All Things to All People: What Saint Paul Really Meant

There is an old complaint, usually made at dinner parties by people who have been agreed with a few too many times, that the most dangerous man in the room is the one who agrees with everyone. We have all met him. He is a conservative among conservatives and a radical among radicals. He laughs at the jokes of whoever holds the microphone and nods at the opinions of whoever holds the purse. He is, as the saying goes, all things to all people. And it is one of the stranger facts of the Christian faith that this very phrase, which we now use almost entirely as an insult, was first written as a confession of holiness.

"I have become all things to all people," wrote Saint Paul to the Corinthians, "that by all means I might save some." It is a startling sentence. Read carelessly, it sounds like the motto of every con man, flatterer, and campaign manager who ever lived. Read carefully, it is the precise opposite. And the difference between those two readings is, I suspect, the difference between the devil and the apostle.

The Oldest Costume

Deception is the oldest profession in the garden. Before there was any murder, before there was any war, before there was so much as a harsh word between brothers, there was a serpent speaking in a friendly voice. It is worth noticing that the first lie in Scripture did not arrive shouting. It arrived as a question, a curious and sympathetic question, the sort a helpful neighbor might ask over a fence: "Did God really say...?" The serpent did not present himself as the enemy of Eve. He presented himself as her advocate, her confidant, the only one honest enough to tell her what God was hiding.

This has been the method ever since. Scripture is crowded with faces that were not faces at all but masks. Jacob wrapped his arms in goatskin and wore his brother's clothes so that a blind father would bless the wrong son. Judas chose, of all the signals in the world, a kiss. And Paul himself warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, which is to say that the darkness has never been foolish enough to advertise itself as darkness. Our Lord put the whole matter in a single image: wolves in sheep's clothing. The wolf, it must be noted, does not bother to dress as a wolf. Nobody would open the gate.

The Actor's Mask

The Greeks had a word for the man who wore a mask upon the stage. They called him a hypokrites, an actor, one who answers from behind a face that is not his own. It was a perfectly innocent word in the theater. Nobody accuses an actor of lying when he plays a king; everybody knows he will go home and eat his supper as a commoner. But Christ took this harmless theatrical word and turned it into the most scorching accusation in the Gospels. Woe to you, hypocrites. The sin was not in wearing a mask on the stage. The sin was in forgetting to take it off when the play was over, or rather, in never admitting there was a play at all.

Here is the heart of deception: it is a face worn in order to take something. The flatterer wears admiration to take your favor. The swindler wears friendship to take your money. The false prophet wears piety to take your soul. Every mask of deception, however varied its features, is carved for the same purpose. It is a tool of acquisition. It changes its appearance so that it may keep its appetite.

The Apostle of Many Accents

Now look at Paul. Here, surely, was a man of many faces. To the Jews he became as a Jew; he had Timothy circumcised so that the young man could preach in the synagogues without scandal. To those outside the law he became as one outside the law; he stood on the Areopagus in Athens and quoted pagan poets to pagan philosophers, telling them that their own writers had half-glimpsed the God he had come to proclaim. To the weak he became weak. He ate what was set before him, spoke the dialect of whatever room he stood in, and adjusted his whole manner of life to the habits of the people he was trying to reach.

If ever a man looked like a chameleon, it was Paul. And yet no one who has read his letters could possibly mistake him for one. The chameleon changes color in order to hide. Paul changed his manner in order to be heard. The chameleon blends into the branch so that no one will notice him. Paul blended into the synagogue, the marketplace, and the lecture hall so that everyone would notice Christ.

The Burglar and the Locksmith

It is rather like the difference between a burglar and a locksmith. Both men carry a great ring of keys. Both study doors with an almost loving attention. Both know that a lock which will not yield to one key may yield to another. A person watching them from across the street might not be able to tell them apart. But the burglar opens the door so that he can carry things out, and the locksmith opens the door so that the owner can get in. The whole moral universe lies in that difference of direction.

