Have You Done Everything You Can With What You Have?

19 May 2026  Acts 20:17-27

Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

“I consider life of no importance to me, if only I may finish my course….” (Acts 20:24)

St. Paul proclaimed the gospel to Gentiles for almost 30 years, and in all that time he never did persuade a critical mass of believers that it wasn’t necessary to be Jewish before becoming Christian. For all that time there were always significant numbers of Jews and Jewish Christians who thought circumcision, kosher laws, and obedience to the Law of Moses were essential to salvation. In fact, Paul and the Gentile mission he started never finished their job – the Romans did. Radical Jewish nationalists declared war on Rome in A.D. 66. It was like Bermuda declaring war on the United States – the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt mercilessly, burned the Temple to the ground, and scattered Jews all over the Empire. Gentile Christians the Romans left alone, and that is how the Gentile mission finally succeeded.

So how on earth could Paul, writing before the Jewish revolt, believe that he had “finished his course”?

Paul wasn’t done in the sense that every question had been asked and answered. He was done in the sense that he had done everything he could with what he had.

It wasn’t just the Gentile Mission that was incomplete. The word “Trinity” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letters of Paul, or anywhere else in the New Testament – it would be centuries before the Church worked out any workable understanding of the inner life of God. Similarly, it was going to take a few hundred years more, and a bunch of heresies more, before the Church thought things through like the divinity of Jesus, and what exactly had happened on the cross.

So how on earth could Paul think he was done?

St. Paul wasn’t any more done than we are in the sense that every doctrine had been completely described and adequately understood at the time of his death. He was done only in the sense that he had advanced the conversation as far as he could. He had created communities and community leaders who were competent to ask the right questions the right way, and to live with the answers. He even arranged to ask the right questions in the right places – at the end of his life he arranged to have himself sent to Rome so that people in the very heart of the Roman world would have access to the conversation about Jesus.

Paul wasn’t done in the sense that every question had been asked and answered. He was done in the sense that he had done everything he could with what he had. He was a scholar and could teach. He was a writer, so he could write. He was a tentmaker, so he knew how to travel (tentmakers were rather like what we would call outfitters). He did what he could with what he had.

The Church grew and spread – over time it would need authorities and institutions that Paul could never have anticipated or even imagined. There would be events and inventions, new people and new cultures, and searching new questions that, like the old ones, could take generations to answer. Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is going to address the safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. No one imagines, certainly not Pope Leo, that this will be the last thing that needs to be said on such a topic.

So when can we be done?

• “Have I done everything I can with what I have?”

• “Have I been a witness to the people most likely to listen to me?”

• “Is Jesus the best explanation for why I am the way I am?”

When we can say Yes to questions like that, then we can be done.