Great Lion of God (86 page)

“I long to see you again, my dear cousin. Perhaps you might find it in your heart to visit Rome and calm our fellow Christians, and inspire them to more restraint.”

Saul read this letter with horror and foreboding. Those who adored the Prince of Peace were proclaiming Him with violence, fury and turbulence! True, it was possible that they were not in the majority but a few could bring disaster on the many and the innocent. (Saul thought of the Zealots and the Essenes in Israel who had brought down slaughter and massacres on their fellow Jews in the streets of Jerusalem, because they lacked control of their emotions and sought to reform a whole world in one act of immoderate ferocity.) Were they deliberately seeking martyrdom? If so, they were mad. Or were they trying to call universal attention to their faith, and their presence among the populace? If so, they were mad, indeed, for an attention which is enraged and bloodthirsty is worse than no attention at all.

He pondered for a long while, then wrote to the elders and deacons of the Church in Rome, rebuking them that they had lost control over several of their members.

He wrote:

“Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever, then, resists the power, resists the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Will you then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good and you shall have praise of the same. For he is the minister of God to you for good, but if you do that which is evil, be afraid, for he bears not a sword in vain. He is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him who does evil.

“Therefore, you must need be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. For, for this cause pay you tribute also—Render therefore to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.

“Owe no man any thing, but love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.—Love works no ill to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law.—Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife—” (Rom. 13:1-13)

It was not a letter the younger Saul, who had burned with hatred for the Romans and had rejoiced at the exploits of the Essenes and the Zealots, would have written. But now he saw that the evil which lives in man cannot be destroyed by an answering evil, and only by patience, faith, love and endless striving for peace and conciliation. The sword was no substitute for enlightenment and justice. The mission of the Christians was salvation, not violence, God, not secular affairs, spiritual joy, not physical force, an empire of the soul and not of human ordinances. That man who had not first conquered himself and his passions—however righteous he considered them—was a desperate danger to his own soul and the souls of his fellows. This did not mean that a good man should be as milk and water. He should be as fine wine, invigorating, consoling, brightening, thirst-quenching and inducing fellowship. Above all, he should transmit joy, and the love which is the heart of joy.

He left Antioch, with Barnabas, for Corinth, feeling that the Church in Antioch was flourishing and prosperous, and needed him no longer.

Chapter 44

S
AUL
, who had been born in a hot and fervid country and had lived and worked in others equally so, found Greece, that green, gold, purple and silvery country astounding not only for beauty but for freshness and climate. The lucent light, the incandescent blue skies, the grace and dignity, charmed him. He had vaguely loved the Greeks because of Aristo. He had suspected their hedonism and their subtly gay and cynical attitude toward life and institutions, and their humor and form and style, but now he remembered their poetry and their tragedians and their ineffable prose, and steeped himself in the grandeur of written and spoken words. Their influence upon the Jews in Israel had been an affront to him and to the other Pharisees. Now he saw that the purity of a faith is enhanced, not diminished, by the quickness of another’s perception, and there was something singularly similar between the conceptual abstraction of the Greeks and the mystical utterances of the prophets in the Scriptures. Religion was not diminished by a new insight, provided it did not deny any proven truth. Rather, it enriched and revitalized it, and made it more poignant.

He was by nature a urban man, and the urbane Greeks he encountered were men, he thought reluctantly, of his own kind. Barnabas was shyly wary of the Greeks, and Saul said to him with irritation, Our Lord loves the cultured man, of a certainty, as much as He loves the illiterate and the unlearned and the simple! We must not confine our efforts to the market rabble—though God knows they need taming and disciplining!—and to the farmer in his field. If we are to advance, as commanded, we do not appeal solely to the slave and the humble, for the Messias spoke with the power of universal wisdom and out of great learning and subtle abstraction, in symbols far more hidden and abstruse than a Homer or a Virgil or a Horace, or any of the great poets of Greece. Truly, as He said, we must be as wise as the serpent and as harmless as the dove, but we must walk amid the porticoes and on the acropolises and in the edifices of learning and culture, as well as in the gutter and the dust. I do not recall that the Lord overthrew one statue or denounced one heathen temple, nor offended the Gentiles in any manner with derision or contempt or accusation. Nor must we.”

As learned Greek gentlemen liked disputations and argument and the Socratic dialogue, Saul soon found himself of interest to these men. They came to his poor inn in Corinth, where they found him, in the evening, sitting in the dying sun and filling his eyes and soul with the resplendent beauty about him. He found himself enjoying his conversations with these men. Unlike the people of Israel and the people of Antioch, they were not surprised that a rich sage should choose to dress roughly. They confided, with a smile, that ostentation and virtue and wisdom were incompatible, though they left Saul with the uneasy surmise that they considered him affected, or eccentric as all “sages” were. In short, he was wearing an approved uniform as a wise man, so he could be distinguished from the ordinary race of men. This irked him, but strangely it also amused him. I am becoming a Greek, he would say to himself. When he tried to impart the intricacies of Greek thought to Barnabas the latter was confused. He said, “We dress humbly because we are humble men,” and Saul said no more.

The plain of Corinth was very fertile and darkly green, and here was indeed the breadbasket of Greece and her source of fruit and vegetables. The temple on the cypressed acropolis was a miniature jewel formed of silver gilt, its columns glowing all day and becoming scarlet at sunset, its winding gardens bursting with the various living murals of endless flowers, and all under a sky of such dazzling peacock—blueness that it stunned the eye. Corinth, itself, was as white as snow, the small square houses bearing trellises of grapes, the narrow streets clean and rattling with chariots and wagons, the shops tiny and teeming. Saul had seen the royal-purple Aegean Sea and the Ionian Sea, as he had passed over the isthmus, and he had seen, at a distance, the rosy and green isles of Greece in their circles of gold beaches, and he thought to himself that heaven must be so. The aromatic dry heat did not irritate him. It soothed not only his flesh but his spirit, and he recalled that Greece was a favorite winter haven for rich Romans who suffered rheumatism in the dank Italian climate. There was, in the air, not only stimulation but a soothing quality that hinted of timelessness and the gods and meanings beyond the understanding of man.

