Getting Down to Cases

But Peter wasn't alone in this experience. The business of being "remade" was pretty common among all the early Christians. The best way to see it at work is to look at someone both "before" and "after" his life has been turned topsyturvy by the impact of Jesus. There is one individual who is pre-eminently a candidate for such a case study. This is Paul, the terror of the Christians, the man who had a passion for putting them to death, and then became Paul the servant of Jesus Christ, willing to die himself in the service of the Jesus he had once hated. Here is a man, in other words, who undergoes a "reversal" of the most unexpected sort, so that the villain of the piece becomes the hero. We see in Paul an example of what can happen to a man when the living Christ gets ahold of him.

We can often learn more about a person by reading his informal letters than by reading an "official" biography by some admirer. Paul, fortunately, was an avid letter writer, dashing off a note here, a scribble there, a long letter when he had time, dictating to whoever could keep up with his tumultuous flow of words, and even then occasionally inserting a sentence of greeting in his own handwriting. He would probably have been astonished to know that some of his letters (though by no means all) have been preserved through nineteen centuries and are collected together as the earliest writings in our New Testament. He didn't pretend to write formal theology (with the possible exception of a letter to Christians in Rome); he simply dealt with specific issues as they arose. One of his most astonishing characteristics is his ability to "shift gears" from the very practical to the most exalted matters, or vice versa. His classic description of the meaning of the Lord's Supper ( I Cor. 11: 23-26) comes tumbling out on the heels of a vigorous "bawling out" he gave the Corinthians because they were getting drunk on Communion wine! And after his lofty treatment of the life everlasting ( I Cor., ch. 15) he turns immediately to the very practical matter of taking up a special offering for the poor.

We need to remember these things about Paul's letters if we are to get the most out of them.