Thursday Theology: Why Paul is Crucial for Christian Proclamation Today

Co-missioners,  

Reformation is on my mind this week. Yours too, perhaps. It seems like an ideal time to make a pitch for the New Testament witness who, more than any other, shaped Luther’s grasp of the Gospel which in turn has shaped so many of us. 

Peace and Joy, 
Jerry Burce, Co-editor 
for the Crossings Community 

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Why Paul is Crucial for Christian Proclamation Today (with a Boost from Bach) 

by Jerome Burce 

The interior of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, before its restoration in 1885. The organ loft is on the left. Engraving by O. Kutschera after a watercolour by Hubert Kratz
From Wikimedia Commons

I can’t help but call it the “Auf Auf Aria.” I discovered it a couple of weeks ago in the course of my very slow post-retirement progression through J. S. Bach’s church cantatas. The one in question here is numbered 134 in the Bach catalogue. Bach composed it for Easter Tuesday in 1724. This was his first Easter season at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. He had arrived there the previous year just in time for Pentecost. The saints there had since been graced—or burdened, depending on your point of view—with their first Christmastide Magnificat and their first jaw-dropping Passion, the one according to St. John. That was on Good Friday. No wonder Bach seemingly went to the barrel on Easter Sunday for cantatas composed earlier in his career. One of these, number 66 in the catalogue, features a fascinating back-and-forth between tenor and alto soloists on the question of whether one can trust the Easter promise or not. Bach vividly grasps this saint-and-sinner dynamic that characterizes every baptized person. He writes music that preaches to it. 

And this is what one finds in the Easter Tuesday cantata, this one freshly composed. It starts with a reprise of that Easter Sunday back-and-forth between tenor and alto, only this time with more agreement than contradiction. “A heart that knows that Jesus lives finds new goodness in Jesus and sings nothing but his praise.” Thus the tenor, who now  gets to hear the alto answer, “How glad a trusting attitude is,” or in the German this inadequate translator may well have mutilated just now, “Wie freuet sich ein gläubiges Gemüte.” 

This goads the tenor into some further encouraging: “Auf Gläubige…” as in “Up, trusting ones!” Why? Because “you have lovely songs to sing,” and again “Auf, Seelen…” as in “Up, you souls, you have an offering [of thanks] to get ready….” That’s the libretto read straight—encouragement, yes. Only what the tenor in fact delivers is more like a joyful kick in the pants. The first thing out of his mouth is not a mere Auf, Gläubige, but a staccato “Auf, auf, auf, auf Gläubige”—“Up, up, up, up” as in yesterday already, you Easter-trusting ones! Such fabulous stuff you get to sing about today, and tomorrow too, and every day for the rest of your lives.” That’s the thrust of the little sermon Bach preaches through his tenor, the message reinforced by the singer’s inability to limit himself to one “Auf” only. Almost always it’s an “Auf, auf” or even an “auf, auf, auf” as the phrase recurs again and again, even as its subject shifts from Gläubige to Seelen and to the offering of thanks we can’t help but come through with when the Easter Gospel sinks home. “Jesus lives! How can you possibly sit there looking sad or jaded.” Auf Auf indeed. Which, as I think about it, more or less echoes the gentle scolding Jesus gives the Emmaus Two in Luke 24:25. As for Bach, he delivers his admonition through dance-like music that can’t help but make the heart bounce. Such great fun it is to listen to! 

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I submit that Bach sets a standard here for Easter preaching. And since every Sunday, strictly speaking, is an Easter celebration, he exemplifies what every pastor worth their salt—every genuine shepherd of Christ’s flock, as one might put it—will do at some point every Sunday. They’ll remind the saints that Jesus lives. They’ll do so vividly, and they’ll do it without fail. “Auf, auf! On your feet, already. There is joy to taste, a promise to revel in!” 

I’ll go so far as to propound this as a baseline qualification for admission to the pulpit or the platform or wherever it is that preachers stand these days to do their thing. “If you know you’re here to achieve at least this much or if nothing else to give it a try, then welcome aboard. Have at it. Otherwise sayonara.”  

I wish the people responsible for training and certifying preachers these days would bear this in mind. I fear they don’t, at least not in the church circles I’m most familiar with. 

Here I think of an item a colleague sent me some weeks ago. It was an online brochure of sorts for a course in lay ministry that an ELCA seminary planned to offer this fall. It was scheduled to start this past Saturday, October 18. Among other things, it promised to help enrollees “practice essential ministry skills, from preaching to spiritual care.” It also advertised the development of “a strong theological and biblical foundation.” Its learning schedule featured thirteen monthly sessions, two of them devoted to the Scriptures. In one of the latter it offered “a solid theological grounding in what the Bible is” and “insight into the Gospels to assist you further with preaching and teaching.” The second promised a “dive into Scripture with a special emphasis on the Gospels.” 

