Jeremiah 1.4-10; Psalm 67; Acts 9.1-22; Matthew 19.27-end
AS I prepared to write down concerning the conversion of Paul, I used to be tempted to comment on Acts 9 in addition to the Gospel, although, for the past two-and-a-bit years, I actually have been confining myself to the Gospel only (since it is the one reading that each worshipper in a lectionary-following church will hear each Sunday).
But Acts 9.1-22, gripping story because it is, needs no commentary from me. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be said about it — about how Paul experiences the risen Lord, setting the pattern for conversion. It is just that what speaks loudest in that story is his stunning encounter with the risen Jesus.
Matthew’s Gospel, in contrast, cries out for investigation, because Jesus’s warning in the ultimate verse (19.30) is so enigmatic and foreboding. My thoughts go immediately to the parable that follows immediately after today’s Gospel: the employees within the vineyard, who toiled all day only to be paid similar to those that turned up on the eleventh hour (Matthew 20.1-16). However cleverly I analyse that parable, the kid in me still cries out, “But it’s not fair!”
I also feel more like a toddler than a mature person of religion once I read Peter’s words on this Gospel. I perceive in them his hunger for recognition: for acknowledgement of his risks and sacrifices. But which will say more about me than about Peter; for his words might be a plain statement of fact (“We have left every little thing”) and query about consequences (“What then will now we have?”). He asks the query in a plural form, but it surely isn’t clear whether he’s speaking on behalf of everyone, like a discipular shop steward, or whether he is simply really asking about himself.
The most sensitive verse is verse 30: “Many who’re first will likely be last, and the last will likely be first.” Like so lots of Jesus’s sayings, it’s couched in straightforward language. But that simplicity vanishes once we ask whom Jesus means by “the primary” and “the last”. He uses a primary/last contrast repeatedly in his teachings, but not all the time in the identical ways, or with the identical meaning. In this Gospel, the context looks eschatological: Jesus refers back to the “being-born-again” (palingenesia) of all things, and to judgement. But does that turn his first/last paradox right into a heavenly waiting room, or perhaps a really British queue, through which everyone waits their turn to be summoned in accordance with clipboard order as a substitute of being received in accordance with the order through which they arrived?
The words “first” and “last” could discuss with chronological time, as with the primary and last employees within the vineyard. Or they might be about status, just like the linking of being first with universal servanthood (as in Mark 9.35). The leader of the Scottish Episcopal Church is named the Primus (“first” in Latin; perhaps “Prima” at some point) because he leads as “primus inter pares”: “first amongst equals”. That is a paradox, too, and a gorgeous one.
I trust that I’m not only aping modern egalitarianism once I say that I read Jesus’s words here as a reference to the inner disposition, not the outer destination, of human beings. Being “first”, for Jesus (if this is true), means “being first with God”. In other words, living in accordance with God’s ways, God’s priorities.
In one vital sense, though — the historical sense — it still helps to read this Gospel by way of the reading from Acts 9. Speaking historically, Peter is “first”: first to fulfill Jesus, first to reply to Jesus, first to follow Jesus. Paul, though, is “last”: the last apostle to listen to Jesus, and to just accept Jesus. He confesses to being the least of the apostles (1 Corinthians 15.9). Thinking historically, within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, it is usually the case that Peter comes first and Paul, last.
In the terms that matter most (which, for Jesus, means by way of our inner dispositions), Paul stands with, and for, all of us who’ve come after the Lord’s lifetime. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t the primary to listen to or the primary to follow. But it is going to all the time matter that we “who profess and call ourselves Christians” are prepared to be last by way of status and renown, while remaining hungry to be first by way of service and of affection.