Barnabas, who was not an urban man and therefore not a cosmopolitan, was less easy in the atmosphere of Greece than Saul. He was insistent in his belief that all men were the same, and so cultivated the humble of Corinth, the slaves, the peasants, the less prosperous shopkeepers, the laborers in the fields, the wine-pressers, the vineyard tenders, the guardians of flocks, the freedmen. If the men of Greece appeared different to the men of the East, from whence he had come, Barnabas, in his simplicity, accused himself of prejudice and narrowness of mind. But Saul rejoiced in the difference between the men of Greece and the men he had known the greater part of his life, for it proved to him the marvelous variety that God had created in His wisdom and His love for beauty and diversity. Moreover, as a man of active mind and imagination, he was curious and excited by contrary opinions, and he loved debates.

He was often invited to the pleasant homes of wealthy Greeks and he found himself enjoying excellent dinners if not the resinous wines of Greece. The Jews in Corinth, in the majority merchants and traders and bankers, were urbane also though, recalling Saul’s former persecution of their Nazarene brethren, they were less friendly to him. The rabbis in the synagogue were aware of his presence among them on the Sabbath, and they observed that no man responded more fervently than did Saul of Tarshish nor with more ecstasy and devotion—wearing his cap of the Tribe of Benjamin—but they were suspicious. They were prepared to dispute with him should he rise in the synagogue and attempt to speak to the congregation, for he was not only a—Pharisee but a member of the new Jewish sect, who were called Christians by the Greeks. The rabbis had no objection to the Christians appearing for worship in the synagogue, for was not Israel plagued by many sects? If they were temporarily convinced that Yeshua of Nazareth was the Messias, blessed be His Name, it would pass. But Saul of Tarshish was another matter. He spoke in Corinth of his surety that Yeshua was the Messias, and that men who rejected Him could not be saved nor partake of the world hereafter in the fullest measure for had not God made a new Covenant with Israel? But Saul did not rise to dispute with the rabbis. He merely gazed about him with eyes blazing with fervent love and desire.

The Jewish Christians were no less suspicious of him, and so he knew, again, that his mission was to the Gentiles, though he confined his personal worship to the synagogue. He left the Jews to Barnabas who did not have his reputation and who was soft of speech and in all manners a true Jew. It was Saul’s deepest desire not to create divisions among the Christian Jews, and he knew that his very presence was a contention.

In the meantime, another thorn was pricking his flesh, and it was a very large thorn. For he was joined in Corinth by John Mark, one of the Apostles, a man much younger than himself who had seen the Messias close at hand and had followed Him and had slept in the fields with Him, and had broken bread and drunk wine with Him, and had seen His Resurrection. Mark was a tall thin young man with immense soft brown eyes which amazingly could become cold and hard when he gazed at Saul, and his hair and beard were like brown silk and his hands and feet were pale and long and he spoke with a slow deliberation and positive emphasis which annoyed Saul from the very beginning. He was not only shyly suspicious of Saul—which Saul detected at once—for Peter had not had kind words to say of him even after their reconciliation, but suspected his mission to the Gentiles.

Though Mark, recognizing that the Lord had come to the Gentiles also, was not averse to having potential converts among the Christians in Corinth or any other city, he believed with all his soul that the Jewish Christians were the inner circle of Israel, the Elect, the only ones assigned the Messianic Message, the only true saints, and that in the future it would be these Christian Jews solely who would have the governance of the Kingdom, and not the Gentile converts, who would form only a small and select body. Therefore, he was embittered against Saul who offered the Messianic and mystic inner circle to the Gentiles. He said to Saul, “The Lord warned us not to cast our pearls before swine nor to throw that which is holy to the dogs.

“There is no limitation to the Kingdom of God,” Saul replied, and in the beginning he was patient. “The Messianic Mission is for all, and is not exclusive nor does it bar any man touched with the Finger of God, Jew, heathen or Gentile.” He smiled coldly at Mark. “The Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness. But to them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God!” (Cor. 1:22-24) He added: “For we are laborers together with God. You are God’s husbandry. You are God’s building.” When Mark did not answer Saul said with his natural wild impatience at such obduracy, “For as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” (Cor. 12:12-14)

Mark looked at him with a glaucous veil over his eyes. He said, “But you were a Pharisee—and the Lord denounced the Pharisees— We still fear and suspect them.”

Saul was infuriated at this non sequitur, and his pride inflamed. He cried, “Whatever anyone dares to boast of I also dare to boast of that! Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—with far greater labors. I have been beaten and have been near death. Once I was stoned. I have been in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And apart from other things there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.” (Cor. 11:21-30)

To this, Mark answered nothing, but left him. Barnabas was distressed. Between the quiet obstinacy of Mark and the haughty pride and certitude of Saul, he felt himself caught between an upper and nether stone. However, his intuition convinced him that Saul was right and just and the younger Mark provincial, for all that he was an Apostle. But Barnabas’ greater distress was that such dissension should arise in the Church, an outcry of protesting tongues. If the Church were so divided then it would be weakened and its mission delayed and distorted. There was always room for discussion, for discussion frequently clarified, but there was no room for war and revolt. When Mark said to him, “The Message should only be given in the synagogues, and not in the heathen marketplaces and in the houses of the Greeks, who are idolaters,” Barnabas tried to explain, but Mark was as convinced as Saul, himself, that he was right.