As Paul says, the good news - the gospel - was promised a long time ago. The first hint that God would defeat evil one day comes - according to many scholars - right there in the beginning, in the third chapter of Genesis. I’m a little dubious about that interpretation, myself, but certainly by Isaiah’s time people were expecting something more than just a restoration of David’s kingdom. They were expecting that God would send someone who would finally, once and for all, straighten out the terrible mess the world was in. They needed more than just a temporary fix. They had discovered that not just any old king would do. It would have to be someone “after God’s own heart”, someone like David himself.
And that’s what Isaiah promised them. He promised that a child would be born who would know the difference between good and evil by the time he was eating curds and honey - another way of saying by the time he was weaned and eating solid food. He promised that it would be someone from David’s line. He promised wisdom, and justice, and prosperity, and peace. But it had taken a long time.
Fourteen generations, Matthew said, from Abraham to David. Fourteen more from David to the exile. And another Fourteen generations before Jesus came. And the way the Hebrews counted, at forty years per generation, that was 4 * 14 * 3 = 1,680 years. That’s actually pretty close to what archeologists have figured... But however you count it, it was a long, long time.
God’s covenant with Abraham was the start of the official countdown on the promise - that through Abraham’s descendants, all the people of the world would be blessed. The next covenant - the next promise - came with the giving of the law to Moses, when the Israelites were promised that God would give them a “prophet like Moses” [Dt 18:15] who would, presumably, once again free them from slavery and/or bring them back from exile. The last covenant was when God promised that there would always be a King from the line of David sitting on the throne. Well, they came back from exile and rebuilt the temple and there still wasn’t any such king. Herod was hardly the stuff of prophecy. Nightmares, more like. And after he had died, the Romans had taken over, and if anything, that was even worse.
But finally the king had come, even though it was nothing like any of them had expected, and even though there still wasn’t any peace, there still wasn’t any prosperity, and there still wasn’t any justice, it was starting to make sense. All they had to do, they thought, was hunker down there in Jerusalem and wait for Jesus to come back. The angels had said, after all, that “Jesus... will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” [Acts 1:11]
But then it all seemed to start falling apart. Saul and some other Pharisees had gotten the go-ahead from the temple authorities to chase down the brethren, put in prison and flogged, and John’s brother James had actually been beheaded. So when Saul – now renamed Paul - came back from Damascus, saying that he had seen Jesus and that Jesus had told him to go and preach the good news to the Gentiles, well, that was simply too much to swallow. They didn’t lay a hand on him, no, they weren’t going to descend to his level - but he wasn’t welcome. No, sirree, not after what he had done.
And now there was Paul again, out there somewhere in Greece or Asia or somewhere, watering down what Moses had given them so many years ago, just so the Gentiles could swallow it! Why, if they didn’t care enough about God to get circumcised and follow the dietary laws, why should they be accepted? What was with Paul, anyway? He couldn’t destroy the church the first time around, so now he was making it so easy to join that just anybody could call themselves a Christian nowadays and they - who had been decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Jews all their lives were supposed to call them brother and sister and have fellowship with them? Why couldn’t they go back to the way things used to be, when Jews were Jews and Greeks were Greeks and you knew what was what?
Yes, yes, Peter and James had said it was ok, all the Gentiles had to do was abstain from blood and sexual immorality and idols. So they’d have to swallow it, even though it went down hard. But it didn’t seem fair. After all, they’d been protecting and keeping the covenant for over a thousand years. And the church in Judea was just barely hanging on, while everywhere Paul and his cronies went churches sprang up as if they were grown from seed. Things just weren’t the way they used to be. Why didn’t Jesus come back before they lost everything?
But Paul was on a roll. His ministry in Greece and Macedonia was at an end; the churches in Corinth and Ephesus were strong enough to stand on their own, well, with a little help. He’d keep in touch. Thessalonica and Philippi were thriving, all he had to do was get the offering to the church in Jerusalem before heading off to Rome and then, God willing, to Spain and even beyond.
Six hundred eighty years since God first told Abraham that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And finally they were getting around to it. It was still such an astonishing notion that Paul had to explain it all over again every time he went to a new city. He had to establish his credentials, he had to remind them of the prophecies, and he had to explain why it was they could be sure that Jesus was the Messiah.
Yesterday was gone. The new covenant wasn’t going to look at all like the old one. Paul wasn’t really sure what it was going to look like eventually, but he knew one thing for sure. It was going to be all over the world. He could only see a little piece of the plan from where he was, but he knew that it was God’s will that Jesus should be made known everywhere, and that he, Paul, was only one of the many who would be working in the very center of it all, Rome, the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known. Surely it wouldn’t be long before Jesus would return.
