The Pauline year, announced by Benedict XVI to the whole Church, is a providential opportunity to contemplate the work of God in the life of Saul, the Pharisee who was transformed into an apostle. Today we are particularly needful of nurturing ourselves with the values that St. Paul lived as a passionate connoisseur of Christ and formator of Christian communities. 

The fascination of freedom

Born in a well-to-do family and a Roman citizen, Saul of Tarsus, who will be called Paul (Acts 13, 9), had completed his formation in Jerusalem, at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22, 3), the most learned Pharisee Scribe of his time. In his assiduous and loving attendance to the Torah, Saul found security and interior strength. His personal identity was supported by the Torah, as an honest searcher of God’s face (Psalm 27, 8). His obsessive zeal for the study and the practice of the law allowed him to prove his value; the encounter with Christ will set him free also from this. 

While he was living this travail, he found himself, against his will, to witness the death of Stephen, a disciple of Jesus and a living Gospel. Deeply impressed at the interior freedom that was shining on the face of Stephen at the moment of his martyrdom, Saul tried his utmost to suffocate the tiny seed of life that the blood of the proto-martyr had succeeded to sow within him. We are at the decisive turning point of his spiritual adventure.

The persecutor fought all in vain against the fascination exercised on him by the interior freedom of Stephen, which led him back to the mystery of a relation with Jesus Christ capable of making a man like Stephen to live and to die in that way, namely, forgiving his murderers.

Perhaps Saul had the intuition that all those who “followed the Way” (Acts 9,2), Jesus Christ  (John 14,6), would become a potential menace for the security, which derived from the perfect observance of the law (Philippians 3, 6). At the culmination of his action against the believers in Christ (Gal 1,13-14) the fascination exercised by freedom became ever stronger, together with the fear of seeing the fall of his life, which was based on the Torah. Saul made the tentative of defending himself, but was solidly seized by God who had chosen him from the time he was in the womb of his mother (Gal. 1, 15),  and who, in his risen Son, was waiting for him on the way to Damascus, in order to fill him with the Holy Spirit.

In his encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus, Saul came to know personally the powerful love of Christ that transformed his life (Gal 2,19-20).He was loved, therefore restored to himself, to God and to the community. The experience of Damascus revealed to him that the Name against which, in good faith, he was fighting and persecuting the disciples (See Acts 9,3-5.13-14.21.26), was the everlasting Living One, the Lord of glory who had knocked him down.

«He has loved me» (Gal 2,20)

All that the Pharisee Saul knew about Jesus up to that moment, now gets upside down and appears to him in a totally new and dazzling light. A revolution of the mind, the hearth  and the life happens in him, which will make of him, as of Stephen and the other disciples, a living Gospel of Jesus.

The Crucified Jesus is alive and risen. This encounter compels him to accept some facts that he had previously believed to be rejected and fought. In his pharisaic awareness, Saul  possesses such a knowledge as it is  capable of disclosing the deep sense of what he is living. He welcomes the relation with the crucified and risen Christ as the primary and absolutely determining event of his Hebrew and Pharisaic faith.

Before the event of Damascus he could state that his life was the Law; from this moment onward he can say “My life is Christ”. Saul is now totally in the power of his saving love. If Jesus has risen, it means that the era of a life, that will die no longer, has started, and that the victory of death, the last enemy (1 Cor 15,26), is annulled, while its empire starts declining  (1 Cor 15,54-58). As a Pharisee, more than many first disciples, he is able to understand all its sense.

The very singular experience of Jesus, known by Saul as his Lord from the very first moment, makes easier and immediate the conclusion that the divine Presence (the Shekhinah) can be contemplated and known in the face of the Risen Jesus Christ: “And God said,’ let light shine out of the darkness’, that has shone into our hearts to enlighten them with the knowledge of God’s glory, the glory that shines on the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4,6).

Paul has entered the freedom of spirit through a journey of gradual expropriation of self and  his privileges as a Pharisee, even in his way of preaching Christ.

