York Minster

We are Ambassadors

Date: 25th January 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Jeremy Fletcher

Mendelssohn wrote the oratorio St Paul in his mid twenties. It is a measure of his standing in these islands that it was sung in English in 1837, only a year after its first performance, and that Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ is said to have taken the soprano role in a performance in Birmingham some years later.  But the oratorio is rarely performed now: his own Elijah, composed a decade later, eclipsed the earlier work, and the Bach Passions and Handel’s Messiah are now top of the list for choirs looking to sing such sacred works.

Perhaps Mendelssohn would not be unhappy at playing second fiddle to Bach. It was he who came to prominence by reviving the St Matthew Passion for its first performance since Bach’s death some seventy years before. But even as he recognised that his own Elijah was a superior work, he might be disappointed that Paulus, St Paul, is so neglected. A creative libretto and structure takes the piece from Saul’s persecution of the early church, through his conversion, to his early preaching and the beginning of his ministry as an apostle, and thence to his confidence in the return of Christ and the life to come.

And there is a special quality given to a work about the conversion of Saul, a Jew, to the Christian faith, written by someone whose grandfather was called Moses and whose father was called Abraham. Felix and his sister Fanny were baptised as Christians in their childhood after an early upbringing in the Jewish faith, and he was ever conscious of his heritage. He commented to the actor and singer who took the part of Christus in the St Mathew Passion that it had taken ‘an actor and a Jew to revive for the world its greatest Christian music.’

It may not be the music’s fault that Paul is not as popular as its early success might have suggested. Paul himself is a difficult character, like many of the greatest figures of history. Fanatical persecution gave way, though crisis, to fanatical evangelism, and the doggedness and single mindedness of the young rabbi would lead him to take his legal case right to Rome, when a settlement out of court might have extended his ministry for years more. I do not think Paul was an easy colleague, nor was he a congenial committee man, an eirenic debater, a pillar of the community. He is, from the depiction of him in Acts and in his own writing, an easy man to admire and a hard man to like.

But thanks be to God that he was met by Christ on the road to Damascus, that Ananias brought him to the church, that Paul took his time to learn and grow in faith, and that he would not rest until there were Christians and churches across the known world. Thanks be to God that we learn of Christ through his writing, and that we are challenged to follow Christ, to be Christ’s ambassadors, because this messenger of the Gospel told the people who told the people who told the people who told us. Paul is a lovely messenger not because of the delights of his personality, but because of the content of his message – the gospel of peace. So there are glad tidings to tell.

As then, as Paul would say: woe to us if we do not preach the gospel – to the glory of God and the praise of his name, now and always. Amen.