Homily

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul writes a little more about his own conversion and life, as he wants to defend his teaching about the freedom of Christians from the Law of Moses and the approach he has taken towards gentiles. The Gospel of Christ is for all people, and the Good News is to be preached to all, to whoever will accept its truth. It is not so clear why he is defending himself. He talks about his great zeal for God and for all that Judaism stood for. We know he was a well-educated man, having been schooled in his home town of Tarsus, now Turkey, but likely receiving even more religious instruction when he moved to Israel.

St. Paul says that he persecuted the Church of God to an extraordinary degree and tried to destroy it. We don't know exactly how he persecuted the Church, or what he did to try and destroy it. In Luke's Acts of the Apostles when they stone Stephen, the first martyr, Paul is standing by guarding the coats of those throwing the stones. And then we read that Paul went to house after house dragging people out to have them thrown into prison, but that's all we know about Paul the Persecutor. Yet he uses his own anti-Christian background as a proof that his mission to the Gentiles is not something that he had decided to do on his own, just as his conversion to belief in Christ was not his own decision. He believed in the Lord Who was shown to him by God the Father. He saw Jesus revealed to him, and St. Paul writes that revelation was a great act of love which God bestowed upon him. But it also had another purpose. It came with a vocation: Paul was to be an apostle to the Gentiles.

As you know, this idea that God now desired to call the Gentiles to a faith in Jesus Christ was extremely hard for many of the Jewish Christians to accept, and that is understandable. From Abraham and Moses, from the law and the prophets, the covenant God made was with Israel, not any other people. The Jews were the only people who worshipped the one, true God. They were the only people who kept the Law of Moses, a law handed down to them from Mt. Sinai. How can it be that now the God of their fathers is allowing, even encouraging and inviting, everyone into His house? How can that be? And even if that was what was happening, how can they be allowed into the house of faith without keeping the Law of Moses? Unthinkable!

But, even though it would have also been unthinkable for Paul, the Persecutor, it is now the main effort and work for Paul the Apostle. So why is St. Paul defending himself here? Obviously, it's about this work among the Gentiles, and since he mentions the Church in Jerusalem, it probably has some relevance. His critics may have accused him of being too dependent on the Church in Jerusalem. Or, they may have accused him of not being dependent on Jerusalem. We don't know. But what we do know is that Paul tells us the revelation he received was directly from God. The vocation as apostle and even evangelist was given to him by Christ, who Paul had seen as risen from the dead.

So why do we, here today, believe? First of all we must have the gift of Faith from God, for no one can believe without the gift of grace. After that we may believe, most of us here, because our parents handed to us the Faith of the Church. But even then, what they taught us is traced all the way back to St. Paul and the other Apostles. What they saw, what they heard, what they were told and taught was what they handed down to us in the Church. We believe because we have chosen to accept the gift of faith, and what we believe is what the Church teaches to us as the truth handed down by the Apostles. Not, as St. Paul says, a Gospel made up by human beings, but a Gospel that comes from the Lord.

There were agitators, critics, skeptics, dissidents, and half-baked, insincere people in the Church in those days, as we find in Paul's letters, and there are the same kind of people in the Church today as well. That should not surprise us, nor should we think we could never become one of their number. If we are distracted, lazy, careless, indifferent, or if we put faith in people instead of Christ, or it can even happen that we choose to do some wrong thing, then we may find ourselves among the semi-faithful or even outside of the Church itself. It's no accident we hear the words, "Wisdom! Be attentive!" during the Liturgy. We should pay as much attention to our faith as we do to our life, because it is only through and with that faith that we can live the fullest of lives, here, and hereafter. Let the critics, the cynics, the self-enlightened, the complainers, and the unbelievers have their say. May our answer always be the same: "I believe."