Thomas Kleinert
I had never heard of Bill Arlow until I read about him last week, and I suspect most of you aren’t familiar with him either. Bill Arlow was born in 1926 in County Down, in Northern Ireland, as a Protestant Ulsterman. In his late teens and early twenties he became an active church worker, helping to organize the first visit of Billy Graham to Northern Ireland in 1949. After a stint with Youth for Christ, he went to seminary in Edinburgh and was ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland. In 1970, as the Troubles were taking hold, he became rector of a parish in East Belfast, where he witnessed the impact of sectarian violence. One of his early experiences there was to minister to a youth shot in the head by a paramilitary, cradling the young man’s head as he breathed his last.
Arlow began to form relationships with paramilitaries on both sides. Eventually, he convened meetings between protestant clerics and lower-ranking leaders of the Irish Republican Army, and his efforts attracted considerable criticism from the protestant community. He received hate mail and death threats, and he and his family had to move house and live under police protection for some time; more civil critics dismissed him as naïve. And yet, the outcome of his efforts was a unilateral IRA ceasefire over Christmas 1974 and a bilateral truce that lasted until September ‘75.
Then the Troubles resumed, and Arlow continued to meet with the paramilitaries as well as with the families of their victims, who were dismayed by any talk of reconciliation. In radio programs Arlow insisted that it was not enough for his Christian listeners to pride themselves on not participating in political violence, but that it was their religious duty to work actively to end it. “It is better to fail,” he told them, “in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.” And he said this many years before the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed in 1998, marking the end of the violent conflict.[1]
It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail. I may not remember Bill Arlow’s name for very long – I’ve long been bad with names, and it’s not getting any better – but I hope we’ll all remember these words, or carry them deep in our bones: It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail. Everything depends, of course, on what we know or believe or hope the final outcome to be.
Paul once thought of Jesus as a violator of law and tradition. All he could see was a blasphemer and messianic pretender, rejected by God in his shameful death by crucifixion. But one day something big happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, a profound crisis triggered by a vision of the risen, living Christ, a crisis that slowly deflated several of Paul’s most closely held certainties. Now Jesus’ crucifixion was no longer proof of God’s rejection of the Galilean’s messianic claims and his teachings. Now the church’s proclamation of a crucified Messiah was no longer a foolish contradiction to God’s purpose, but the fullest expression of God’s love for sinners, Paul himself included.[2] Now he could no longer understand himself apart from Christ, but only as one whom Christ, in boundless love, had made his own. The compelling love of Christ had claimed him, laid hold of him, and sent him to proclaim the good news as an ambassador for Christ.
Some would say, “Wow, did you hear about Saul? Who would have thought, he really changed his mind, didn’t he?” Others would respond, “No, it’s bigger than that. He sees himself and the entire world in a whole new light – bathed in grace!” And Paul himself, what does he say? He writes, “If anyone is in Christ – new creation! Everything old has passed away; look, everything new has come into being!” To Paul himself, the transformation is not just a change of mind or a sudden sensibility to a new light in the old world – no, it’s a new creation! To him, the ancient promise declared by Isaiah has begun to take shape among him and his contemporaries and around them:[3]
I am about to create new heavens and a new earth, says the Lord; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord – and their descendants as well.
Paul finds himself and all people caught up in the renewal and consummation of all things through God’s redeeming act in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul knows, of course, that in countless ways “all is definitely not wondrously new.” And yet Paul proclaims that “in some vital way all things are new.”[4] The full depth of God’s love has been revealed in the cross of Christ, and Christ, the firstfruits, has been raised from the dead. Now all things will unfold from that moment. Christ’s death and resurrection brought the end of a world under the dominion of sin and the advent of another: a new creation, new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home.[5]
What the Corinthian believers must decide, according to Paul, and we along with them, is whether to orient our lives to the present that is on the way out, or the future that is already illuminating the present like the first rays of sunrise. And once we have decided, assuming we have decided to lean into the light of that dawn, we practice living no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and was raised for us,[6] and according to the pattern of his life.
Holly Hearon points out that the relationship between Paul and the Corinthian church was “tense … at the time of this correspondence.” The apostle apparently felt that a number of believers there regarded him from a point of view that was on the way out, from a human perspective that was out of sync with the newness of life in Christ. These Corinthians were disappointed because he didn’t have the powerful presence and demeanor that they expected in an apostle. And they were frustrated because he said he would come and visit, and then he didn’t show.
Paul, on the other hand, was pained that they were drawn to apostles other than him, and that may well be why he writes so emphatically about reconciliation in this passage of the letter – five times in three verses.
Hearon suspects that Paul recognized “that what goes on in human communities, how we relate to one another, has implications for how we relate to God” and vice versa.
It is not just about us; nor is it just about God. It is about how we understand ourselves to be in relationship with God and with one another, all in the same moment. The two are inextricably linked.[7]
Once we begin to grasp that God “in Christ” is reaching out to us, reconciling us, reconciling the world to God-self, not counting our trespasses against us – once we begin to grasp that God “in Christ” is re-establishing righteousness in our most fundamental relationship, once we begin to grasp that, and to the degree that we grasp that, we also begin to embrace the new-creation challenge to reach across the barriers and divisions that separate us, individually and as groups, whether due to old, ingrained injustice, or to the common daily missteps, misunderstandings, and misconceptions that get between us. We embrace the challenge and we practice. We practice reaching across in unsentimental love, seeking the healing of relationships fractured by our loveless ways.
“Were Paul and the Corinthians reconciled?” Hearon asks. “We do not know.”[8] We don’t have a Third Letter to the Corinthians telling us how things went after Paul’s urgent plea. His efforts may have failed – but better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail, as Bill Arlow reminded himself and his listeners.
Many of us wonder every day how to practice the kind of reconciliation that is not afraid to face the truth about ourselves. Many of us struggle with what to do when greed, retribution and chaos dim the horizon like heavy, gray clouds. What do we do? We practice – better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.
For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which God’s whole purpose not only for God’s people but for all of God’s creation turns.[9] And while we may turn every which way, forgetful as we are, self-absorbed, status-obsessed, and loveless as we can be, God’s mercy doesn’t swing back and forth, or turn like some mad whirligig.
The sun’s still rising. God has turned all things toward life’s fulfillment in justice and in peace. And that’s where we orient our lives.
[1] See Samuel Wells, Christian Century March 2025, 34 and https://www.dib.ie/biography/arlow-william-james-bill-a9451
[2] See James Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 577.
[3] See Isaiah 65:17ff.
[4] William Greenway, Connections, Year C, Volume 2, 84.
[5] 2 Peter 3:13
[6] See 2 Corinthians 5:15
[7] Holly Hearon https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-2-corinthians-516-21-2
[8] Holly Hearon; see note above
[9] See James Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 578.