PAUL OF TARSUS

At the dawn of Christianity, no man did more intense work to the Gospel than Paul of Tarsus. As a dynamic spirit of great vision, he gathered in his person the three great cultures of the time: Hebrew, Greek and Roman - he is the apostle par excellence, the greatest pioneer of the Gospel.

No other man has had on the historical evolution of Christianity, greater and more decisive influence than him. Travelling east and west, he brought to the core of the young religious ideology innumerable multitudes of souls, peoples, and entire countries.

The existence of this man is divided into two periods, of almost equal duration but opposed character. One can even speak of two lives of this intrepid evangelizer, just as he also used two names, Saul and Paul: 30 years from Tarsus to Damascus and 30 years from Damascus to Rome. And in both, he plays his complete role. A mortal adversary of indefinite attitudes, Paul fulfils his task always with body and soul, with all the vehemence of his genius, with all the passion of his nature. At first, he fights Jesus without respite and rest because he sees in him the great enemy of the revealed religion; and then adores him with the utmost sincerity of heart, and wants to see him worshipped in the whole world for he recognizes him as the Redeemer of the human race.

At the centre of Paul's life is Christ - yesterday as an enemy, today as a friend; at first, a target of hatred, then an object of love and glorification.

Paul knows no hesitant decisions. He hates mediocrity. He is the authentic character of the integral Christian, and in all this ardour, there is nothing of fanaticism; everything is regulated by serene rationality.

At the gates of Damascus, the hour of enlightenment sounded for the stinging pursuer: “Saul, Saul, why persecutes me?” Saul falls to the ground - and the proud castle of his old Jewish theology falls also. Ruins and debris. Not one stone upon another.

So intense is the light of the sky that blacks out all the lights of the Earth. Saul is blind. Complete darkness for three days. The planet must be silent so heaven can speak.

In these three days of silence and introspection, Saul seeks to guide his thoughts in the midst of the incognito universe that has dawned on his soul.

Who are you, Lord?

“I am Jesus.”

From this dramatic hour, one idea, one ideal dominates him: to make the Christ known, loved and served by all men.

And it was in this psychic disposition that Paul began his career, the magnitude of which is witnessed in the “Acts of the Apostles” and the “Epistles”. Immediately he encounters a select group of auxiliaries - men and women, young and old - and with them, went out to the spiritual conquest of the world. Out of love for this ideal, he allows himself to be persecuted and slandered, mocked and scourged, condemned to death and beheaded. And amid his sufferings, he writes, “My brethren, I am overflowing with joy amid my afflictions. Christ is my life, and death is my gain. Christ is who lives in me.”

His dynamic enthusiasm, his heroic life at the service of Jesus exceeded infinitely the fact that he had embraced certain ideologies of his Jewish people and others of the time. His life is an apotheosis of self-redemption by the cosmic Christ, and not by the human Jesus, so much so that he confesses: “I die every day, and that is why I live; but it is not I who live, the Christ lives in me. My living is Christ.”

By these words, we see that Paul was lived by his inner Christ, his true redeemer, and he did not think himself redeemed by the physical blood of the human Jesus, dead decades before, but redeemed by his eternal Christ. Paul confesses true self-redemption in the sense of Christ-redemption because he identified his soul with his inner Christ, who redeemed him from his human ego!

Paul is the greatest purifier of himself. And at the height of his Christlike experience, he writes these words: “If Jesus only died but was not raised, our preaching is vain, our faith is vain, and you are still in your sins.” Therefore, Paul does not admit redemption by the death of the human Jesus, by the shedding of the physical blood, but by the life of the divine Christ. And, in a jubilant challenge to death, he exclaims, “What is thy victory, O death? What is your sting, O death? It was death swallowed up by life, in Jesus our Lord.”

Thus, there was a progressive and ascensional evolution in the life of Paul of Tarsus. The Christlike Paul correcting Saul the Jew. For him, what redeems man from his sins is not the blood of the mortal Jesus but the spirit of the immortal Christ!