KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 January
Blinded into sight
It is a paradox, to be sure. The light which blinds is the light by which we see more clearly and more fully, albeit always “through a glass darkly” as Paul says in 1st Corinthians (13.12). The light which blinds, as Paul says later in Acts, is “a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun”(Acts 26.13), something more metaphysical than physical, something more like Plato’s Sun as the child or image of the Good in The Republic.
“I could not see for the glory of that light,” Paul tells the Hebrew people on the stairs of the Temple (Acts 22.11). He speaks to them in Hebrew after having spoken in Greek to the Roman Tribune, Claudius Lysius, who is Latin speaking yet understands Greek, to get permission to speak to his fellow Jews. To add to the complexity of cultures and languages, Lysius initially thought that Paul was an Egyptian somehow connected to the Sicarii, Jewish zealots violently opposed to Roman rule, later known through another kind of linguistic confusion as the Assassins, a 12th century Arabic term in Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslim culture wrongly associated with hashish!
Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, marks the first use in English of the word, “assassination”. “If th’ assassination could trammel up the consequence”, contain as in a net the results of our actions, we would do whatever we could get away with even if we know it is wrong! Paul’s pursuit of what he thinks is right, the persecution of the followers of Jesus, a sect, brings him into collision with himself. The sufferings of Christ, he discovers, are not opposed to the glory of the Messiah but are contained in each other. The suffering is in the glory and the glory in the suffering.
The biblical scene is one of conflict and confusion and yet out of it comes the beginnings of “something rich and strange” (Shakespeare’s The Tempest) which will become the Christian religion. The story in Acts (21.40ff) belongs to the Christian Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (Jan. 25th), usually and wrongly taken to signify his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. That is mistaken because Christianity or the Christian religion does not actually exist at this point in any kind of distinct and clear way.
