Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany [Proper 5], rcl yr b
Sunday, February 4th, 2024
ISAIAH 40:21-31; PSALM 147:1-12, 21C; 1 CORINTHIANS 9:16-23; MARK 1:29-39
I have become all things to all people
One of the correspondents that used to cover Bill Clinton remarked once on what it was like to see the president emerge from intense conversations with his staff. He would be deadly serious as he spoke with his entourage about some policy or scheduling detail. But as this correspondent told the story, no matter how important and serious that conversation might have been with his staff, if Clinton ever saw someone from outside his retinue, his demeanour would instantly change from deadly serious to smiling and open-hearted. The implication that the correspondent was making was not so much that Clinton was actually all that happy to see voters. It was rather that Clinton had an uncanny ability to be the person that others wanted him to be. The public wanted him to be happy to see them, and so Clinton was.
And Clinton did, after all, largely keep the bankers, the traders, the middle class, and the military relatively happy. Add playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show to all that—and you had a man for all people. And St Paul sure sounds here like a bit of a crowd pleaser, a politician perhaps similar to Clinton, smiling and winning over everyone and keeping everyone happy when he says “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
But this would be a mistake, I think; Paul was, and is, hardly a crowd-pleaser. Paul is clear elsewhere in this same letter that, in his mind, there are impermissible things. That is, Paul is not “all things for all people” by saying “do what you want, all things are ok.”He says quite the opposite to the Corinthians, who imagined that the freedom of the gospel meant being free from moral constraint. There are things contrary to the way of Christ, for Paul writing to the Corinthians, including adultery, visiting prostitutes, and taking a fellow Christian to court. As Tertullian put it in the early centuries of Christianity, for Paul to be all things to all people did not mean becoming “an idolater to idolaters.”
While Paul preached the freedom of the gospel, he preached also the way of Christ, a freedom not from the law of Christ, or a freedom from others or a freedom from obligation, but Paul preached a freedom for others, as Bonhoeffer would put it many centuries later. The freedom of the gospel is not for Paul a freedom to act in self-interest. It is a freedom to renounce self-interest for the greater good of others; this is the sort of freedom that comes with conforming our lives to the cross of Christ; a cross where, after all, we see sacrificial divine love in action, and taking place for our sake.
So when St. Paul says that he has “become all things to all people” he doesn’t mean he intends to stray too far away from the way of Jesus, too far away from the way of self-giving, or too far away from the preaching of the gospel. Paul feels bound to proclaim the gospel, to proclaim the good news of Christ crucified, and as a result of the victory of this crucifixion, a Christ who rises, ascends, and who will return.
Paul does not scoff at the gospel for the sake of those who would scoff at the gospel. Paul doesn’t become an unbeliever for the sake of unbelievers. Paul is convicted, and he will preach the gospel in season and out of season.
This is to say that when Paul continues to preach the Gospel, and that Paul will continue to shape his life according to the cross of Christ, he intends to make a connection between what we say and what we do. We preach the cross of Christ, and we shape our lives according to that same cross; we preach the sacrificial love of Jesus, and we offer ourselves sacrificially. There is no division to make between the proclamation of Jesus, and the Jesus-like shape of our lives. This is because this message can be spoken, and this life lived, because of what Jesus has already done for us. Christ is crucified, and because Christ is crucified, we can speak the word of life and love, and live according to his life and love taking shape in us; and all this according to the power of the cross.
And so as we get closer to what it means for St. Paul to “become all things to all people,” we arrive at what we might call forbearance. We arrive at patience as central to our lives as we interact with others, as we interact with fellow Christians, as we interact with those who don’t share the Christian faith. St. Paul doesn’t pretend to be anyone other than himself; Paul doesn’t try to become a crowd-pleaser. Augustine puts it this way: in becoming all things to all people Paul doesn’t try to do so “by lying, but by sympathy.” Another commentator puts it this way: “Paul’s motive is love, not duplicity, and his methods are sympathy and empathy, not dishonesty. His approach is not one of unprincipled accommodation … but one of forbearance that serves the salvation of others.”
Paul is not, here, trying to make a case for him being the only one who is, or should be, all things to all people in this way. He is encouraging the Corinthians to be so as well; and we would take it as wise counsel too. There is little profit in us—the followers of Jesus meeting to worship at Duke and Water streets in downtown Kitchener—in us trying to be anything other than we are: sometimes succeeding, often failing, but always seeking to be Christ’s own possession, seeking to live out the freedom that Christ has secured for us: a freedom for others, the freedom to renounce self-interest for the greater good of others, the freedom that comes with conforming our lives to the cross of Christ. And we should feel no shame in speaking this truth: that in the cross Jesus accomplishes for us what we cannot for ourselves, and the we are made, with the Holy Spirit, a new creation in him.
And that within this sort of constraint, we can be patient with others in both the church and the world. We are free to make space for others, to be patient with others, we have no need to be forceful with others, because to be forceful and impatient is to make the gospel and ugly and unattractive thing. We can be free to wait upon others, secure in the fact that we are in fact all in process, that God is at work in our lives in different ways.
It’s a forbearance that means we don’t expect all others to be fully formed in the gospel. It means feeling free to make a great space for others to come and see what we are up to, what we are struggling with, and to come to know, finally, who it is we serve: not ourselves, not our egos, not our pocketbooks, not our image, we don’t even come to serve our own respectability, but to serve Christ crucified, and to allow him to shape our lives according to his love; and to allow the space for him to shape the lives of others, too.
It’s a forbearance that means being as open as we can at our boundaries, even as we are confident in our proclamation at the centre of things: that we are here to worship Christ crucified, because on that cross Christ has made a space for us that we cannot create on out own, a space that is made according to his self-giving love, the love we are blessedly able to know, a love that is transforming our lives, and a love that we can share with others with the forbearance that our Lord is already showing to us.