The apostle who gets a bad rapNo New Testament apostle gets a worse rap than the apostle Paul. He is accused of supporting slavery, gender inequality and homophobia.
None of these accusations are remotely true, but why disturb visceral hatred with uncomfortable truth?
Over the long years I have begun to admire Paul more and more. Some people call the apostle John, the apostle of love, mostly because of the love he encourages in his first letter. But breathing through the thirteen letters of Paul we find the love of Christ, in my view, the like of which we find nowhere else.
When we say the love of the apostle Paul, we mean, of course, the divine love of Christ working through the apostle Paul.
The Thessalonian example
Nowhere does Paul's love sound out louder than in his first letter to the Thesslonians. Paul had only known these new Christians for a short while. He had been bundled out of Thessalonika under cover of darkness, just weeks after his arrival.
How would you feel towards young believers you were forced to leave, and you guessed would be persecuted upon your leaving? You would feel a deep love and concern for them, but would you feel like this?....
"I feel like an orphaned child who has just lost it's parents" (2:17)
Imagine a child whose parents have been killed in war. Glaze-eyed the child has lost its whole world and feels utterly bereft and bereaved and unsettled. Paul's connection to his Christian friends was so deep that he felt orphaned when separated from them.
"I was away from you in body but not in thought" (2:17)
This is what lovers say when they are parted for a while - I can't stop thinking about you. That's how Paul felt for his Christian friends.
"I made every effort to return" (2:17)
Again and again, Paul tried to see his friends, but all his plans were thwarted. We desperately try to see people only whom we love very deeply.
"You are our hope, our joy, our crown, our glory." (2:19-20)
When Paul gets to heaven, what will give him the most joy? It is the people who are, there whose lives he touched with God's grace. God's people mattered to Paul more than anything else in this world, and they were his anticpated crown in the world to come.
"Now we really live because we know you are well" (3:8)
Harry Nilsson sang a song with these lyrics, "I can't live if living is without you." Paul says that he comes alive most of all when he hears that his friends are doing well. Their wellbeing makes him tick makes him buzz, makes him happy.
Putting it all together
I have come across parents that love just a pale shadow of this, I have met siblings who love a little like this, but I have never yet come across any Christian who loves other Christians like this. Paul's love for his brothers and sisters soars high and sets the bar for how much it is possible for a fallen but redeemed sinner to love.
The love of Jesus is infinite, and we might be tempted to think, "Jesus was perfect, I could never love like that." This is why Paul is in the Bible. He was not divine, but he had the divine love of God beating in his heart.
No matter how advanced we may think our love is, none of us have ever reached the dizzy - and painful - heights of the apostle Paul. He sets the bar for the love of God in the soul of an ordinary sinner.
May we love just a little like Paul, who in turn copied his Master.
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