Having a spiritual experience can happen in a split second.
And trust me, you'll know when you see it, when you feel it. It is essential in
understanding this dilemma that we remember who Paul is speaking to. The church
in Rome, a complicated convergence of two vastly different cultural communities
bound together by a common spiritual experience.
To oversimplify and generalize the two, we can do it like
drawing the line down the center of the page. On one side, we have the Jews on
the other side, the Greeks. I remember being a little girl and my dad telling
me, you know, Melanie, there are only two types of people in this world, those
who are Greek, and those who wish they were Greek. In Rome these two
communities were separated by contrasting worldviews. The Hebrew view of the
world was grounded in earthly material realities in which they lived, spiritual
truth found only in justice.
And on the other side, the Greek view to simplify was
asserted that the highest human experience is knowledge. Always seeking to
explain why people fall in love like Aeros and Aphrodite. Why night turns to day
like Hyperion and why it rained on my wedding day when there wasn't a cloud in
the sky. Oh, just we don't talk about Bruno, no.
This is why in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Paul
reduces these two communities to their simplest form in saying Jews demand
signs and Greeks desire wisdom. It would be like summarizing the political
divisions of our day to say, Republicans demand guns and Democrats they desire
taxes, but we all know it really isn't that simple, is it?
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