Bible reading: 1 Timothy 1:12-17.

Message.

If I mention the year 1666 you’ll probably think of the Great Fire of London which started in a bakehouse in Pudding Lane and destroyed three-quarters of the ancient city, including St Paul’s Cathedral. But the fire wasn’t the only thing to happen in that year: the British Navy engaged in three battles with the Dutch (they lost one, won two so went to the top of Group C – not really!); and the first experimental blood transfusion was carried out (it was gruesome, between two dogs, and the doctors involved knew nothing about blood groups).

1666 was also the year when a Bedfordshire evangelist published a book. For the crimes of preaching without a licence, conducting unlawful assemblies, and leading worship which didn’t conform to the Church of England’s guidelines, this man had been committed to prison. After six years in jail, and with execution a very real threat, John Bunyan – for that’s who it was – felt that he should write an account of his life and spiritual journey. This was not the famous “Pilgrim’s Progress” which came out twelve years later (for Bunyan survived prison and eventually died of natural causes), but a book with the snappy title “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: Or, A Brief and Faithful Relation of the Exceeding Mercy of God in Christ, to His Poor Servant John Bunyan”. It’s still in print today.

Bunyan isn’t the only person to have used that phrase “the Chief of Sinners” – in fact it was common parlance among the serious-minded Puritan Christians of the time; Oliver Cromwell used it in a letter written to his cousin in 1738: “You know what my manner of life hath been, oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light; I was chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet god had mercy on me. O Riches of his mercy”. A century later the Methodist Charles Wesley – helped by his brother John – used the phrase in a cheery hymn of 1740 which begins, “Depth of mercy! Can there be mercy still reserved for me?” and an Irish writer, William McComb, wrote a hymn which begins: “Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed his blood for me” – it’s not exactly world-class poetry. The great 19^th century Scottish preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne wrote of his conversion, “I come to Christ, not although I am a sinner, but just because I am a sinner, even the chief”. More intriguingly, the same words were used by Robert Louis Stevenson in his book “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (one and the same person, but with vastly different personalities), with Jekyll lamenting his situation by saying, “If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”

But, of course, none of these people originated the phrase: it was the apostle Paul who first wrote it, in the first of two letters to his young protégé Timothy. Here is the phrase in a modern translation: “This is a true saying, to be completely accepted and believed: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. I am the worst of them, but God was merciful to me”. Now, I don’t know about you, but those words rather make my hackles rise. That’s not, of course, because of what they say about God and Jesus, but because of what Paul is saying about himself. We say to ourselves, “Isn’t he overdoing it a bit? We know he wants to give credit to God for his spiritual salvation, but isn’t he almost boasting about how bad he was, wallowing in his past sinfulness?” There’s an unpleasant hint of false modesty here – for surely Paul knew of people who’d committed far greater evils than he had: murder, robbery, extortion or whatever? Nevertheless, in his own eyes he was the worst sinner of the lot and had deserved to be on the receiving end of God’s wrath and judgement. Do we really believe him?

Well, let’s see the reasons that Paul gives for describing himself in this way – this takes us back to the early chapters of Acts where he looks on approvingly as Stephen is stoned to death and later sets out on a mission to destroy the first churches which, he is convinced, are preaching blasphemy – for how could the holy God have a son? We all know how Paul – still at that time called Saul – is poleaxed by a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus and is never the same again. But, despite his many comments about being made a new man by God’s grace, memories of his past continue to haunt him. Paul’s crime wasn’t just that he persecuted the Church – we don’t know how many Christians were locked up or even put to death by his efforts – but, far more importantly, that he had persecuted Jesus himself. Could there ever be true forgiveness for that? He doesn’t appear to be very sure.

I don’t think we have a great deal of sympathy for Paul here. (By the way, in his letter to the Romans he calls himself “a wretched man”). Yes, in his zealous ignorance he spoke against Jesus and tried to suppress the Church – but was that really the worst sin he could have committed? After all, there are plenty of sins to choose from! As far as we know, he hadn’t committed mass murder or serial rape or domestic abuse or other crimes which we’d consider far more serious; we’d say that, yes, he was mistaken and intolerant but didn’t need to keep beating himself up in such an self-obsessed way. Yes, we know that Paul is trying to emphasise to Timothy the greatness of God’s grace, we can understand that; but was he going about it in the right way? Possibly not.

Before I go any further, I want to go back to that word “sin”. (I’m reminded here of two people discussing the Minister’s sermon. One says, “What was he talking about?” and the other replies, “Sin”. The first person continues, “And what did he say about sin?”. The answer comes back, “He was against it”). You’ll remember that the word most commonly used in the Bible isn’t about us doing things which harm or degrade someone else, nor to do with us deliberately breaking laws; it’s about “missing the mark” or not getting things right. The Greek word used isn’t just found in the Bible, it’s common in ancient Greek plays, where it depicts the flaws or defects of a character which may eventually lead to their downfall. So, to get back to Paul, when he wrote, “I was the chief of sinners”, he wasn’t saying, “I’m the worst person who has ever lived” but rather, “As far as God was concerned, I’d totally got hold of the wrong end of the stick; instead of welcoming Jesus as the world’s saviour, I tried to shut him down and stop others from following him”. No wonder he ended up feeling so guilty!

Back in the days of mass gospel rallies led by people such as Billy Graham, it was quite common to have someone give what was called “a testimony” to their Christian conversion. Sometimes the person speaking was a well-known celebrity – Cliff Richard talked about his new-found Christian faith at a Billy Graham rally in 1966, much to the amazement of everyone present. But other testimonies took a different line: these were people who had been involved in a life of violence, criminality and drugs but had somehow found their way to faith. People would sit enthralled by these tales; it was almost like being at the cinema. However their interest tended to drop off once the sordid details ended and the speaker came to Christ. People enjoyed these dramatic tales of “sinners saved from the burning”, but they did give the unfortunate impression that, unless you’d had a dramatic conversion experience, you weren’t really a Christian. It was hard for respectable church-going people to call themselves “the chief of sinners” because that was palpably untrue!

I wonder if this is why Paul wrote to Timothy in the way he did. For he doesn’t seem to have had the same kind of life-changing experience that Paul had; we read in Paul’s second letter that both his mother and grandmother (we’re not so sure about his father) were Christians which means he was probably brought up in the faith from an early age. It would have been inappropriate for him to have called himself a “chief sinner” – the danger for him, as for many of us, is that he could have taken his Christian faith for granted. So Paul wanted to make the point that we all depend on God’s mercy, encouraging Timothy to keep his faith and to “fight well” – with words! – for Jesus.

It would be pointless for us to beat our breasts and pretend that we are terrible people when we’re not. But we’d also be wrong to preen ourselves before God and say, “Look how good I am”. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether we’re a tinker-turned-evangelist like John Bunyan, an Oxford don like the Wesley brothers, a pop singer like Cliff Richard, a Pharisee like Paul or someone brought up in a Christian home like Timothy. “All have sinned” – missed the mark – “and fallen short of God’s glory”, wrote Paul to the Christians in Rome. Perhaps it’s not the words “Chief of sinners” that need to stick in our minds from the title of Bunyan’s book, but “Grace abounding” – to us all.