Nov 172013
CONTRASTING OPPOSITES WAS a popular rhetorical device during the time of St Paul. The Lord Himself used the method, usually contrasting concrete things such as new wine and old wineskins or the plank in one’s own eye vs. the speck in one’s brother’s eye. He pointed to those who would be first vs. those who would be last in the Kingdom of God. “Many are called but few are chosen” He noted, and this became a kind of refrain commenting on Gospel incidents (e.g. Matthew 20:16).
When St. Paul wrote to communities where believing Jews and their converts often tended to maintain their allegiance to the Law while accepting Christ as the Messiah, he focused on the contrast between those who found their salvation in keeping the Torah (Law) and those who found it by believing in Christ. But Christ alone, Paul insisted, is the source of our salvation and only through faith are we joined with Him.
Not having to keep the Law made some people think that they could do whatever they wanted. Paul responded with another contrast: that between flesh and spirit. “The Law is fulfilled in this one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14) he affirmed. Our fallen passions – the flesh – push us to abuse our neighbor instead through sexual immorality, hatred, selfish ambitions and the like. But living in the Spirit produces love, joy, peace and the other characteristics St Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-23).
Darkness and Light in St. Paul
When Paul writes to the Ephesians he speaks of darkness and light to contrast a life lived in ignorance of God vs. a life illumined by the knowledge of God. When people are “alienated from the life of God” they walk “in the futility of their minds” (Ephesians 4:17-18) like pagans. Separated from God, they try to figure things out on their own and that inevitably leads to disaster: epitomized, in Paul’s words, by lewdness and every kind of excess.
St. Paul included idolatry as another example of our futile self-determination. Of course, actual idolatry was practiced in the ancient world for centuries, dying out in some places only in the fifth or sixth century. But St John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage, said that, for those who claim to worship Christ, idolatry may mean something else. Giving service to our passions, he argued, is actually worship of Venus, the goddess of love; allowing wrath to absorb us is actually worship of Mars, the god of war. You more truly worship by your deeds and practices than by your rituals, he insisted, and this is the higher kind of worship! (Homily 18 on Ephesians).
St Paul has been criticized for singling out sexual immorality as the height of godlessness. Paul, they say, saw licentiousness as the gravest sin, worse than any other. Note, however, that Paul only starts by focusing on promiscuity. He then goes on to include all kinds of behavior which, he teaches, are equally incompatible with the life in Christ. He names untruthful speech, unresolved anger, theft, and unseemly language as signs of – and here he introduces another contrast – the old man (vs. the new man created according to God).
It is perhaps the moralizing of some Christians in earlier days rather than St. Paul which is responsible for our ignoring unresolved anger or lack of mutual love while focusing of sexual morality. It may be argued, however, that, our sexual failings are, in fact, weathervanes indicating our need for self-satisfaction at all costs.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Church when lust and greed drive its members, including their leaders, to turn their backs on the light. Then we see the chilling force of Christ’s own words, “If the light that is in you is darkness, how great must it be” (Mt 6:23).