Today June 30

Today is (or at least I am going to celebrate) the feast of the magnificent St. Paul, (first century). We know more about Paul than about almost any other figure in New Testament history. And if you include apocryphal documents, we know even more! We know he was short, bald, bowlegged and had a unibrow. Doesn't sound too handsome, does he? And yet, the full effect wasn't bad. He was considered "well-formed" -- maybe there was a different standard of manly beauty in those days. But I think it speaks to a certain overall quality of character which shone forth from him and made him an attractive person indeed. What I'm thinking about now is this statement in Butler's Lives: "No one perhaps has written of St. Paul with truer intuition than Cardinal Newman, who was specially fitted to appreciate the secret of the apostle's appeal, his gift of Christian sympathy." - vol. 2, p. 672.

And I thought about that. First of all, who wouldn't love to read about St. Paul from the illustrious hand of Cardinal John Henry Newman! But more than that; I thought "What does 'Christian sympathy' mean in this case?" Immediately I thought of things in Paul's life that engender sympathy: his blindness, his prejudicial treatment at the hands of the Jews and the Christians alike, his stoning in Lystra, his scourging in Philippi and Jerusalem, his years-long chains in Caesarea, his shipwreck at Malta, his beheading in Rome. (He was probably acquitted after his first trial in Rome; then following a fourth missionary journey, again arrested and imprisoned in Rome, where he was finally beheaded along the Ostian Way at a place now known as Tres Fontane and honored with the church St. Paul Outside the Walls.) But I don't think that's what the author means. I don't think he means St. Paul invokes sympathy, but that he has it. That would be a tough sell to some of our modern feminists, wouldn't it? They seem to equate him with Torquemada somehow. But he was, in fact, a sympathetic man. He could have escaped prison during the (miraculous) earthquake but called out to the jailer not to commit suicide, "Wait! We are all still here!" In Lystra, he could have accepted the accolades of being proclaimed a god (in Greek Hermes or in Latin Mercury "because he was the chief speaker") but he tore his clothes and said, "We are men like you yourselves." (Retranslated these days as "We are human beings," which just doesn't have the same punch, somehow. :) ) In Philippi he could have let the slave girl keep validating him with her divining spirit -- after all, she proclaimed "These men are servants of the most high God," but he had sympathy for and compassion on her and drove out her demon -- to his own peril.

He was a dynamic, over-the-top, take-no-prisoners type of preacher and missionary, THE Apostle, but he was, for all that, just a man, and a sympathetic man at that. St. Paul, pray for us.