by Peter Mullen, TCW
AS many north of the border prepare to celebrate Burns Night (and no doubt south of it too), we are republishing this article from January 2021.
JANUARY 25 gives us a far better reason than Burns Night for rejoicing. It is the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul.
Paul is one of God’s supreme miracles and acts of grace. He is second only to Jesus Christ himself in the history of Christianity. Consider this: it was St Paul and not the gospel writers who first gave us those words from the Last Supper, ‘In the same night that he was betrayed he took bread . . . Likewise after supper he took the cup . . .’ Paul was the greatest of all the Christian teachers. He was the biggest influence on the Catholic St Augustine and on the Protestant Martin Luther. Paul’s teaching that life is a crisis demanding decision is even at the centre of the philosophy of the atheistic existentialists.
It was Paul who defined in words of one syllable the human predicament: The thing I do, that I would not; and the thing I would not, that I do. Many philosophers had said the problem with us human beings is our passions which run away with us. We will one thing, but our desires throw us off course. Paul realised that the fault does not originate in the passions but in the will itself. We consist of contradictory volitions. We really are divided selves.
As a Greek-speaking Pharisee, he had read deeply not only the Old Testament but the classics of Greek literature. He was the genius who tried to fuse all these influences. He couldn’t do it. It was only after his prolonged meditation on the Person of Christ that he made sense of our divided selves. So here he quotes Euripides from the 5th century BC: ‘We know the good; we apprehend it clearly: But we cannot bring it to fruition.’It is a truth repeated by Paul’s near-contemporary, Ovid, who said: ‘I see and approve better things, but follow worse.’Isn’t that what you do, if you’re honest? And isn’t it what I do? And the result is a sense of self-disgust. What Paul calls a sense of sin.
This is the beginning of Christianity. In the Old Testament, God said, Be good! And we find we can’t be good. Paul expressed this conclusively: ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’ This is a punning piece of poetry – a metaphor taken from the Greek archery contests. The Greek word for sins is hamartia. And in the archery contests that’s what they called the arrows which fell short of the target, hamartia. So to sin is to fall short.