St. Paul: Playing with Prepositions

                                           

                                          Part One: Some reflections on in, from, to, and with 

St. Paul has a unique way of using prepositions to move us into right relationship with God and one another. Religion’s role is to teach us how to relate correctly, while codependence is a dysfunctional way of relating.  Prepositions are insignificant parts of speech, compared with more important words such as nouns and verbs. God is always turning matters upside down and inside out by making the insignificant into the important. Nobodies are always chosen to be his somebodies.  St. Paul tells us that God uses the weak to shame the strong, and the foolish to shame the wise. In fact, God chooses what is lowly and despised to bring to nothing the things that are something ( see I Cor.  1:27 -28). St Paul is imitating God, we might say, by not using nouns and verbs exclusively to help us into right relationship, but prepositions, (the nobodies of the Grammar Book), to help us get into the continual conversion process our religion calls for.                 
 St. Paul’s perception of himself is equally humble and therefore wonderful. Paul never calls himself a theologian. He refers to himself as an “apostle”, seemingly a proud title, but its basic meaning in Greek is probably what Paul is proud of. And that meaning is "to be sent as an ambassador of someone else," namely Christ. Paul also calls himself “a slave of Jesus Christ”. He does not belong to himself but to His Master.  As Christ’s property, Paul does what he is told to do, namely preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. His slavery is freely embraced, and in fact is what enables him to be sent all over as an apostle.  It was a glorious vocation, but the glory of it came through the suffering involved in carrying it out. 

 Part of the marvel of Paul is his use of prepositions as a way of gaining entry to the Mystery of God that is in Christ.  His aim was to get real people to know Jesus Christ.  Paul used everyday examples and metaphors taken from their lived experience and daily conflicts in order to introduce them to spiritual realities beyond their imagining. Through his letters, Paul changed the way the people of his day saw reality, and the way they related to one another and God. In doing so he laid the foundations of Christian civilization in what would centuries later be Europe.   That is a stunning achievement, all the more astounding, when we realize that Paul had no idea what he was accomplishing. All he wanted to do was write a few letters to a few scattered communities. He had no idea of the impact his words would have on us centuries later. If he had, he probably would have been more careful of how he expressed himself. Paul’s Master, Jesus Christ did with Paul what Paul could never have hoped to achieve had he been pursuing his own agenda. Our Lord used Paul to change peoples’ thinking, feeling, behaving, in short, how they saw themselves in relation to Christ's message. By following Paul, people would move from codependence to interdependence, from tribalism to Church, or in the terms Paul uses, from death to life, from sin to grace, from slavery to freedom, in Christ Jesus.

Prepositions ably express various styles of codependence, and also concisely state the interdependence we care called to. In addition, prepositions illustrate the journey from one state of being to another.  Prepositions help us to see whatever we are stuck in, to look beyond it towards what we are being called to, and to go with the flow of grace moves us to cooperate. But they are so insignificant that they do not win our attention by themselves. Prepositions are humble servants that do not try to be noticed. All they want is to be part of the process of freeing us and helping us grow. Perhaps St. Paul should be named the patron saint of prepositions.  For, like John the Baptist, Paul goes before the Lord. Preparing the way for Christ, Paul positions himself before the people not as their savior, but as a slave of Christ.  Paul incarnates the meaning of the term pre-position by helping all who will listen to him to relate to God and man in Christ Jesus.