His freedom is not the same thing as free will and presumption, but a sense of total belonging to Christ, as slave and servant; therefore free from all human opinions. In this sense, freedom becomes a form of very rigorous service; “After all, brothers, you were called to be free; do not use your freedom as an opening for self-indulgence, but be servant to one another in love» (Gal 5,13).

Freedom flows from the Damascus encounter, when Saul makes the experience of the love of Christ, an absolutely unconditional and free love for him: “He loved me and gave himself for me”  (Gal 2,20).

The transfiguration of Paul

For St. Paul “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1,21), and salvation consists in being made conform to his image, dying to ourselves and rising to new life in him (2 Cor 4,10; 13,4; Rom 6,3-11). The Christological experience that Paul makes in his encounter with the Risen Jesus reveals to him  (Gal 1,12) that in Christ there is the solution of the Hebrew problem of communion with God through the Spirit, which had so far been entrusted  to the observance of the Torah. In fact, the last page of the Scriptures include all the preceding ones; the achievement of the last phase does not make the intermediate phases of God’s design to disappear. Thus, Paul discovers the Pre-messianic Torah as a pedagogue that leads man to Christ, while waiting for the coming of the last true Master (Gal 3,19-29). Christ, as “the last Adam” (1 Cor 15,45), is the definitive form of the redeemed human nature (1 Cor 15,21-22; Rom 5,12-21; Col 3,9-11; Ef 4,22-24). In Him we shall know the “power of his resurrection only if we participate in his sufferings, becoming conform with him in death”  (Phil. 3,10).

With his experience of life and his writings, Paul teaches us to behave in a way worthy of the Gospel also in the world of post-modernity in which we live. He indicates a new way of being human, rooted in Jesus Christ, Messiah and Lord, through Baptism, and animated by charity as self-oblation (Rom 5,5-11; 8,28-39).

The love of God, in Christ Jesus, reaches its perfection only in weakness, with the paradox of the cross (1 Cor 2,1-5). In the Cross of Christ, the Apostle sees what even today could be a new key, which gives sense to our human development. This is not so much a question of knowledge as of courage, a new way to set up our life.  To make this transfiguration possible we must choose Christ as the unique rule of life, in such a vital relation with him as it may involve the whole person, opening it to all the brothers, in order to communicate the same gift to them also. The spiritual adventure of Paul, as apostle and mystic, is fulfilled in a constant transformation into Christ.

The liturgy of life

The many details of the transfiguring transformation of Saul, narrated three times in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9;22;26), are confirmed in the letters of the Apostle, but with more sobriety. He understands that his vocation is the work of God, a pure undeserved grace offered to a man who justifies himself with the practice of prescriptions, but who is, in reality, a “blasphemer, and a violent persecutor” (1 Tim 1,13). God has chosen and called a persecutor to turn him into an apostle. This call is a free decision of the Lord, his pure will; however, it is not an improvisation, because God’s love for us always comes from very far. (Rom 8,28-30).

In the Pauline letters the action of “calling”, in Greek kalein, has always God himself as subject. In His Letter to the Galatians, 1,15-16, Paul speaks of his vocation with theological  terms of cult, «When God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother’s womb, called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me so that I should preach him to the Gentiles…”

The verb used by the Apostle “to set apart”, to separate- is meaningful in the particular vocation of Paul. He introduces himself equally in the Letter to the Romans: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, set apart for the service of the Gospel of God” (Rom 1,1). God has set apart Paul for himself, as in the liturgy of the temple they set apart for him offerings and the early fruit (Exodus 29,26-27; Num 8,11; Lev 20,26). Paul is subtracted from a common way of living in order to be introduced into a special relation with God. However, the contexts make us to understand that it is not the matter of a segregation, because the election of the Apostle carries with itself the mission of introducing others, especially the Gentiles, into the same relation of covenant with God in Jesus Christ.

