Get Ready to Lose

Photo by Mitchell Hollander

The story of the apostle Paul is certainly an ironic one. It is, moreover, a story that tells us how an encounter with Jesus may dramatically upset one’s life.

Paul (or Saul, as he was also known then) was an early persecutor of the fledgling “Christ movement”—a movement initiated by a group of Jews who were convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised messiah (or Christ) of Jewish tradition, and thus the lord and savior of both Israel and the whole world.

Some Jews like Paul did not accept these claims, and he tried to stop this movement in its tracks. But that all changed for him when he received a personal revelation of Jesus Christ. According to the account given in the book of Acts, Paul experienced a direct encounter with the resurrected Jesus while he was on his way from Jerusalem to the city of Damascus to arrest Jewish Christ followers living there (Acts 9:1–30).

In this revelation he received a divine call to become an apostle to the other nations beyond Israel. That is, he would become a primary spokesperson to the rest of the world for the very group that he had been trying to destroy (Galatians 1:13–16).

Paul consequently proclaimed the good news of Jesus’ lordship, persuaded many, and founded a number of communities of new Christ followers (i.e., churches) throughout a significant portion of the Greco-Roman world. The members of these churches generally consisted of both Jews and non-Jews who were taught by Paul to maintain their ethnic and other social differences, which had importance, but to nevertheless self-identify first and foremost as followers of Jesus Christ.

In other words, being a Christ follower was to be considered more important than being a Jew or any other ethnicity, a free person or slave, a male or female, etc.

And this new way of life for the early Christ followers that served to unify them also caused a great deal of havoc. Why, you ask? Allow me to explain.

First, the Jewish community at large was provided certain privileges by the Roman Empire that allowed them to continue in their traditions that forbid anything smacking of idolatry. These special privileges required, in turn, that local Jewish communities maintain appropriate boundaries between themselves and other groups to whom such privileges did not apply.

But now imagine that a significant group of non-Jewish persons were giving their allegiance to the Jewish messiah, began to observe traditionally Jewish ethics—including, especially, a refusal to participate in anything that would be deemed idolatrous, and publicly claimed to be members of a Jewish movement. However, such persons were still in every other respect maintaining a non-Jewish identity and recognized accordingly.

Consider as well that, with the notable exception of Jews, people’s participation in various, regular cultic activities that honored the gods was considered a civic duty that served the health and well-being of the communities in which they lived. What was idolatry from a Jewish perspective was interwoven into nearly all aspects of life for everyone else. A person with a reputation for ignoring or dishonoring the gods would naturally be met with grave suspicion.

So, again, what sorts of problems might such a scenario create? Well, for Jews there would be the fear that Rome might revoke their privileges for failing to uphold the social boundaries of their own communities. Jewish Christ followers, then, might have been in danger of severe reprimand from Jewish communal leaders for promoting what would be in their view a watering-down of these boundaries.

For the greater civic communities there would be the fear that such small but growing groups of non-Jewish malcontents (from their perspective) could jeopardize the order and well-being of their cities. Non-Jews who had joined the Christ movement were, then, extremely vulnerable to persecution at the hands of civic authorities and their own countrymen in general.

A chief orchestrator of this social chaos, Paul felt the brunt of displeasure from both the Jewish and greater civic communities. The former persecutor had become the persecuted. After planting churches throughout the eastern portion of the Empire, experiencing a good deal of opposition and hardship along the way, he eventually found himself in prison as result of his missionary efforts.

Paul had been a person of respectable social status, possessing a stable and honorable place in the accepted social order of things. But he was now, as far as most people outside of a marginalized movement would see, not much of anything. In the year 67 CE he was executed.

It is common for Christians to claim that Jesus came to offer us a wonderful new life. That claim is true. Yet, while the circumstances of our contemporary world may differ from that of the apostle Paul, what we can learn from his story is that this new life found in Jesus may well bring with it the loss of all else.

What allowed Paul and those in the churches he founded to endure was the very thing that got them into trouble in the first place: a reprioritizing of what was most important to them, in hope that what is promised to come through Jesus is by comparison infinitely better. As the imprisoned Paul said:

“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:7–8 NIV).