Paul Wasn’t There Either

Paul never saw the cross. No account puts him at the hill — not in the crowd, not watching from a distance. By the time he enters the story at all, the crucifixion is years behind, and he comes in on the wrong side of it: holding the coats at Stephen’s stoning, then hunting the churchThe English word "church" doesn't translate the Greek ekklesia — it derives from kyriakos, a pagan term for a building belonging to a lord. Ekklesia is a called-out, gathered people; the New Testament rarely leaves it bare but qualifies it — "the church of God" (whose it is, who called it) or "the church at Corinth" (which local gathering) — never a building. The Septuagint already used it for Israel's qahal, the congregation God called out and assembled (Acts 7:38). A spiritual organism, not an institution. Synonyms: ekklesia, ecclesia, called-out ones, assembly, congregation, kyriakos, qahal, edah.
See also: firstfruits. See A People, Not a Place More house to house.

And yet no one in the New Testament stakes more on that cross than Paul does. “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus ChristNot a surname but a title: the Greek Christos, rendering the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah) — "the Anointed." The anointing that set apart Israel's kings, priests, and prophets all converges on the one person it was pointing to. Synonyms: Messiah, Anointed, the Anointed One, Mashiach, Christos. See also: Logos More, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). Everything, staked on an afternoon he never witnessed. What is the cross to a man who wasn’t there?

In the first person

Listen to how he talks about it — because he doesn’t talk like a man reporting an event he heard about secondhand.

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).

“Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).

“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection… being made conformable unto his death” (Philippians 3:10).

Crucified — with him. The dying of the Lord Jesus, carried in his body. This is not a man pointing back at someone else’s execution; it is a man describing his own experience of it. So it’s worth asking what happened to Paul, that the cross became his way of naming it.

We know what happened. Still breathing threats, on the road to Damascus, he was struck to the ground, and a light took his eyes. “And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink” (Acts 9:9). Then something like scales fell away, and he saw, and was baptized(Greek baptizō) — to immerse, dip, or submerge; the word is physical before it is religious. The ceremony pictures dying, being buried, and rising with Christ, and the washing that comes with it — not a ritual requirement but an image of an inward reality. Synonyms: immersion, submersion. More. Down. Three days in the dark. Up — and a different man on his feet, because the one who went down that road — the credentialed one, “touching the righteousnessFrom the Greek dikaiōsis, rooted in dikaios — the Greek rendering of the Hebrew tsaddiq: right, just, in right relationship. Two senses run together: the courtroom verdict — declared righteous, acquitted, set against "condemned" (Romans 8:33-34) — and the older, wider Hebrew tsedeq: a setting-right of what was out of order, God's own righteousness as saving action (Isaiah 46:13). The word carries both; leaning on either alone narrows it. Synonyms: justify, justified, dikaiōsis, dikaios, righteousness, tsaddiq. More which is in the law, blameless” — did not get up from it. Someone else did.

We’ve seen that shape before: it’s the one the water draws at every baptism — a death, a burial, a rising. The cross, the tomb, the third day. So when Paul points at the cross, maybe he isn’t pointing at something he missed. Maybe he’s pointing at the only thing that names what ran through him.

The men who were there

Now set the disciples beside Paul — the men who actually were there. They had the closest seat in the room for three years — and they didn’t understand either, not through the ministry, not at the cross, not even at the empty tomb. Their going-down was watching their hope killed in front of them, and scattering. Their dark middle was literal — days of buried hope, with nothing to do but wait, not knowing there was anything to wait for. And their rising came slowly, on a road of their own, as a stranger they didn’t recognize opened the scriptures they already had, until their eyes opened with them.

On the surface, their story and Paul’s share almost nothing. They lost a man they loved; he was stopped in the middle of a war he was winning. But the difference is mostly surface. Each had spent a long time in the old self, sure of everything — three years of it for them, following and missing it; a whole life of it for Paul, blameless in the law and certain he was right. And each was then taken down into the same three days: the disciples through the cross and the tomb to the third morning, Paul struck blind — “three days without sight” — before the scales fell. The same three days, counted out twice. Not the same story, but the same shape — down to the number of the days.

