Christianity might have been born in a thoroughly Jewish home, but it quickly got sent to a Roman boarding school. In Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, we see something of that happening. Philippi, like Corinth was a Roman colony, and Paul draws rather more positively on that heritage to shape his language when he writes to the Philippians, than he does in his more troubled relationship with Corinth. Indeed, it may well have been the Philippian church Paul had in mind when he spoke of the generosity of the Macedonian churches (2 Corinthians 8:1-7), appealing to the competitive spirit at Corinth, and trying to get them to up their game in the generosity stakes. Paul envisages in Philippians that his death might be a very real possible outcome of his imprisonment. The picture is the traditional site of Paul’s burial in Rome. Certainly there is a strong note of thanks in the letter, not least for the practical help the Philippians have sent Paul via Epaphroditus (P...

When we turn from Galatians to Ephesians, the change of tone is startling. This is one of those letters where the tone is rather less argumentative as well as less specific than Paul normally is. For many scholars, that suggests a disciple of Paul summarising some key elements of his master’s teaching. For others, it represents simply a different scribe, and Paul in a more reflective and different mode of teaching. The letter certainly shares Paul’s love of long and convoluted sentences, with Eph 1:3-14 essentially being a single sentence in the original Greek (depending on your view of what a sentence is!). Extracts from Ephesians are mainly read in the summer months in Year B. It also provides a number of epistles for saints’ days. As I say, it seems less specific than many of Paul’s letters, which is a reason some people raise questions about how closely it is connected with Paul himself. Indeed, some of the best and earliest manuscripts don’t actually have a destina...

Galatians, selections of which are read in the early Sundays of Ordinary Time after Eastertide in Year C, reads like Paul’s hastiest and angriest letter. He addresses the recipients as “foolish Galatians!” (Gal 3.1) And the letter includes one of his rudest comments, carefully left out of the lectionary, “Those agitators [arguing for circumcision] had better go the whole way and make eunuchs of themselves!” (Gal 5:12 REB) Paul’s passion and anger revolve around the subjects of circumcision especially, but also sharing a common meal. A statue of Paul with a sword (symbolising the word of God) seems particularly appropriate for this fiery letter. The statue is in St Paul’s Outside the Walls, Rome. From the time of the Maccabean crisis 1 circumcision and food laws had become key “works of the law” that helped maintain cultural boundaries around Judaism. Paul’s practice, of not requiring Gentile circumcision, and of sharing a common meal with non-Torah-observant Christian...

Paul wrote more than two letters to the Corinthians: it’s the only way of making sense of the letters he mentions in his correspondence with them. It’s just that we don’t have any more than two collected in our scriptures, and don’t know what happened to the other(s). We have no way of knowing exactly how many there were. Some scholars, observing that the letter in the Bible called Second Corinthians seems a bit of a patchwork, suggest that it could have been stitched together from at least two, and perhaps three original letters. There’s no real evidence to say so. The changes of mood and direction could just as well come down to getting interrupted mid-dictation by some event or news which caused a swerve in the argument. Since no-one has ever found a fragment of manuscript that shows a version of the letter with a different beginning, middle or ending, I think I prefer the simplicity of an interruption causing Paul to alter course. Either way, it’s a reminder that ...

From looking at Paul’s most carefully and tightly argued letter, we turn to one that is almost a ragbag of collected problems, First Corinthians. These problems are either ones that the Corinthians have written to Paul about, or ones he has heard of from others. Here, even more than usual, we are aware as readers that we only have half a conversation. The lectionary leaves out most of the passages in the middle of the letter where Paul is seeking to legislate for the community: issues of incest (ch. 5), settling community disputes (ch 6), provisions for marriage, celibacy and divorce (ch 7), and eating food offered to idols (ch 8). One of the losses in this is that we miss the details of how an early (probably largely Gentile) Christian church faces the problems of reimagining Jewish community organization. What happens when you transplant Jewish tradition into Greek soil without the framework of Torah to shape it? What does following the example of the rural Palesti...

In my previous post , I offered a picture of the context at Rome which causes Paul to write this letter. It is written to a city in which divisions between Jews and Greeks focussed on claims about Jesus have previously boiled over, and may be heating up again. I noted that more than in most letters, with Romans you need a grasp of the overall argument to see the meaning of any individual reading. Today I offer that kind of outline of how I read this letter. There are others. The Colosseum, built after Paul’s day, reminds us how much violence was a feature of the Roman Empire Paul’s first three chapters, after an opening greeting, step straight into this. Paul initially takes up and repeats the common criticisms Jews made of the pagan world, and then he echoes some not atypical Roman anti-Semitic attacks on Jews. Both are shown to deserve the criticism the other dishes out, but Paul goes on to privilege the Jewish scriptural tradition, not because it was given to the Jew...

Rome’s chariot race track was already an established feature in Paul’s day. Romans is Paul’s longest letter (just beating 1 Corinthians to the punch). It’s worth noting that this is why it comes first in the New Testament: Paul’s letters are organised in order of decreasing length. The Sunday lectionary contains readings from all its chapters except 2 and 3, so we need to spend a bit of time on it. The number of readings reflects both its length, and the way it has been thought of, especially since the Reformation, as the most important of Paul’s letters, and a kind of compendium of his thought. Despite that long tradition, most people nowadays go at least part way to accepting that it is a response to specific circumstances, just like Paul’s other letters. It is written for a particular situation, not as a timeless treatise of theology. Different scholars give more or less weight to a whole range of different reasons, so I am going simply to outline my own speculation,...

In the previous post , I looked at some of the general issues involved in reading Paul’s letters. In today’s blog, I want to explore a couple of key themes. There are core ideas which crop up repeatedly in Paul’s thinking; but the specific ways he develops them belong to the different contexts of each individual letter. One idea which crops up in a number of contexts is usually called “justification by faith”. Since some people suggest this is Paul’s main, only, or central theme, we need to spend a little bit of time looking at it here, while saving many other themes for individual letters. It’s probably also worth repeating my previously given health warning: other views of Paul are available, and here we enter one of the more controversial (and occasionally rather bad-tempered) areas of both modern scholarship and church-dividing doctrine. Statue of St Paul in St Paul outside the Walls, Rome. Paul is commonly represented with a sword as a metaphor for the Word of Go...

I expect this to be the first of two posts introducing Paul. In the second, I want to take a look at some of his characteristic themes, but today, I want to renew a health warning I have occasionally mentioned elsewhere. Everything you read here is just my opinion. I hope my opinions are well-grounded in the text and the world it was written in. I hope they provide good, illuminating and helpful ways of reading the text. I hope they help you read it, for yourself, and to others, with fresh understanding. But there are always other opinions available. This variety of views is nowhere more obvious than it is with regard to Paul’s writings. One of the earliest comments we have on them comes in the Second Letter of Peter: So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the o...

Triptych of Pentecost by the Florentine artist Orcagna (Andrea di Cione). Via Wikimedia Commons . As in most early representations, the Mother of the Lord is central. As I turn to a book that is unique in the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, I note that the lectionary uses it in a unique way. The church reads the stories of the earliest churches during the Sundays of Easter in place of a reading from the Old Testament. My title reflects that: it comes from a saying frequently attributed to St Augustine “We are an Easter people, and ‘Alleluia!’ is our song.” 1 The Acts of the Apostles stands in a genre of its own among canonical literature, though writing legendary “Acts of …” various apostles became something of a literary pastime among the early Christians. It clearly shares a great many of the themes of Luke’s Gospel, to which it forms the sequel. If Luke’s gospel was largely the story of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, the Acts of the Apostles is the story of ho...