The graceless beauty of Elihu’s words should unsettle all readers of religious vocation or temperament. There is beauty in such crystal. Cold glass and steel, skillfully wrought, erect buildings and monuments that are breathtaking in scope and brilliance.
Elihu may be a fool. He is not a dullard.
His verbal artistry erects a theodicy that is intimidating in its self-confidence. Anyone who can speak like this, it seems for a moment, must know what he is talking about.
Yet Elihu does not.
Paul’s edifying words, delivered at the invitation of a synagogue leader in Pisidian Antioch, take up the theme of sophisticated error by rehearsing the enmity that the custodians of Israel’s legacy displayed towards Jesus.
Irony is one of Paul’s stronger cards: ‘Men of Israel …’, he addresses his Jewish kin in Antioch. The single degree of separation between the Jews as a people and this Jew as an apostle of Yeshua results from this most Jewish man’s encounter on the Damascus Road. The experience would generate and sustain the most painful proximity of his life, that which brings together and yet holds apart Paul and Israel. It would shape a dilemma with which he for one moment agonizes aloud—we must not forget that he agonized silently over the matter with unceasing turmoil—in the text we encounter as chapters nine through eleven of his letter to the Romans.
‘Brothers, children of Abraham, and you God-fearing Gentiles, it is to us that the message of salvation has been sent’, he continues, sparing his synagogue compatriots a vocative identity that would hint at the destiny he saw for them if they did not heed the message of his messiah.
It is to us that the message of salvation has been sent. The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath.
Paul’s ironic whip was lead-tipped as it swung over Israel, destined as his people were to kill their own prophets with both word and deed.
His own justification for loosing that whip is phrased in the language of provocative love. He thinks the sting of ironic lead will move some towards the truth. Only a man and his God know the truth of such justifications. This reader believes in the probability that Paul in this regard—as in others—knows himself.
Like Elihu’s brilliant counter-proof to the nature of true wisdom, Paul locates those who wield custodial powers over a people’s spiritual legacy and its interpretation in the most vulnerable of poses. They stand unprotected from large error.
Paul may be wrong about everything, it must be admitted. Yet his most skeptical reader should concede the point that this man—née Saul of Tarsus—has thought long and with both ardor and passion about the matter.
Paul’s conclusion sketches out a world in which the custodians of truth are condemned by it. He weeps rather than gloats as he says so.
Canter Bridge 
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