NOTES for Gal 1:15-16

The apostle Paul, of course, speaks first of all about his own calling, but by no means only about his own. In essence, calling each person into the Church, God performs the four key actions of which the apostle speaks. First, the Lord chooses each one, and we become unique for Him, one-of-a-kind and unrepeatable. When we are tormented by the question of the meaning of our life, it is important for us to remember that God's election is already contained in the Creator's plan for each of us. Second, the Lord calls each person. He addresses the heart and waits for a response, waits for us to accept Himself and His will for us. This call is a great gift of God's grace. Third, so that we may be truly alive and carry in ourselves the undistorted image of the Invisible God, the Lord "reveals His Son in us." The apostle refrains from specifying how this happens; what matters to him is that when a person responds to the calling, he is united with the Son of God with his whole being. What the Fathers of the Church called the deification of the human person takes place. Finally, fourth, the gift of life is given to us so that we may use it as God Himself does. And this means first of all giving life, bringing to others not ourselves, but the Word of God.

The apostle Paul very vividly contrasts the human and the gracious in serving God. He says that while trying to serve God according to his own, human understanding, he "persecuted the Church... being an excessive zealot for my ancestral traditions." But when God was pleased, He revealed, that is, made manifest, the presence of the Son of God in him and appointed the apostle to preach Him to the Gentiles. It was no longer Saul of Tarsus himself, but God, who was pleased to choose him for ministry. It was no longer himself and his zeal that he could bring to people, but the Son of God. He was no longer sent to be zealous for correctness, but to proclaim salvation. This is the choice offered to us Christians who read these words: to be excessively zealous for ancestral traditions or to proclaim the Son of God. As the Didache says in its first words, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a monument of Christian writing from the end of the first century: "There are two ways: one of life and one of death."