In the last post I was recommending F.F. Bruce’s book
on the relationship between Paul and Jesus. In it he helpfully distinguishes
the ways in which Paul’s gospel is traditional and yet also involved fresh
revelation from Jesus concerning the significance of his death, resurrection
and ascension.
Having teased out those distinctions Bruce then shows
that Paul and Jesus have a common theology of what he calls ‘the way of
salvation.’ Interestingly, one of his main arguments is their agreement on
justification by faith.
“Nowhere has Paul more
fully entered into the heart of Jesus’ teaching about God and man than in his
insistence on justification by faith.” (Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 52)
The language of justification is there in Luke 18 of
course: the tax collector and not the Pharisee goes home justified. But Bruce
argues that the content of justification is taught far more frequently by Jesus
than we might think simply by counting the number of times the language appears.
Consider, for example, of the parable of the prodigal son:
“When the black
sheep of the family came home in disgrace and started off with the fine speech
he had so carefully rehearsed, his father might easily have said "That's
all very well, young man we have heard fine speeches before. Now you
buckle to and work as you have never worked in your life, and if we see that
you really mean what you say we may let you work your passage. But first
you must prove yourself; we can't let bygones be bygones as though nothing had
happened." Even that would have done the young man a world of good,
and even the elder brother might have consented to let him be placed on
probation. And that is very much like some people's idea of God. But it
was not Jesus' way of presenting God - nor was it Paul's.
For - and here is where the
Pauline doctrine of justification comes in - God does not treat us like that.
He does not put us on probation to see how we shall turn out - although,
if he did so, that in itself would be an act of grace. But then we should never
be really satisfied that we had made the grade, that our performance was
sufficiently creditable to win the divine approval at the last. Even if we did
the best we could - and somehow we do not always manage to do that - how could
we be sure that our best came within measurable distance of God's requirement?
We might hope, but we could never be certain. But if God in sheer grace
assures us of our acceptance in advance, and we gladly embrace that assurance,
then we can go on to do his will from the heart as our response of love,
without constantly worrying whether we are doing it adequately or not" (F.F. Bruce, Paul
and Jesus, 54)
Although he doesn’t have the parable of the Prodigal
Son in mind John Barclay develops this a bit further. He argues that the
similarity between Jesus and Paul extends beyond an emphasis on grace to the
sense in which their view of grace is offensive as well
as inclusive. They both “enact and
express a paradigm of God’s grace that is simultaneously welcoming to the lost
outsider and deeply challenging to the insider – challenging to the point of
scorching away the secure marks of a bounded system” (John M.G.
Barclay, “‘Offensive and Uncanny’: Jesus and Paul on the Caustic Grace of God,”
in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 17).
That,
of course, is exactly what we see in the parable – the prodigal son, the lost
outsider, and the tax collectors and sinners with whom Jesus kept company, they
are welcomed by God’s lavish grace. And yet the same grace deeply challenges
the self-righteousness of the elder brother and the Pharisees who lamented the
breadth of Jesus’ social circle.
So,
what unites Paul and Jesus? Among other things, the message of the offensively
inclusive grace of God.