Endless
Patience
1
Timothy 1:12-17[1]
We are not
patient people. Not typically. We have become accustomed to instant everything.
Microwave ovens, the internet, and cell phones have gotten us in the habit of
getting what we want right now. Of course, there are some notable exceptions among us, but I would
say that patience is not something most of us come by naturally. We have to
learn it. Life has a way of breaking down our impatience, and the more life
experience we have, the more patient we’re likely to be. Many of you may be
like me: I learned patience mostly from my children. Not that they were
patient, but I had to learn patience in order to raise them.
I would say that, at
least at first, St. Paul was not a patient man. In his early adulthood, he was
climbing the ladder as fast as he possibly could. By his own confession, he had
been a zealous Pharisee, devoted to obeying every rule in Judaism in every
possible way. As a result, when
confronted with the gospel, Paul’s initial response was violent. He considered the gospel to be worthy of a
death sentence. What made Jesus’ gospel
outrageous to someone like Paul was that it presents a God who loves everyone so
much that he goes out searching for those who have lost their way! That was an
intolerable upheaval in the image of God for Jewish zealots like Paul. It was outright blasphemy![2] And so he set about to
eradicate it as quickly as possible.
That’s not some kind of
exaggerated picture of Paul intended by his opponents to slander him. Most of
it comes from Paul’s own confessions about his life. And so in our lesson from
First Timothy for today,[3] we hear about how Paul
had formerly been “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” (1 Tim.
1:13). The sobering fact is that he did all of that on God’s behalf, as an
expression of his faith.[4] That may seem
impossible to believe, and yet I think it was part and parcel of his
impatience. When confronted with something he could not reconcile with his own
cherished ideas about God, he didn’t hesitate to act in anger and violence.
People of faith still do it all the time.
But something happened
to Paul that changed him dramatically. He came face-to-face with the risen and
exalted Christ, who loved Paul enough to die for him. And as a result Paul
received mercy and grace “poured all over” him (1 Tim 1:14, CEB). That was
enough to convince him that he was headed in the wrong direction. So he turned
his life around completely. But more than that, Paul received a commission: he
was “judged faithful” and “appointed” to serve Christ. And so, as he says
elsewhere, Paul began to proclaim the good news he had formerly tried to
destroy (cf. Gal. 1:23).
Some might be tempted
to say that this is a special case. They might think that God made an exception
for Paul because he was Paul. But that’s not what our lesson for today
suggests. In fact, it suggests that the reason why Paul experienced such
extraordinary grace and mercy was to show that this is the way God deals with
us all. As the Scripture lesson puts it, Paul’s experience was to demonstrate
that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). Since
Paul could consider himself the “foremost,” or a “worst-case” sinner, our
lesson says that he received mercy so that “Jesus Christ might display the
utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him
for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:16). In the words of another translation, Paul
experienced God’s “endless patience” (1 Tim. 1:16, CEB) that he shows toward us
all.[5]
I think some of this
might come as a shock to us. After all, it is “Saint Paul” we’re talking about,
preacher and teacher of the gospel, founder and pastor of churches, and writer
of about a third of the New Testament! Most of us would consider ourselves much
worse sinners than Paul! But I would say our lesson insists that the reason why
Paul experienced such amazing grace and mercy was to show there is no one who
is beyond the love of God. He had blasphemed Christ and viciously attacked and
even murdered Christians. If he could be forgiven for that, then there was no
one who could not be forgiven. Since Jesus came into the world to save sinners,
that includes us all. And Paul was the prime example of God’s “endless
patience” that is available to everyone, everywhere.
Our Scripture lesson
for today comes from the end of Paul’s life. The message that God’s grace and
mercy and love are for all people was an important part of the gospel Paul
preached from the very beginning. In fact, the idea of God’s “endless patience”
can be found in Scripture long before Paul’s life, even before Jesus died on
the cross. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God displays grace and mercy to his
wayward people again and again.[6] And yet, not only was
this a fundamental part of Paul’s scripture, but also this was something Paul I
think knew by personal experience. Over the course of his lifetime, I’m sure
St. Paul had many occasions to observe God’s “endless patience” at work in his
life.
I think the point of
our lesson for today is that God’s “endless patience” is not just something
that was true for a select few or for special cases like Paul. It’s true for us
all. God shows us all extraordinary grace and mercy.[7] Christ Jesus came to
save us all from our sins. There is no one who is beyond the love of God. This
is the way God deals with us all—the same way he dealt with the people of
Israel and the same way he dealt with Paul. It is the same way that God has
always related to the human family. And I would venture to say that there are a
number of us here today who have had many occasions to observe that God has
worked in this same way in our lives. Just as God always has, so he always will
show us “endless patience.”
