by CCW | 25 January 2015 14:25
The Conversion of Paul is an epiphany and for that reason, in the Prayer Book, it is to be observed when it falls on a Sunday in the Epiphany Season. Paul’s story is quite a story, full of drama and intensity, controversy and struggle. The importance of his story for the life of the Church is wonderfully captured in this feast. Paul’s conversion is the only conversion celebrated among the principal holy days in the life of the Church.
And rightly so. With Paul, the Christian Faith goes global. With Paul, the Christian Scriptures come to birth – his writings comprise the largest part of the New Testament after all. He is, as some have put it, the second founder of Christianity. In a sense without Paul, there would be no Christianity. His conversion, then, is a matter of great significance.
We are told about his conversion in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a book which John Donne remarks, following Chrysostom, could just as easily be called “the Book of the Acts of Paul, so conversant it is with the life of Paul.” Paul’s conversion is told to us three times in Acts albeit in various ways. In our lesson this morning, we hear Paul himself tell his story. What is his story? Saul the Persecutor becomes Paul the Apostle.
There is a change from being the Persecutor of The Way, as the followers of Jesus were first called, to becoming the great preacher of the Gospel of Christ, the Apostle to the Gentiles, the one who takes the Gospel to Rome and by extension to the world. What his story reveals is conversion as transformation. It is an epiphany of the truth and power of Christ that transforms human lives. What is that transformation? It is really about becoming more truly and fully human. The truth of our humanity is found in communion with God. Nowhere is that more fully expressed than in the God/Man Jesus Christ and in our life with Christ. Paul’s conversion is his encounter with the Risen Christ, the one whom he is persecuting in persecuting the followers of Jesus Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” Paul will tell us, echoing exactly his conversion. His conversion occurs through a vision on the Road to Damascus.
The phrase has come to represent any significant kind of turn-around in people’s minds and lives, a so-called ‘Road to Damascus experience’. What lies at the heart of Paul’s conversion, I think, is a break-through of the understanding that can only happen through an intensity of struggle with the truth of God. There is something quite intense about Paul and it is an intellectual and spiritual intensity. It results in seeing things in a remarkable and new way. It is an epiphany of the essential teachings of Christ in human minds and hearts and lives. Nowhere is that more clearly seen, perhaps, than in the life and writings of St. Paul.
His conversion is equally his confession. He recognizes himself as having been utterly and completely wrong about the followers of Jesus and about the Jesus whom he never directly met or known apart from his vision. His vision teaches us a lot about faith and conversion.
There are things seen and heard. “A great light round about [him]”, which he says elsewhere in Acts was “above the brightness of the sun”, blinds him because of its glory but there is also a voice which is heard, the voice which questions him, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” His response to this voice is to ask, “Who art thou, Lord?” to which the reply is “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest”. Pretty intense and quite intriguing. The others who are in his company see the light but don’t hear the voice.
The conversion is necessarily personal and that is what Paul is telling us in his speech at Jerusalem in our lesson this morning and yet it is something which has to be made known and manifest to all. Paul has just been forcibly taken from the temple in Jerusalem by a mob of Jewish people. Why? They accuse him of “teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place; [and] moreover he also brought Greeks into the temple,” namely one Trophimus the Ephesian, “and he has defiled this holy place”. The violence of the mob creates a public disorder that immediately gets the attention of the Roman authorities who literally rescue Paul from “the violence of the crowd” who “were trying to kill him”. As he is being carried away by the Roman soldiers, Paul sees an opportunity. He says to the tribune, one Claudius Lysias, “May I say something to you?” The tribune’s response is first to ask with surprise, “Do you know Greek?” and then to ask whether or not he is the Egyptian who recently “stirred up a revolt,” leading “four thousand men of the Assassins out into the wilderness,” as the Revised Standard Version rather anachronistically and curiously puts it; the King James Version says “four thousand men that were murderers.”
Paul’s response is to state his credentials as “a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city”. His request is to be allowed to speak to the people who had just dragged him out of the temple. He addresses them in the Hebrew language. The scene reveals the collision of cultures. Now the Assassins are obviously not the militant group of Shia Muslims that arose in the 11th century in Syria a thousand years later than this story which is why it seems odd that the more modern RSV should use that word but the sicarii who were a militant Jewish off-shoot of the Zealots. Their name derives from the sica, the small curved dagger used to kill Romans and Roman sympathizers among the Jewish people in Roman occupied Israel. The only time the word is used in the New Testament, it is more familiarly known from the Jewish historian, Josephus, writing about the same time as Paul and the Evangelists. Yet as Piers Paul Read suggests, “the Assassins in Syria are both the descendants of the Jewish Sicarii and the ancestors of the suicide-bombers of Hezbollah” (The Templars)
Simply put, we have in this scene the convergence of cultures out of which Christianity emerges: Greek culture and language, Hebrew religion and language, and Roman order and language.
But even more we have Paul’s story of his conversion. He bears testimony to Jesus knowing too that his testimony will not be accepted and that his mission will ultimately be to the Gentiles. The reaction of the Jews to his speech is hostile and the Roman authorities decide to “examine him by scourging” – not quite water-boarding perhaps, but torture nonetheless, which marks the beginning of a whole parade of sufferings that Paul will endure as part of his witness and mission. At this juncture, he makes known that he is also a Roman citizen and therefore should not be bound and scourged.
It might seem that we have in Paul’s conversion all of the elements of violence that bedevil and disturb us today. It might seem to confirm the prevalent notion of religion as inherently violent and nasty. But this would be to overlook an important element in Paul’s conversion, the turning away from violence and the embrace of suffering for the truth’s sake. Saul is changed from “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” to bearing witness to Christ. What is his conversion? It is his epiphany moment on the road to Damascus, his break-through of the understanding that the glory of the Messiah and the sufferings of Christ are one; the glory is in the suffering. It changes how things are seen and experienced.
The conversion of Paul highlights two things which characterize the writings of Paul, the importance of teaching or preaching the Scriptures and the notion of redemptive suffering. His conversion means the repudiation of violence and persecution and the embrace of learning and suffering. It is what we have heard in the epistle readings for the previous two Sundays of Epiphany. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” and “bless them which persecute you; bless, and curse not.”
Paul’s conversion is an epiphany of the truth of God in Christ Jesus that transforms human lives. Our humanity finds its truth in communion with Christ; he in us and we in him.
“Let this mind be in you,” Paul tells us, “which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be equal to God, but emptied himself … and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.”
Paul’s conversion illustrates Christ’s summary of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” Such is the witness that belongs to his conversion.
Fr. David Curry
Conversion of St. Paul
(Epiphany 3, 2015)
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