The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
1 Corinthians 15:1–11
Bar none, I am the most humble-est
Number one at the top of the humble list
My apple crumble is by far the most crumble-est
But I act like it tastes bad outta humbleness
The thing about me that’s so impressive
Is how infrequently I mention all of my successes
I pooh-pooh it when girls say that I should model
My belly’s full from all the pride I swallowI’ve got it all and I’m gettin’ more
But I never fall, beat ’em all
‘Cause you know I’m so humble
I’m so humble, I’m so humble.
—“I’m So Humble,” the Lonely Island
I share this with you because today we’re talking about Paul. And Paul has knack for mixing statements of humility with assertions of authority. Sometimes we call it a humble-brag. “I’m honestly not that smart—I just work really hard!” “I wish I were better at accepting praise—people tell me all the time that I don’t take compliments well.” “I always feel so under-qualified for the awards I receive.”
We can often find Paul doing something similar. He seems to have had a bit of a problem with credibility. It’s very difficult for us to imagine, because Paul and his theology loom so large in the church today. It’s only barely an overstatement to say that Paul invented Christianity as we know it.
The early followers of Jesus did not immediately fuse together into the thing that we call the church. They did not immediately create something that we could recognize as a new religion: Christianity. Remember that all of Jesus’s followers, and in fact nearly everyone he spoke to, was Jewish. Peter, James, John, Andrew, and the rest of the twelve: Jewish. Mary Magdalene, Martha and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus: Jewish. Jesus does have a few odd encounters with people who are not practicing Judaism, but few. And most of them don’t end up being followers of him.
After Jesus’s death and resurrection, it’s not immediately clear what the next steps are for the followers of Jesus. And we have competing accounts in the New Testament about what exactly happens. It appears that all of the early missionary work of the apostles is focused on other Jews. Jesus-followers are essentially a sect of Judaism, along with others like the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Zealots, or the Essenes. It is spreading around the empire, though, amongst the Jewish Diaspora communities in every major city.
At some point, though, these Jesus followers start to reach out to Gentiles. Gentile is just the Jewish word for non-Jews. It literally means “nations,” or “ethnicities.” Many cultures have a word that they use for outsiders. The Greeks in this period called non-Greeks βαρβαροι, barbarians, because to the Greek ear, other languages just sounded like “bar-bar-bar.”
There had already been groups of Gentiles on the edges of the Jewish community. They were generally referred to as God-fearers. These were Gentiles who were interested in the God of Israel, participated to some degree in Jewish life, sometimes patronized synagogues, but had not taken the final steps to become Jewish. Of course, for men, becoming Jewish meant being circumcised, which as you can imagine, was a significant barrier for some.
As the message of Christ is spreading among scattered Jewish communities, it is fining it’s way to ears of these Gentile God-fearers. And as more and more Gentiles begin to show interest, begin to be moved by the Gospel of the risen Christ, a debate is stirred up about just how to deal with these people. Do they need to become Jews—be circumcised and keep the Kosher laws—or can they be followers of Christ while still remaining Gentiles?
Like I said, we have competing stories in the New Testament about just how this debate went down. The Book of Acts gives the credit for reaching out to Gentiles to Peter, who is called in a vision to visit the house of Cornelius the Centurion and share a meal, something forbidden by Jewish practice. Peter is then able to convince the other pillars of the church, most notably James of Jerusalem, Jesus’s brother, that they need a new outreach to Gentiles, one that seeks to bring them into the church without requiring them to first become practicing Jews. Peter is the one who makes the change.
Paul’s own account is somewhat different. Of course, he is not like the other apostles, is he? All of the early apostles knew Jesus during his life on earth. They followed him during his ministry. Or some, like James, were even members of his family. Other prominent church leaders get their authority from their proximity to Jesus, or their proximity to those who knew Jesus.
