21/04/2023

St Paul's own Rabbi offers the Sanhedrin some very rational advice. The same rationality is repeated by Pascal some 1700 years later. Pascal defended the rationality of belief in Christianity in the form of what is known as "Pascal's wager". It is logical to live the life of a believing Christian even if you cannot truly believe for if there is Judgement after death you have avoided sin and so will be saved but if there is nothing you won't know anything about it as you too will have disappeared into that void of nothingness.

There may be human wisdom in both Gamliel's advice "to wait and see" and Pascal's wager but there is no true belief in Anselm's "ever greater" God. We do not know whether Gamliel was true to his words and accepted that the growing Church really did come from God, but we do know that his "school" was active in persecution. Saul guarded the outer clothing of those who bludgeoned St Stephen to death.

The miracles of Jesus and continued by the Apostles are the "signs" that the people needed to convince them that their Messiah had come. The Jews of the first century were a tightly knit community of believers who knew in their very beings that they were God's own people. It must have been very hard for them to accept that God could have offered redemption to the unrighteous and unclean Gentiles.

It wasn't easy for the Gentiles to believe either. The intellectual sophisticates of Asia Minor and Athens had to have their minds convinced that the perfect purity of the "good" that their philosophers had sought had been a  broken and bleeding criminal's corpse on a cross in Palestine. 

The Holy Spirit did prevail and Paul's proclamation of the Risen Lord became the Church where the wisdom of the Greeks was retained even in the remotest corners of Europe. We all have personal miracles where we know that Father, Son and Holy Spirit have entered our lives and God gives each of us the adequate amount of wisdom to choose Life rather than Death. We need to use our free will wisely and without cynicism prepare with love for the judgement to come. 

Dear Lord, may I continue to find support for my acceptance of your will for me by turning to you in prayerful contemplation. May your Angels guard me from all evil and let my prayers be witnessed by my life. May the prayers of Mary and all the saints of heaven be the support of our Worldly Church and the inspiration for all of us to turn to joyful holiness.