Meditation for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
“Brother Saul, receive thy sight”
There is something providentially wonderful about the celebration of the Conversion of Saint Paul in the last week of the Epiphany Season this year. For his conversion can be seen as a kind of epiphany, a making known to us about what God seeks for our humanity. It is all about light and life. His so-called conversion, so-called because there are a number of ambiguities about what is to be understood here about the word conversion, is nonetheless about a breakthrough of the understanding.
His conversion is not about a change of allegiance from Judaism to Christianity because the latter does not yet exist either notionally or institutionally. Paul, after all, is a critical figure in the ultimate development of what will come to be called Christianity. As the accounts make clear, his story is entirely within the context of late Judaism in its encounter with Greek language and thought and its domination by Roman law and order. Such is the real richness of The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. It reminds us that Christianity cannot be understood apart from the collision of those principles: Jewish religion, Greek philosophy and culture, as well as Roman order.
Luke tells us about the story of Saul on “the road to Damascus.” The phrase has entered into world culture as the image of conversion, a kind of breakthrough moment. In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, Paul tells his story three times. The epistle reading for his feast day provides us with the third and, perhaps most moving account, especially when one considers the setting. It is one of hostility, the hostility of the Jews towards Paul who has to be rescued by the soldiers of the Roman legion and who is allowed to address his own people “speaking unto them in the Hebrew tongue” after having spoken in Greek to the tribune, Claudius Lysias, a Roman officer. We see the interplay of Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the story of Saul who by virtue of his experience will be renamed Paul.
What is his story? It is his conversion, and here the word must be used literally, from being the persecutor of Christ to becoming an Apostle of Christ. It is, also literally, about seeing former things in a new light. He is blinded into sight, into a new way of thinking about the Messiah, a new way of thinking about God’s engagement with our humanity in terms that without destroying the law transcend the law, especially in its narrow Pharisaic sense. His story is about his mystical encounter with the risen Christ. In a way, the critical moment lies in the exchange between Christ and Saul.
