Post-Comfortable Christianity and the Election of 2012

Shortly before he died in Oxford in 1988, the Jesuit retreat master and raconteur, Bernard Bassett, in good spirits after a double leg amputation, told me that the great lights of his theological formation had been Ignatius Loyola and John Henry Newman, but if he “had to do it all over,” he’d only read Paul. “Everything is there.” There is a temptation to think that God gave us the Apostle to the Gentiles in order to have second readings at Sunday Mass, usually unrelated to the first reading and the Gospel. But everything truly is there. Paul was one of the most important figures in human history, and a great character to boot. That is, a character in the happiest sense of the word. “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).

Tragedy and comedy intertwine, ultimately issuing in glory, whenever he is on trial. He longs to live and to die in the same breath: ”For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:210). Whenever he is on trial for his life, he invokes a forensic brilliance to save the very life he is willing to sacrifice. Just as Jesus who had come into the world to die, slipped through the mob in Nazareth because his hour had not yet come, so does Paul become his own defense when on trial, ready to die by God’s calendar and not man’s. In Caesarea, he confounds Antonius Felix, the Roman governor of Judaea and Samaria, and a little later he does the same to the successor of Felix, Procius Festus. The best court scene is Paul before Marcus Annaeus Novatus, who had taken the name of his adoptive father Junius Gallio.....

Of course, the Gospels, Acts and all the Epistles are wonderful. But Romans and Ephesians are so rich that if one meditates each verse, and savours its meaning as one might savour each spoonful of some superlative cream of crab soup recipe, one begins to get at least a small glimpse of the generosity and goodness of God in giving us this, His Plan of Salvation.

I will be 73 years old in August. I will also celebrate my 50th Spiritual Birthday in August. I got Saved on August 18, 1962. And after all these years of serving the Lord, and soul-winning and Bible study, etc., it is just now beginning to sink into my thick skull and calloused old heart, the unimaginable love and grace and generosity God has made available to us HERE AND NOW; not to mention what those who love God have awaiting them in eternity.

There is an old gospel song which is based on 1st Peter 1:8 which goes, “It is joy unspeakable and full of glory...........and the half hath never yet been told.”

Oh Pshaaaaaw! The half?! Truth be told; what awaits us is SOOOOO unspeakably glorious that not one nano-particle has ever yet been imagined, let alone having been told!

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