A WORD FOR TODAY, August 18, 2022
Peggy Hoppes
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Blessings. Peg
A WORD FOR TODAY, August 18, 2022
“However, I consider those things that were gain to me as a loss for Christ. Yes most certainly, and I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith, that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on, that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:7-12, WEB
I’ve been reading what life was like in the days of Paul. His letters are filled with metaphors from the life he lived; he talks about sports, family, military, and city life. He grew up in a city; you can see in his letters and the examples that he uses that he was cosmopolitan. Some suggest that Paul teaches a different Gospel from Jesus. One reason is that his language is so different, so the message sounds different. Jesus’ parables are more focused on agrarian life and vineyards, country or small-town life. How could they be saying the same thing? Jesus came from an Eastern (Middle East) culture, but Paul came from a Western (Greco-Roman) culture. Their world views were different, but the Gospel remains the same.
The message is the same, the way of saying it is different. Paul grew up in the city. The first century urbanization was second only to our time. Life revolved around the cities in the Roman world. There were differences between then and now. We have urban sprawl, but they were confined by walls. We tend to think that multi-level buildings were a recent development because of modern engineering and elevators; who could walk up more than a few flights of stairs every day? But some buildings in Rome and other ancient cities were as much as six floors high because there was no room within the cities to build wider buildings, so they had to expand up.
The cities dealt with so many problems, like the lack of water and the overabundance of sewage. It was dangerous to be out after dark, and the people hid behind locked doors. The people were crammed in, especially the poor who were forced to live in tiny spaces at the tops of those ancient skyscrapers. When disease came, it took many. Fire was a particular fear because once something began to burn, the fire often took whole blocks and cities. The problems of that ancient world may have manifested differently than today, but doesn’t this paragraph sound familiar?
When I drive through the cities in our nation, I always pass through neighborhoods that are falling apart. They are dirty and dangerous. The poor are living in unlivable conditions. Those buildings might have running water, but in too many of them the water is nasty and unhealthy. It may seem hard for most of us to believe, but many of those buildings do not have adequate plumbing. Large families live in small rooms, and do not have good access to waste disposal. In those ancient cities, the sewage and garbage ran in the streets; it was said you could smell Rome before you could see it. Sadly, sometimes, human waste is still found in our streets today. You don’t want to be on the city streets at night now any more than then. Fire and disease are still very real fears for those who live in crowded buildings.
This was the world in which Paul lived, which is why his examples seem so different from Jesus. Yet, sometimes I think we moderns can understand Paul much better than Jesus because we are more familiar with his Greco-Roman world view. We are more likely to understand city life than vineyards. Imagine being Paul, walking through a city, seeing the waste along the roads and thinking about his own life and faith. In today’s passage, he sees every good thing about his life as refuse, as the sewage running down the street, because the promise of Christ is so much better than anything in this world. The New Jerusalem, the city where we will dwell for eternity will not be dirty or dangerous or unhealthy. It will be perfect. For today, we press on toward the promise that is ours and will be ours forever through faith in Jesus Christ.
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