For the solemn yearly feasts, the pilgrims from every direction cover the streets of Palestine and go up to the temple of Jerusalem, singing Psalms of ascensions (Psalms 120-134). Paul surely vibrates at this rhythm and participates in the splendid liturgies of the temple. He knows the value of the cultural practices of his people, the Sabbatical rest, the office of the synagogue, the fast on the Expiation Day, the prayers that accompany the daily acts, the use of phylacteries and fringes, the spontaneous fasts, the offerings and the vows. Faith in God and the study of the Torah had committed his youth to follow the ritual scheme of separation from the profane reality. However, the Lord prepares him to it, also through the minute practice of all the ritual prescriptions, to encounter Jesus Christ, who is greater than the temple”, and to interiorise his passion for God in a constant life liturgy.

The living and dynamic elation with the Son of God inaugurates the liturgy of life. It is no longer the matter of a ritual relation, as in the Temple of Jerusalem, but an existential relation that transforms each moment of daily life. The scheme of the typical sacredness of the temple turns upside down. The contact with God does not happen through separations any longer, but, because of the Incarnation, through the immersion into the mystery of Christ.   

Paul has felt to be seized by Jesus Christ (Phil. 3, 12) and his range of values, also in the religious area, turns upside down, “What were once my assets I now through Christ Jesus count as losses. Because of the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, I account everything else as loss. For him I have accepted the loss of all other things and look on them all as filth if only I can gain Christ…” (Phil. 3,7-8). To remain united with Christ, he puts himself at the service of the neighbours with all his strength, in the evangelisation.

The experienced charity of Christ urges him to give his life for the Gospel.

The push 0f oblation

Fetching from his long-standing experience in the Temple, the apostle, after becoming Christian, works a radical change of perspectives. He uses the specific terminology of the cult and applies it to the experience of Christian life. For Paul, liturgy becomes the “natural” picture in which Christian life goes on in its sacredness. He applies this perspective first of all to himself and describes his apostolate with a language of cult. (1 Th. 1,9-10; Gal 4,8-11). In his evangelisation Paul is a “liturgist of Christ” (See Rom 15,16) who renders the cult to God with his own existence (Rom 1,9-10; 2 Tim 1,3). Though neither Jesus Christ, nor Paul have personally made any sacrifice in the temple of Jerusalem, their very existence is described, in the Paulist epistles, with a language of cult.

The apostle has charged Christian life with a liturgical sense, without distinguishing between ministerial and common actions; he compares the conclusion of his own life with the sacrificial libation; his blood is going to be offered in libation (cf Phil. 2,17; 2 Tim 4,6). His apostolic ministry is the cult he lends to “God in the Spirit” (Rom 1,9). He qualifies himself as the “protagonist of a liturgical activity” (Rom 15,16) in his ministry among the Gentiles. His full dedication to the inhabitants of Philippi, is a sacrifice realised in him to the advantage of the life of faith of the Philippians, which is denominated “sacrificial offering and liturgical activity”   (Phil.  2,17).

The collection of funds practised in the Greek communities pro Church in Jerusalem is called “liturgical activity” (2 Cor 9,12) and Epafrodito, sent by the Philippians to assist Paul in the uneasiness of prison, lending him the services which the apostle in prison needed, is designated as “protagonist of a liturgical action”  (Phil. 2,25).

The baptismal reality  puts us in a completely new situation for the liturgy of the Temple of Jerusalem. This allows the apostle to transfer the specific terms of the cult in the temple into the Christian life. “I urge you, then, brothers, remembering the mercies of God, to offer your bodies in a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God; that is the kind of worship for you. Do not model your behaviour on the contemporary world, but let the renewing of your minds transform you, so that you may discern for yourselves what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable and mature. (Rom 12,1-2).

After explaining the new situation in the letter to the Romans, Paul concludes inviting the believers, in the name of the experienced mercy, to present to God the offering of one’s own person. This push of oblation, lived in the concrete particulars of daily life, is the liturgy of life. Here is the secret of the spiritual adventure of St. Paul and of every Christian life.

Regina Cesarato
Biblist and Superior General 
of the del “Pie Discepole del Divin Maestro”
Via Gabriele Rossetti, 17 - 00152 Rome