I read this late one night. I was struck immediately by the absence of any mention of Paul’s epistles or the first letter of Peter, for that matter. I went to bed not sure why this jarred me so. It came to me of a sudden in the wee hours of the next morning. 

It has everything to do with perspective—with the angle, that is, from which one is doing one’s seeing and thinking. 

Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497) – The Conversion of Saint Paul
From Wikimedia Commons

Paul is the apostle-come-lately as he cheerfully confesses in 1 Cor. 15:9. The Jesus he sees is the Resurrected One who showed himself in that blaze of blinding glory on the road to Damascus. This is the Jesus, the Christ, that Paul is captured by for the rest of his life. This is the One his letters bear witness to . I suddenly want to refer to Paul’s epistles as the “Auf, Auf” letters. Paul speaks of Jesus both consistently and insistently in the present tense. He pushes his readers—he pushes us—to do the same, and in doing so to embrace the wild new reality this unfolds. “If anyone is in Christ, new creation!” Bingo! “The old has passed away; the new is come”; and yes, as of right now, this very day in A.D. 2025, “all things are yours” and by grace you have been saved,” and God “has raised you up and seated you with Christ in the heavenly place.” Look! Or in Paul’s Greek “Idou!” (cf. 1 Cor. 3:21ff, Eph. 2:6, 8). 

And, sadly, this is precisely the reality those enrollees in the seminary’s lay ministry program won’t get to see because the only Jesus they’ll be talking about is the one we meet in the Gospels. To put it bluntly, impiously even, this is past-tense Jesus. Jesus as-was—that’s how they’d put it in Jane Austen’s English as spoken by working stiffs. Here the emphasis is on “following Jesus,” as in that which the first disciples were told to do and which we, by implication, are under orders to do as well. And here the constant question preachers are supposed to push is “How are you doing this morning with that job of following?—or at least I fear that’s the question they’re pressing. Monkey on my back, as once it rested on Peter’s. What a bitter burden to inflict on baptized people! There is not a chance I will follow Jesus more effectively or faithfully than Peter and his apostolic colleagues did. You won’t either.  

What we all need on Sunday is Paul’s Jesus. That’s the one Bach delivers so brilliantly to those stumbling bumbling disciples in the Leipzig of 1724. “Auf, auf! How can you not get up? Didn’t he stand in that locked room on Easter night declaring peace to the clowns who let him down so hideously two days earlier? Isn’t that exactly what he’s doing here for all of us this very morning—another Easter morning as all of them are these days? New reality all around for us to count on whether we see it or not. It’s enough to hear of it. So “On your feet, everybody!”  Not just “auf” or even “auf auf,” but this time “auf” in a triplet of triplets, “auf” sung by the tenor nine times in a row, the whole thing throbbing with jubilation and utter conviction. That’s how Bach brings this aria to a close, all ears riveted on the Jesus who is. 

How can anybody be fit to preach if they aren’t first bathed in this Gospel?  

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Reformation Sunday is upon us this coming weekend. In lots of U. S. Lutheran churches the gathered saints will hear Jesus’ famous declaration in John 8: “If you continue in my Word you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” A few weeks ago I read a passage in a fascinating book co-authored by Robert Kolb in which Kolb, without speaking directly to this verse, nonetheless draws on Luther to explicate what it means. 

‘This re-creative Word exercises its power to forgive sins and thus create the new reality of the child of God in the form of God’s promise, made in human language and made on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. The promise is not only the substance of things hoped for but also the—indeed unseen—reality of what God bestows through his gift of faith in Christ. [Luther writes,] “For many preach Christ, but in such a way that they do not understand or articulate the use and benefit [of the message]. . . . For it is not a Christian sermon, if you preach only of the events in Christ’s life, nor is it if you just preach the glory of God.” It becomes a God-pleasing sermon “if you teach the story of Christ in such a way that it makes it useful for us believers for our righteousness and salvation, so that . . . we may know that all things which are in Christ are ours. This faith and knowledge of the Lord makes us love, magnify, and glorify him.”’ [From Robert Kolb and Carl R. Trueman, Between Wittenberg and Geneva (Baker Academic, 2017) p. 13. Emphasis added.] 

Which, come to think of it, is Luther saying “Auf Auf” having learned it from Paul as Bach would later do.  

A joyous ongoing Easter, everybody!