“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.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” to which Saul responds with the question, “Who are you, Lord?” “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.” But Saul has been persecuting those who claim to be the followers of the Way, the followers of Christ after his death and, in their view, his resurrection. But in the exchange, persecuting Christ’s followers means persecuting Christ. God and man, Christ and Church, are intimately related and associated concepts. There is an intimacy about the encounter which suggests something about the character of Saul, about the intensity of the questions about the relationship between God and man and about the question of the relationship between glory and suffering. The breakthrough moment for Saul who becomes Paul is to see the necessity of the sufferings of Christ as belonging to the glory of the Messiah. It will be a major theme of Paul’s ministry. “What shall I do, Lord?” he asks, blinded by the light on the road.
He puts himself into the hands of Ananias, “a devout man according to the law” and one who is “well-spoken of by all the Jews” of Damascus. It is Ananias who says “Brother Saul, receive your sight” and tells him of his mission to be a witness to God and his Just One, whom he has seen and heard. “Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name.” It is a poignant and powerful moment, the inauguration of a new way of thinking and living and one in which the focus is on what is seen and heard about Jesus.
He is blinded into sight by a light greater than the light of the noon-day sun. The image here is about the divine light in which everything is seen in a new way, a new way that effects a change. In this sense, the story captures the logic of all conversions, effecting a change in the understanding. The change may involve something dramatic as in the case of Paul, transformed from being a persecutor to becoming the great Apostle of the Gentiles. It marks a breakthrough moment that is more than repudiation of former things; it marks as well the idea of recapitulation, the way former things are now seen in a new and greater light.
That is the challenge for us now and always. It is always about being “transformed by the renewing of our minds” and that is a constant work in progress. Conversion is about the constant turning of our hearts and minds and lives to God. Far from being a one off moment, it is dynamic and not static. It is, in short, about our life in Christ.
A prayer by Lancelot Andrewes puts it nicely. “O Lord, grant that in thy light we may see light; the light of thy grace today, the light of thy glory hereafter.”
“Brother Saul, receive your sight.”
Fr. David Curry
Meditation for the Conversion of St. Paul
January 25th, 2018