1 Cor.1:26 “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28He chose the lowly things of this world –and the things that are not–to nullify the things that are,”

Before he was converted, during his days as a Pharisee, the Apostle Paul – known as Saul – was certainly well-known as a staunch arch-conservative, who would vigorously resist any radical change to his religious tradition. In Philippians (3:5-6) Paul said that he was ‘circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless: as for zeal, persecuting (anyone who tried to bring radical change in the name of Jesus).’ In fact, the first time we meet Paul in the Bible, he is supervising the stoning of the Stephen (Acts 8:1) – whom the apostles saw as a ‘gracious’ man, ‘full of the Holy Spirit’, (6: 5) – but whom Saul, the ‘Pharisee’, saw as a dangerous ‘blasphemer’ who needed to be publicly executed as soon as possible (6:11).

However, on the Road to Damascus, Paul was personally confronted by the ‘once- dead-now-risen’ revolutionary Jesus, who pointed out to him that to oppress people working for Christ-like change was to oppress Christ himself. ‘As he neared Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. (Acts 9:3-5)And for Saul, that realization meant that everything had to change! So he and his friends took their whole world to task, and set out to reshape it, bit-by-bit, according to the upside-down inside-out values of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. To the great consternation of the key stakeholders in the status quo, Paul and his co-conspirators were ‘able to do immeasurably more’ than one might have imagined they would have (Eph 3:20). They chose the “things that are not” – to nullify “the things that are”.’ (I Cor. I:26-28). And time and time again they helped ‘foolish’ people confuse the ‘wise’ and ‘weak’ people confound the ‘strong’ (1 Cor. 1:26) in their quest to develop radically inclusive and egalitarian communities of faith in the midst of an established religious tradition which had previously disenfranchised them. They succeeded to such an extent that one horrified observer is recorded as saying – ‘these people have turned the whole world upside down!’ (Acts17:6)