With, becoming in

Jesus had told the men who had him in the flesh that the arrangement was temporary — and that ending it was for their good. “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” (John 16:7). Expedient — better for them — that he leave. And of the Spirit: “he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:17). With, becoming in. As long as their eyes had him — the face, the hands, the man at the table — their looking would stop there, at the surface of him. The going-away is what turned with into in.

Paul is the strange confirmation. He missed the whole with — the three years, the meals, the teachingFrom the Hebrew Torah — instruction, direction — rooted in yarah, to aim as an archer toward a target. Never primarily legislative. The stone tablets were hidden inside the ark, inside the most holy place, mediated by a priest. The promise was always to move that instruction from stone to flesh — from concealment behind a veil to working from within the person. Synonyms: Torah, nomos, instruction, teaching, commandment, mitzvah. More by the sea. What he got instead was brief and blinding, and everything after it was in: “Christ liveth in me.” And this latecomer is the one who wrote, “though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more” (2 Corinthians 5:16) — the one apostleFrom the Greek apostolos — one sent out on behalf of another. In the NT, applied to those sent by Christ as direct witnesses of his resurrection; the authority is tied to the sending and the witness, not to an institutional title that can be passed down. More who never knew Christ after the flesh, telling the ones who did that the flesh-knowing is finished.

Last of all

Paul knew exactly where he stood in the order of things. Counting off the witnesses of the risen Christ — Peter, the twelve, five hundred at once, James — he puts himself at the very end: “And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time” (1 Corinthians 15:8). Last of all. The latecomer, and he says so himself.

But why him — why show up last, out of order, to the man who’d missed everything? He answers that too: “for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him” (1 Timothy 1:16). A pattern — for them which should hereafter believe. Set down for the ones who come after, to show that the same thing runs where no one saw the hill.

Which may be what he meant by a line that can sound strange on first hearing: “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Is that a man stepping in between us and Christ? He tells us himself what he means by it: “be followers together of me… as ye have us for an ensample” (Philippians 3:17) — the same word family as pattern. Not the destination. The working model — the one to watchIn plain English, to observe means to see attentively — to give careful, focused attention to something. This is precisely what the Hebrew shamar points at: watchful, protective attention toward something valued. In religious usage, particularly in the Church of God tradition, "observe" has been reduced to performing an external requirement. The original sense — attentive seeing that allows something to reveal itself — is what the feasts and sabbath are actually asking for. Synonyms: shamar, keep, watch, guard. More if you want to see how this goes in a man who wasn’t there.

That’s us.

And us?

We weren’t there. Neither was Paul — and what happened to him anyway became everything he pointed at for the rest of his life. If the cross is a shape that can run through a man who never saw it; if it ran through the men who did see it, in a form of their own — then the question in front of us was never whether we were there. It’s whether the shape has run, or is running, in us: something we were sure of, going down; a dark middle with nothing to do but wait, and no certainty there’s anything to wait for; a coming-up into a sight we didn’t have before.

No two of these stories will look alike, because no two of us are alike. Paul’s didn’t look like Peter’s. Ours won’t look like either. But whoever has been through it doesn’t need it argued — they recognize it, the way we know a song we love in a key we’ve never heard it played in: not one note the same, and known at once. If something in this rings that way, then late was never the problem. Born out of due time turned out to be a way in.

See also:

Further Study

Paul’s first-person cross — read as few or as many as you like:

• Galatians 2:20 — “I am crucified with Christ”
• 2 Corinthians 4:10 — bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus
• Philippians 3:10 — made conformable unto his death
• Galatians 6:14 — the world crucified unto me, and I unto the world
• Romans 6:3-6 — our old man is crucified with him
• 2 Timothy 2:11 — if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him
• Acts 9:1-19 — the road, the three days, the scales
• 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 — died, buried, raised… and last of all
• 2 Corinthians 5:16 — henceforth know we him no more after the flesh
• John 16:7; 14:17 — expedient that I go away; with you, and in you
• 1 Timothy 1:16 — a pattern to them which should hereafter believe
• 1 Corinthians 11:1; Philippians 3:17 — followers of me, as ye have us for an ensample