Deception adapts in order to take. Love adapts in order to give. The deceiver learns your language so that he can pick your pocket in it. The apostle learns your language so that he can tell you, in words you understand, that you are loved beyond measure. The skill is the same. The flexibility is the same. The close attention to the listener is the same. What differs is where the gain goes. And Paul was explicit about where his gain went: he made himself a slave to all, he said, that he might win more of them. Not win more from them. Win more of them, and not for Paul, but for Christ.

The Antioch Test

Lest anyone think Paul's flexibility had no limits, we have a wonderful and rather uncomfortable scene from the city of Antioch. Peter had been eating with the Gentile believers, happily and freely, until certain men arrived from Jerusalem. Then Peter quietly drew back and began eating only with the Jews, and the other Jewish believers followed him, and even Barnabas was carried away. It looked, by all appearances, like exactly the sort of thing Paul himself did: becoming as a Jew to the Jews.

Paul opposed him to his face.

Why? Because Peter's change of face was not made to give the gospel but to protect himself. He was not adapting his manner for the sake of the listener; he was adapting his convictions for the sake of his reputation. And the result was not that more people heard the good news, but that a whole table of Gentile Christians was told, in effect, that they were second-class members of the family of God. Paul called it by its proper name. He called it hypocrisy. The actor's word again.

This is the test that separates the apostle from the chameleon, and it is a test every Christian can apply to himself. When I change my manner, whom does it serve? Am I bending my habits so that another may hear the truth, or am I bending the truth so that I may keep my comfort? Paul would eat anything, sit anywhere, speak any dialect, and keep any company. But he would not alter the gospel by a single syllable. He would rearrange the furniture of his life in any direction; he would not move the foundation an inch. This is the same man who wrote that if even an angel from heaven preached a different gospel, let him be accursed. That is not the voice of a man who agrees with everyone.

The Face That Does Not Change

There is a curious paradox here, and I think it is the most important one. The deceiver, for all his many faces, is the most monotonous creature in the world. Strip away the masks and there is always the same thing underneath: a hungry self, looking for what it can get. He has a thousand costumes and only one character. The saint, by contrast, may look quite different in different rooms, but he is the same man in all of them. Paul in the synagogue, Paul on the Areopagus, and Paul in chains before King Agrippa were one Paul, because the thing at the center of him did not change. He had been crucified with Christ; it was no longer he who lived, but Christ who lived in him. A man whose center is fixed can afford to be flexible at the edges. It is the man with no center who must keep changing his face, because he has nothing else to offer.

This is why Christ could dine with tax collectors, argue with Pharisees, and weep with the sisters of Lazarus without ever being anything other than Himself. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and precisely because He never changes, He can meet every person exactly where they stand. The fishermen found Him speaking of nets. The woman at the well found Him speaking of water. The scholar Nicodemus found Him speaking of birth and spirit in the dark of night. He took up the language of each one, not to deceive them, but to find them.

The Honest Face

We live in an age of masks, though they are no longer carved from wood or stitched from leather. We curate our faces for the screen, tune our opinions to the audience, and present one self at church, another at work, and a third in the comment section at midnight. The temptation is not new; it has only become more convenient. And the Christian finds himself caught between two errors. On one side lies the rigidity of the man who will not bend at all, who insists on speaking only his own dialect and then wonders why nobody listens. On the other lies the fluidity of the man who bends at everything, who speaks every dialect and has nothing to say in any of them.

Paul shows us the narrow road between them. Be flexible in manner and fixed in truth. Bend your habits, your preferences, your comforts, and your pride. Do not bend the gospel. Learn the language of your neighbor, sit at his table, eat what he eats, and listen to his poets. But when at last you speak, speak with an honest face.

For in the end, the question is never how many faces a man wears. The question is whose face shines through them all. The deceiver wears many masks to hide himself. The apostle wears many garments to reveal Another. And the only face worth showing the world is the one that, looked at long enough, begins to look like Christ.

~The Seekers Quill