Sermon for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
“He spake unto them in the Hebrew tongue”
Paul’s conversion is momentous in the story of Christianity. He is sometimes called the second founder of Christianity for with Paul the Christian Faith goes global at least historically. His travels along Roman roads and in Roman captivity contributes to the spread of the Christian Faith. His story, especially his ‘conversion’, marks the beginnings of Christianity as distinct from Judaism and from the surrounding Hellenistic culture under the dominance of the Roman Empire. Yet his conversion is entirely within the context of Judaism and within the syncretic nature of what will come to be called the first century AD, anno domini, in some sense because of St. Paul as he, too, will come to be called.
Told to us three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s conversion is more about the beginnings of a process of discovery and understanding than simply a one-off event. Certainly there is a dramatic quality to the way Paul tells his story about what happened on the Damascus road. Certainly, it seems, something happened. But his conversion is not from one religion to another because Christianity does not yet really exist as a distinct entity. His conversion is really his insight into a new understanding about the nature of the Messiah which has yet to be fully developed.
He is, he says, a Jew from Cilicia, from Tarsus, “a citizen of no mean city”, and crucially too, he will lay claim to being both a Pharisee and to being a Roman citizen. Both are equally important in terms of the significance of Paul and what will be his teachings for the development of Christianity.
The lesson is Paul’s speech to the people about his experience and its meaning. The context is more powerful than we might realize and more complex in ways that challenge Christians with respect to other religions and cultures. The context is one of extreme hostility and violence. The preceding verses of this chapter are altogether remarkable. Paul has gone into the Temple in Jerusalem with the intention to teach about Jesus. Before he can say anything he becomes an object of derision and hate. He is, first, accused of “teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and his place.” Secondly, he is accused of bringing a gentile, a Greek from Ephesus named Trophimus, into the temple which is regarded as a defilement of “this holy place.” He does not seem to have been responsible for this but in another way it belongs to the interplay between Jew and Gentile.
