Sunday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,
and my message and my proclamation
were not with persuasive words of wisdom,
but with a demonstration of Spirit and power,
so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom
but on the power of God.

Until the end of time Saint Paul will be remembered for his marvelous letters. Not only did he write some of the most important documents in the Bible, but some of his imitators did too!

I think he would have been very surprised at that. Saint Paul’s first mission was not to write but to preach. He fired off his letters when he was locked in jail and had nothing better to do. No one knows how many he wrote; there may have been hundreds now lost forever. With them he greeted his friends, shared his faith, tried to solve intractable problems, chastised his enemies, and exhorted everyone to greater fidelity.

The one thing he never thought was that he was writing scripture. His forte was preaching, and he did that with spirit and power.

Paul didn’t argue with people. Little can be achieved by arguing. If anything it only demonstrates one party is louder and more obnoxious than everyone else. He had tried argumentation in Athens, the home of the world’s greatest philosophers, and been laughed out of town. When he arrived in Corinth, much chastened, he resolved to speak only of “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

Two thousand years later, we still rely on the solid foundation of Paul’s preaching. He built diverse people into unified churches that would last until the Coming of Christ.

As I read his letters, I am convinced of his great affection for the people he met. He loved people! His heart was broken every time the Spirit drove him off to another town to announce the Good News. He poured his love for them into his letters and they received these letters with great enthusiasm. To the poor folks he had gathered, these letters must have seemed like correspondence from Mars. Who would care for us so much as to keep in touch over such a long distance when he has so many more friends?

But even that bond was not sufficient for Saint Paul. His churches were never about him. They were built on the power of God which they had felt and he had seen as he spoke to them. In his words about “Jesus and him crucified” they heard freedom, joy, hope, and spirit. They felt the breath of God filling their lungs and strengthening their knees. They might have said, “Were not our hearts on fire as he spoke to us?”

In today’s gospel Jesus challenges us to preserve and grow that fire which Saint Paul lit and a hundred generations have tended these two thousand years:

But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything…

Today, as we are confronted with the challenges of modern life the Word of God urges us to:

Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed….