Sometimes it’s stated as a joke, but other times it’s meant very matter-of-factly: this idea that the Apostle Paul was the best kind of Christian. A pro, you could say. A saint whose life was a model for ours (besides all of that pre-conversion stuff, of course). Who else would we put on his level, who authored many more New Testament letters than Peter and who said boldly and unmistakably, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ”?
As one who has dabbled in church planting and learned from those who have done it more effectively than I, Paul’s model for starting churches in the book of Acts is often pointed to by those who seek to emulate his methodologies, as gray and unrefined as they might be.
Of course, there’s some merit to this. Bringing Paul down to our level humanizes him and helps us to see our own conversion narratives in him — the chief of sinners, the former Christian-murderer-turned-apostle, saved in spite of himself, who openly makes fun of his own public-speaking ability and steps forward when the cynics ask, “Who in the world is responsible for the church in Corinth? Gosh!” And because he was an actual pastor who knew the other apostles personally, his instructions on what Christian community and church leadership should look like should matter greatly to us.
But there’s also a reason why the “Christ, Paul, Me” meme exists on the interwebs in varied forms. There’s a theological law of atrophy there that’s hard to deny. Have I been carried up to the “third heaven” in a vision like he has? Have I been miraculously saved from being stoned to death? More groundedly: Do I love my church as much as Paul seems to gush over the church in Philippi? It doesn’t take long to see the holes, especially if we make Christianity into a moralistic passing of the baton from Jesus to his early followers to us.
But, maybe that’s part of the point, and maybe there’s another reason why Paul is held up in scripture as a spectacle. In biblical theology, there’s this idea that the minor characters point to someone beyond themselves, like a whisper or a foreshadowing in a story, as if the point is to see God’s fingerprints over them rather than a mirror image of ourselves. “Christ is all and in all,” Paul says in Colossians 3. He fulfills all that comes before him in the Bible. And — this is what often gets missed — all that comes after him as well. Paul, the man, is no exception. When we look at it this way, his words take a different form, a more symbolic one and, in the end, a much more relieving one.
Most of Paul’s letters express deep personal affection for the churches, his longing to see them again, gratitude for their support, and concern about false teachings or influences that threaten their spiritual health. In the first letter to the Thessalonians, he says he endeavored eagerly with great desire to see them face-to-face, but Satan hindered him. So “when he could bear it no longer,” he sent Timothy, his son in the faith, to encourage them and to establish them further in the faith, while making mention of his own accompanying sufferings.
And this is where it comes down to a matter of perspective as readers. Who are we in the letters? Who do we align with the most? Perhaps we’re less like Paul than we think. Or, said differently: perhaps we are not the point of Paul. In our bias toward making scripture all about us, we tend to emphasize the “Imitate me” part of that verse more than the “as I imitate Christ” part. The truth is we are more like the Thessalonians, the recipients of the letter, and Paul is symbolically more representative of God. Which makes Timothy, the sent one, like Jesus.
And all of a sudden, like a 3D image in a Magic Eye book, a picture of redemptive history starts to pop off the page: God, though separated from us for a time by our sin and Satan’s schemes, endeavored with great eagerness and desire to see us again. And so, like Paul sent Timothy, he sent Jesus to journey from heaven to earth, to suffer for us on a cross, and to encourage us in the good news of his death-defying and demon-thwarting schemes.
Paul’s desire to see the churches again is an echo of an even greater lover, who uses Paul’s words to give us a window into his own heart. Paul’s “I can bear it no longer” is derivative of the heartache that God himself feels over us, like Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep. If I’m honest, I hardly know what to do with that idea, and I struggle to believe it. But it’s also the most relieving thing in the world to know that he wants to see me more than I want to see him, and that’s ok, because that’s part of the gospel.
Any imitation we do of Paul isn’t to replicate what Jesus has done or ascend to some higher level of spiritual existence or sanctification but to point to what he’s done, to point to the one who came down so we wouldn’t have to go up. And the beauty of the letters is that even in the “imitate me” language, if we listen carefully, there we see Jesus. And we’re comforted with the fact that although we always fall short, even though we’re hopelessly separated, the chasm is never too wide for love.