Yesterday was over. They couldn’t go back to the way things were. It was going to be hard to get that across to the church back in Jerusalem. Paul had heard that under the pressure of the political situation the brethren there were closing ranks, refusing to welcome Gentiles into the fellowship. And yet he had to be the one to take the offering; he didn’t know how they’d take it, getting money from the Greek and Macedonian churches. Timothy might be able to get a hearing, after all his mother was Jewish, but the others probably wouldn’t be welcomed at all, and there would be all his hard work gone to waste.
How hard it was, he mused, for people to step out of their accustomed ways of doing things. They knew - who better - who Jesus was, what he had done - and yet they continued to try to make him fit into their boxes. Jews - good; Gentiles - bad.
Well, he had to be patient. Sometimes he felt like a pregnant women, Paul thought. What did Mary feel like, back then, oh - more than fifty years ago now, he wondered. She knew the baby was going to come. She knew her life would never be the same. But she didn’t have any idea what was going to happen, what was going to happen to her and Joseph and the new baby. She hadn’t heard a thing since the angel came, and it certainly didn’t look like God was providing very well. She should have been at home, getting things ready, weaving baby clothes, making sure the midwife was on hand. What were they doing on the road, traveling up to Jerusalem? Surely riding a donkey couldn’t be good for a woman so near her time! and when they got there, there wasn’t any place for them to stay. Did Mary ever wonder if she had heard right, if she hadn’t had some kind of bizarre vision? But of course, there was the baby, wasn’t there. That was a fact. and the baby was going to come no matter what happened, so she might as well just get back on the donkey and let God do what God was going to do.
Paul pulled himself back to the present. How silly, he thought, how could he possibly know what a pregnant woman felt like? But he was so full of an urgent need to get to Rome, and yet he was going in absolutely the wrong direction, east instead of west, and he had been wondering if perhaps he had been wrong about God sending him to Rome. Did Mary ever doubt? She had the baby, anchoring her to reality. And he had the church. Or more accurately, the churches. They were springing up almost faster than he could count. He knew that it wasn’t his eloquence or charm that had done it.
Well. He’d just keep on going, that’s all. He had the prophecies, they were clear. He had his vision of Jesus, that was clear. He had his marching orders, too. Paul knew what his life’s work was to be. There wasn’t any doubt about that. And he had been guided and protected. He didn’t always know exactly what he was supposed to be doing, but whenever he went in the wrong direction, the Holy Spirit turned him firmly around and pointed him where he was supposed to go. And right now he knew that he wasn’t going to get to Rome this year.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d get to Rome. Paul didn’t know how, or what would happen there, but in the meantime he’d just plan for it. I’ll do what has to be done today, and tomorrow will come when God wills it. He bent his attention back to the letter he was writing. “I will come to you,” he said. “It is my heart’s desire to come to Rome to see you, to encourage you and be encouraged by you, and I’m planning on it, but do not know right now whether or not it is God’s will. In the meantime, this is what I’ve been thinking, about what the gospel means, and how to live together as the people of God and since I can’t be there in person I’ll put it down on paper."
This is more or less the way Paul begins the greatest letter in the entire Bible.
He is between one stage of his life and another. Nothing is particularly clear, except that God is calling him to a detour he hadn’t planned on, one that might derail his entire vision of the future. Yesterday was gone. Things will never be the same - either the way they were before Jesus knocked him off his feet on that dusty road to Damascus, or even just the year before, when he was settled in for what looked like a much longer stay in Ephesus. He doesn’t know whether he’ll die in Jerusalem, or get to fulfill his dream of carrying the gospel to Rome and beyond.
So, not knowing what else to do, since the Holy Spirit has derailed him yet again, Paul sits down and writes a letter. And that letter revolutionized the entire way people have thought about Jesus Christ from that day to this. That letter captured St. Augustine, the greatest theologian of the early church. That letter woke Martin Luther from the bondage of works into the freedom of grace, and sparked the entire Reformation. But between Paul’s letter and the beginning of the Reformation was a couple of hundred years more then 14* 40* 3 generations! It’s been about fourteen generations from the Reformation to the present. And the church is changing – again. Into something we may not recognize. Again.
Someone once said that life is what happens to you while you are planning something else. This letter that changed the world was something Paul did because he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, caught between a finished yesterday and an uncertain tomorrow.
Between yesterday and tomorrow is today. That is what matters. And God will use you in it, if you let him.
