Today's reading continues the account of the witnesses connected with the Nativity. And if the first witnesses were...
Today's reading continues the account of the witnesses connected with the Nativity. And if the first witnesses were shepherds, now righteous people and prophets come to take their place. It would seem that these people are not at all like simple shepherds. But there is something common that unites them: all of them are waiting for the Messiah and are ready to receive him as he is. For a prophet, the revelation received from God is most important; he hears God directly, and for him there is no question about whether he can trust what he has heard.
The prophetic experience of direct communion with God is, of course, unique every time, but with all its uniqueness, none of those who had occasion to hear the voice of God raised questions of what modern theologians call theological verification: any prophet receives the revelation given to him as a direct instruction to act. And if God points to the infant brought into the Temple as the Messiah, then that infant truly is the Messiah, whoever may say otherwise and whatever doubts learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah may express on this matter.
Righteousness is a phenomenon of another kind, but a righteous person too is often given the ability to hear God. And if at times his mystical hearing is not as sharpened as a prophet's hearing, the habit of trusting God unconditionally helps the righteous person become certain of the authenticity of the revelation received. What unites these people with simple shepherds is not only the expectation of the Messiah, but also their attitude toward God and toward the will of God. One could say that, unlike the same Pharisees, for example, they are not very religious. Of course, all of them are members of the Synagogue, but there they are apparently not in the front rows: there are people there whose activity makes them barely noticeable, and sometimes completely unnoticeable.
In theological and religious-political disputes, so frequent in the synagogues of the Gospel period, they apparently either take part rarely and unwillingly, or do not take part at all. They do not belong to any religious school and perhaps do not even have what is usually called a religious worldview. They simply trust God, who long ago became the center and meaning of their life, and they live while listening attentively for what he will say to them. Or they pasture their flocks, like the Bethlehem shepherds. Of course, compared with learned theologians they may appear simple people, even, like the shepherds, ignorant. But they will certainly have no problems with the theological interpretation of what they have heard from God. Nor will they have needless doubts about the reliability of what they heard. That is why they are granted to see the Messiah before others. Including those who were sure they would see him first.
15
15:2 Ye are saved, if ye hold fast - Your salvation is begun, and will be perfected, if ye continue in the faith.Unless ye have believed in vain - Unless indeed your faith was only a delusion.
15:3 I received - From Christ himself. It was not a fiction of my own. Isa 53:8-9.
15:4 According to the scriptures - He proves it first from scripture, then from the testimony of a cloud of witnesses. Psa 16:10.
15:5 By the twelve - This was their standing appellation; but their full number was not then present.
15:6 Above five hundred - Probably in Galilee. A glorious and incontestable proof! The greater part remain - Alive.
15:7 Then by all the apostles - The twelve were mentioned Co1 15:5. This title here, therefore, seems to include theseventy; if not all those, likewise, whom God afterwards sent to plant the gospel in heathen nations.
15:8 An untimely birth - It was impossible to abase himself more than he does by this single appellation. As an abortion is not worthy the name of a man, so he affirms himself to be not worthy the name of an apostle.
15:9 I persecuted the church - True believers are humbled all their lives, even for the sins they committed before they believed.
15:10 I laboured more than they all - That is, more than any of them, from a deep sense of the peculiar love God had shown me. Yet, to speak more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to zeal and diligence in it.
15:11 Whether I or they, so we preach - All of us speak the same thing.