Paul’s story is very different. He did not know the earthly Jesus. And he didn’t learn about Jesus from those who knew him, either. Paul appears first in the Christian story as Saul, a persecutor of the early church. But on his way to Damascus, with persecution orders in his hands, he has an encounter with the risen Christ. He sees a vision. He hears a voice. He is struct blind. And from then on, he stops being a persecutor of the church and becomes its hardest working missionary.
But you can see how this creates an authority problem for Paul. He is very clear that his authority does not come from Peter, and it does not come from James. Paul is adamant that his authority comes directly from Jesus, directly from the encounter Paul has on the road.
But it seems that not everyone finds that story convincing. If we’re trying to sort out a disagreement in the Jesus movement, who are we going to trust? Should we trust Jesus’s own brother: James? Should we trust one of Jesus’s closest disciples: Peter? Or should we trust this strange zealot who never even met Jesus, and who wasn’t known to any of the other apostles?
So wherever Paul goes, he seems to be fighting for his own authority. You see, he doesn’t just say that he is a convert to Christ. Paul calls himself an apostle. An apostle! Specifically, Paul says that he is “The Apostle to the Gentiles.” He believes that Christ has given him a special mission to reach out, not to Jews, but specifically to Gentiles. In Paul’s telling, Peter is the apostle to the Jews, Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. But not everyone accepts that authority. Specifically, there are people who claim to be followers of James who push back hard on Paul and his seemingly sacrilegious mission to the Gentiles. They seem to be coming through behind Paul, telling the churches that Paul has built that he isn’t a real apostle, and that his message isn’t the truth.
So Paul is at pains to show that he is, in fact, a real apostle, and that while he is not dependent on Peter or James, he does nonetheless have their support. He is preaching the one and only true gospel, and anyone who claims otherwise is mistaken.
He tells part of the story here in chapter 15 of First Corinthians. “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” Paul is telling them the message that he received, the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
“And that Christ appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” Cephas is how Paul refers to Peter. It’s the Aramaic word for Rock, as opposed to the Greek Πετρος. Paul says that the risen Christ appeared first to Peter and then to rest of the twelve. He doesn’t say anything about Mary Magdalene, who saw Jesus at the tomb. Either he doesn’t know the story, or he leaves Mary out for his own reasons.
“Then Christ appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.” We don’t really have this story attested anywhere else. The gospels and Acts talk about appearances to small groups, but no one besides Paul suggests Jesus appeared to such a big crowd.
“Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” It seems like Paul might be trying to throw a little shade on James, not including him earlier, and not including him as one of the apostles.
“Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” One untimely born is a euphemistic translation. The Greek word is εκτρωμα. When Jerome translated this word into Latin, he used abortivus: abortion. It can have a wide range of meanings. It’s not clear whether Paul refers to himself as a miscarriage, a still birth, a neonatal death, or a medical abortion (see David King, “Ektroma: A Reading of 1 Corinthians 15:8 by the Father of One Untimely Born,” Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa, vol. 43, no. 1, 2019: 1–15).
“For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” This is where Paul seems to show humility. He isn’t like the other apostles. There is something wrong with him. He should not be what he is.
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” God’s grace makes Paul something he is not supposed to be. That’s a humble-brag.
“On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me.” Paul is really laying it on thick here. A regular brag and a humble-brag, jammed together into one.
But Paul tries to bring it all together with a note of unity: “Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you believed.” In the end, we are all preaching the same gospel. It doesn’t matter who you believe, so long as you believe in the life-giving message of Christ’s resurrection power.
And it’s worth a moment to return to Paul’s strange metaphor of himself as an εκτρωμα, as one untimely born. In using this image, Paul is emphasizing the overwhelming power of Jesus’s resurrection, the incomprehensible way in which Jesus has destroyed death. Christ’s grace is so great that it is able to bring to eternal life even one untimely born, one who never truly tasted life in the first place. In fact, this is part of the promise of Christ. Jesus does bring to resurrection even these. They are not lost. They live. And so shall we, by God’s grace. Thanks be to God.