A Monumental Mission

The "Gospel According to St. Paul"

By: Fr. Lawrence Boadt, CSP

I want to take you on a tour of St. Paul and his writings, and that means we will do two things: First, we will look at the Acts of the Apostles to get a sense of Paul's missionary work and how it was both accepted and rejected by Jews and Gentiles alike. Second, we will look at some of Paul's letters to see how he himself dealt with the challenges of his ministry, especially with the opposition he faced from various groups that did not approve of the gospel he was proclaiming. So let's start with Acts, beginning with a bit of background.

The Crisis of the Cross. For the very first disciples, the death of Jesus was a major crisis. Many of them had expected that Jesus would overthrow the Romans, or at least that he would be the great teacher that the Jews were looking for: the prophet Elijah or the prophet Jeremiah, or the great unnamed prophet spoken about in Deuteronomy 18. But Jesus didn’t seem to fulfill any of those roles because the Jewish leadership rejected him, and he died at the hand of the Romans. So it looked as though everything they had hoped for was lost.

Then came rumors of a resurrection. Mary Magdalene and Peter were out at the tomb, and no one was there. Someone else saw him later that day. The disciples from Emmaus came back saying they had eaten with him. Word spread,…

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