[1] ©2016
Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 9/11/2016 at Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf.
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God,
128-29, where he points out that Jesus “demonstrated God’s eschatological law
of grace towards those without the law and the transgressors of the law,
through his forgiveness of sins. By so doing he abolished the legal distinction
between religious and secular, righteous and unrighteous, devout and sinful. He
revealed God in a different way from that in which he was understood in the law
and the tradition and was perceived by the guardians of the law.” Cf. also
ibid., 142, where he speaks of this as a “revolution in the concept of God”: “God
comes not to carry out just revenge upon the evil, but to justify by grace
sinners, whether they are Zealots or tax collectors, Pharisees or sinners, Jews
or Samaritans, and therefore, also, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.”
[3] Cf.
James D. G. Dunn, “The First and Second Letters to Timothy and The Letter to
Titus” New Interpreters Bible XI:779-80,
where he discusses the question of the “Pauline” nature of the Pastoral
Letters, which have been questioned as authentic letters of St. Paul for over
200 years. He suggests viewing the issue from the perspective of “what we might
call the concept of ‘living tradition.’ That is, within Israel's history we can
readily discern several different streams of tradition, each originating with
an authoritative earlier figure, but elaborated and extended within the
immediate circle of that figure's disciples and retained under the name of the
originator of the tradition. The Pentateuch is generally recognized to have
reached its final form in this way, and the present book of Isaiah to be the
work of two or three generations. Just as David was remembered as the
originator of a still-growing collection of psalms, so also to Solomon was
attributed a sequence of wisdom writings (most notably Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes). A close comparison of the Gospels, even of the Synoptic Gospels
alone, indicates that there was a basically similar elaboration and extension
of the Jesus tradition within the Gospel format. John 21:24 attests to the
activity of a circle around the Fourth Evangelist, who had at least some hand
in the final form of John's Gospel. The Pastorals can be readily seen in
similar terms.” He therefore concludes, “The Pastorals would have been deemed
authentically Pauline; therefore, their attribution to Paul would have caused
no problem. Already, in this early judgment, the canonical definition of what
was and what was not ‘Pauline’ was being determined.”
[4] Cf. Karl
Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1:199,
where he says that Paul is “an opponent and persecutor of the community simply
because (cf. Rom. 9:4f.) he stands for Israel, for its election and calling,
for its mission to the world, for the course and development of its history as
the history of salvation, and therefore for the faithfulness which is to be
shown to God in the form of the faithfulness of Israel, its obedience to the
Law which He has given it and its trust in the promises which He has made to
it, in short, for faith in the Word of God which has been spoken and is to be
received in and with its existence. He persecutes Christians because he sees
that this economy of reconciliation and revelation is questioned, transcended,
relativised and outmoded by them, i.e., by their proclamation of the person,
work, lordship and authority of the Jesus of Nazareth rejected by Israel and
delivered up by it to be crucified, by their declaration of His Messiahship,
election, calling and commission, of His history as salvation history, of the
demand to obey Him, to trust in the promise given in Him, to believe the Word
spoken in His existence.”
[5] Cf.
Dunn, “First and Second Timothy and Titus,” NIB
IX:794, where he reflects on the “trustworthy saying” that “Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners” by adding, “Paul had been the worst of these ‘sinners,’
so that the mercy he received could serve as a model of the full sweep of God's
patience toward those who were to believe subsequently.” Cf. also W. D. Mounce,
Pastoral Epistles, 57: “It is the
Jewish rabbinic argument of the harder to the easier (qal wāḥômer): if God’s
mercy can extend to someone as sinful as Paul, surely it can reach anyone.”
[6] Cf.
Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, 58: “The
OT frequently pictures God as being patient with the world, slow to anger and
abounding in love (Exod 34:6 …; Num 14:18; Pss 86:15; 103:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah
4:2; cf. Rom 2:4; 9:22; 1 Pet 3:20).”
[7] Cf. also
Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.2:31, where
he speaks of God’s grace and mercy toward us in terms of God’s great “Yes” to
us all, a “Yes” that God says “without any if or but, without any afterthought
or reservation, not temporarily but definitively, with a fidelity that is …
total and eternal.”
