by CCW | 25 January 2026 10:00
I know. You have heard this text already this year, perhaps more than once. Yet it befits, I think, The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul which almost always falls within the Epiphany season as it does today, The 3rd Sunday after Epiphany. Paul’s words from Romans read on The 1st Sunday after Epiphany express an essential feature of Epiphany and of Christian life. This text highlights the radical meaning of Epiphany not just as teaching, not just as education, not just as healing (as signaled in the Gospel for Epiphany 3 – “speak the word only and my servant shall be healed”), but epiphany as conversion.
About the idea of conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have, perhaps, a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion, particularly as a religious term, as conveying a sense of certainty and self-righteousness: ‘I saw the light’, unlike everyone else, I suppose. Paradoxically, it seems to play into our polarized world of ideologies and advocacy agendas with their competing claims to dominance and power.
We assume that conversion means a radical break from one position to another and thus retains a sense of opposition and conflict of opinions. There is, I think, another and more compelling way to think about conversion that Paul’s story suggests. It involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another lead to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending opposed viewpoints but without simply negating them. This is especially the case in the conflict of partial goods each claiming exclusive and total control as if they were absolute.
The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal, in another sense, universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which happens to us arbitrarily, inadvertently, or externally. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind about how to think what is good and right; an ethical struggle. Hence, conversion is an on-going affair. Conversion in this sense is education, the constant transformation through “the renewing of our minds”, to use Paul’s powerful and insightful phrase.
The word ‘transformation’ is, literally, metamorphosis, a radical change in our entire outlook and attitude of mind. That can happen dramatically – sometimes – or it can happen more often gradually. Learning, after all, is about the activity of knowing in us that leads to changes in how we understand and see things. It means the willingness to see things differently, to challenge our assumptions and our attachments. This is wisdom.
The realization of the problem about our attachments is a feature of the cultures of ancient Greece, of Confucianism, of Hinduism, and Buddhism as well as a feature of the ascetic disciplines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is intrinsic to the journey of the soul as a constant series of conversions of the mind to a deeper appreciation of truth. In other words, conversion is the dynamic of the mind’s engagement with the ideas that matter and which change us in the constant conversion to truth.
The classic example is Oedipus in Sophocles’ great play. He has to learn that his attachment to his way of knowing is radically incomplete. He is driven into collision with himself without which he cannot come to realize not only the truth of Teiresias via prophetic insight but that his own problem-solving kind of reason (ratio) is only partial and dependent upon a more complete understanding, (intellectus). It means transcending the opposition and collision between two apparently competing yet partial positions. It happens in the struggle to learn and know better.
This, too, is Paul’s story. He was Saul of Tarsus, a committed Pharisee who, as he says, “persecuted this Way unto death”. The Way is the term first used to describe the early followers of Jesus. Some, like C.S. Lewis in his celebrated The Abolition of Man (1943), use this term to comment on the universal aspects of ethical teaching and life, drawing on the Tao of ancient Chinese philosophy, and extending it to the Tao of Jesus, we might say, This is the idea of natural law as an ethical way of thinking and being adumbrated or shadowed forth in other religions and philosophies.
To be clear, Paul’s conversion is not from Judaism to Christianity because the latter did not yet exist. At best it is coming into being. But his conversion is more than a rejection of Israel, more than simply repudiation. Already in the story of Saul who becomes Paul, the name change indicative of the profound shift in his understanding, there is the idea of an intellectual struggle within Judaism about the meaning of the Messiah. At issue is the question about human suffering in relation to God’s will and purpose for our humanity; a perennial question.
His conversion is really an epiphany, a break-through of the understanding. He could not reconcile the idea of the glory of the Messiah expressed in the political images of power and domination, with the image of the Crucified Christ. The break-through moment is his realization that the glory is in the suffering. There is a story, a legend, about a medieval saint, (Bernard of Clairvaux or Bonaventure?), to whom Jesus appeared in a vision of glory. But the saint said, “show me your wounds”, the marks of the crucifixion, and instantly the vision disappeared. It wasn’t Christ but a demonic deception. The point is what the Conversion of Paul is really all about, the glory in the suffering.
That changes everything and sets him upon a new path, no longer the persecutor but The Apostle to the Gentiles, a recognition of the universality of God’s will for our common humanity and not just for a privileged or chosen few. At issue is the question about human suffering in relation to God’s will and purpose for our humanity.
That question belongs very much to Israel, to the project of the Exodus and beyond, especially in terms of the vocation of Israel with respect to the Law as something universal and for all nations albeit in and through Israel; “A light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel”, as we will hear at Candlemas in Simeon’s words about Jesus. Luke and Paul both emphasize the significance of Christ within that perspective. The epiphany emphasis is on light, the light of knowing through revelation primarily. On the road to Damascus in the heat of prosecutorial zeal, there is a break-through of the understanding that contributes to the later emergence of what will become Christianity.
It happens in the form of a vision, itself a way of talking about something in the mind, something which comes to be known. The form of this vision is instructive, “a light above the brightness of the sun,” something beyond, not under the sun (Ecclesiastes). This is not unlike Plato’s great image of the sun as “the child of the Good” which is always beyond (επεκεινα) the grasp of our knowing and being and yet the principle of all and every form of knowing and being from the lowest to the highest. In this sense, conversion cannot be just about the privileging of one form of knowing over another but more about the gathering into unity and fullness of all the diversities of our being and knowing understood in their integrity and truth. Paul will develop this theme about the human community of souls as participating in the life of the Spirit. “There are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit”.
The conversion of Paul is about being self-convicted by coming into collision with oneself ethically and morally. Only so can there be a change whether it happens dramatically or gradually. Conversion in its fullest sense is continuous growth and change that is part of the project of sanctifying grace. It is about becoming more fully who we truly are in the Providence of God in and through the forms of opposition and persecution that belong to human experience, both in terms of what we do and what is done to us. It means transcending the oppositions and so being transformed. In this sense we may say that epiphany is conversion. We are changed by what we come to know through the witness of the Scriptures to Christ and our thinking upon Revelation.
Fr. David Curry
Conversion of St. Paul/Epiphany 3, Jan 25th, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/01/25/sermon-for-the-conversion-of-st-paul-third-sunday-after-epiphany/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.