Jeremiah 1.4-10; Psalm 67; Acts 9.1-22; Matthew 19.27-end

AS I prepared to write about the conversion of Paul, I was tempted to comment on Acts 9 as well as the Gospel, even though, for the past two-and-a-bit years, I have been confining myself to the Gospel only (because it is the one reading that every worshipper in a lectionary-following church will hear each Sunday).

But Acts 9.1-22, gripping story as it is, needs no commentary from me. That is not to say that there is nothing to be said about it — about how Paul experiences the risen Lord, setting the pattern for conversion. It is just that what speaks loudest in that story is his stunning encounter with the risen Jesus.

Matthew’s Gospel, in contrast, cries out for investigation, because Jesus’s warning in the final verse (19.30) is so enigmatic and foreboding. My thoughts go instantly to the parable that follows immediately after today’s Gospel: the workers in the vineyard, who toiled all day only to be paid the same as those who turned up at the eleventh hour (Matthew 20.1-16). However cleverly I analyse that parable, the child in me still cries out, “But it’s not fair!”

I also feel more like a child than a mature person of faith when I read Peter’s words in this Gospel. I perceive in them his hunger for recognition: for acknowledgement of his risks and sacrifices. But that may say more about me than about Peter; for his words could be a plain statement of fact (“We have left everything”) and query about consequences (“What then will we have?”). He asks the question in a plural form, but it is not clear whether he is speaking on behalf of everyone, like a discipular shop steward, or whether he is only really asking about himself.

The most sensitive verse is verse 30: “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” Like so many of Jesus’s sayings, it is couched in straightforward language. But that simplicity vanishes when we ask whom Jesus means by “the first” and “the last”. He uses a first/last contrast repeatedly in his teachings, but not always in the same ways, or with the same meaning. In this Gospel, the context looks eschatological: Jesus refers to the “being-born-again” (palingenesia) of all things, and to judgement. But does that turn his first/last paradox into a heavenly waiting room, or perhaps a very British queue, in which everyone waits their turn to be summoned according to clipboard order instead of being received according to the order in which they arrived?

The words “first” and “last” could refer to chronological time, as with the first and last workers in the vineyard. Or they could be about status, like the linking of being first with universal servanthood (as in Mark 9.35). The leader of the Scottish Episcopal Church is called the Primus (“first” in Latin; perhaps “Prima” one day) because he leads as “primus inter pares”: “first among equals”. That is a paradox, too, and a beautiful one.

I trust that I am not just aping modern egalitarianism when I say that I read Jesus’s words here as a reference to the inner disposition, not the outer destination, of human beings. Being “first”, for Jesus (if this is right), means “being first with God”. In other words, living according to God’s ways, God’s priorities.

In one important sense, though — the historical sense — it still helps to read this Gospel in terms of the reading from Acts 9. Speaking historically, Peter is “first”: first to meet Jesus, first to respond to Jesus, first to follow Jesus. Paul, though, is “last”: the last apostle to hear Jesus, and to accept Jesus. He confesses to being the least of the apostles (1 Corinthians 15.9). Thinking historically, in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, it is also the case that Peter comes first and Paul, last.

In the terms that matter most (which, for Jesus, means in terms of our inner dispositions), Paul stands with, and for, all of us who have come after the Lord’s lifetime. It does not matter that we were not the first to hear or the first to follow. But it will always matter that we “who profess and call ourselves Christians” are prepared to be last in terms of status and renown, while remaining hungry to be first in terms of service and of love.