Canter Bridge

Paul, who with a purist’s zeal plundered the lives and networks of the earliest Christians, remains in his apostolic career deeply aware of how his actions had stripped him of all credentials based in status or achievement. Something akin to guilt with its barb removed presses him to describe himself with self-deprecating clauses like ‘the greatest of sinners’ or—as here in Ephesians 3—’the very least of all the saints’.

He is hardly incapacitated by the residual pain of his regret, though he seems to carry its agony without full reprieve.

Strange, then, that he can describe himself so explicitly as among the most favored of human beings, entrusted with a late-innings revelation of God’s core values and principle objectives that was hidden to earlier generations. Only the most sinewy logic of grace, whereby frailty and failure do not disqualify but rather prepare the heart’s ground for intrusive grace, could tolerate this extremity of what one might call the apostolic paradox.

This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles— for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you, and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power. Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ.

A close reading of Paul’s autobiographical temperament suggests that statements like this are entirely devoid of ego. No attempt is made to go deeply into the matter of how such privilege could come to a man so damned by past action. The matter is simply laid out with a simplicity that runs counter to deliberateness and spin.

When one probes the mentality and experience that generate this manner of self-presentation, the most obvious fact is that Paul truly believes that things are as he states them. Indeed, he seems not to take into account that anyone who has drunk deeply of the Christian message could see things any other way.

A very bad man has been summoned into the counsel of God to absorb a ministry held back from patriarchs, saints, priests, kings, and prophets heretofore. From there, he finds himself entrusted to carry this message to nations previously considered marginal to the divine project but now seen as central, sharing space with Israel herself in the colloquy of God’s chosen ones.

Credentials, qualifications, moral preparation, the finishing schools of human piety, these are for Paul simply irrelevant to the way in which YHWH works. The matter is so clear that it requires little apology to make it acceptable to those whose lives, like Paul’s, have become enmeshed in vivifying grace.

We understood, perhaps, that God is no respecter of persons, a polite and convenient truism with which subtle tongues embellish civil moments. But we didn’t know this.