Today we celebrate the Conversion of St Paul. This festival actually falls on the 25th of January, but we have brought it forward a day to this Sunday.
For many Christians, Paul is something of a closed book. We may recognize the story we have just heard of Paul's blinding and life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ. We may also recognize some of Paul's more famous passages, such as the description in 1 Corinthians 13 of love (or charity in the Authorised Version) that is read at countless weddings. But the reality is that Paul can be tough to get into. He hardly ever tells a story; he engages in rather complicated arguments; and his tone is sometimes a little harsh.
So if you've found Paul a bit impenetrable, you may be comforted to know that it's not just you. In fact the second letter of Peter (3:15-16), within the New Testament itself, acknowledges that in the letters of 'our beloved brother Paul' there are things that are 'hard to understand'. But those who make the effort to grasp Paul's message and to open their hearts to it have often experienced its transforming impact on their lives. It's striking how many great Christian leaders and thinkers (such as St Augustine, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth) have testified to a turning-point in their lives that came through reading Romans, the most influential of all Paul's letters.
If I had to summarize Paul's message in one word, it would be 'grace'. The greeting at the start of all his letters is some form of the phrase: 'Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ'. 'Grace' is Paul's first word, and it is also the theme running like a gold thread through his writings, the clue to understanding God and our relationship to God. But what did Paul mean by 'grace'? He didn't mean 'elegance'; he didn't even mean a prayer before eating a meal; grace, for Paul, means God's love for us which comes before any response we might make to God, even before any thought we might have about God. And for Paul the love of God is bound up with Jesus and what we see of God in him. So God's grace is about God coming to us in Jesus, in humble and patient love, in suffering love, when we do not deserve it, when we are not interested in it, when we might even be actively hostile and resistant to the very thought of God and the name of Jesus.
Grace was the heart of Paul's message, and we can see why. The grace of God in Jesus Christ was imprinted on Paul's heart and mind on the Damascus Road, and in the events that followed, as described in our second reading today. When this story begins Paul (or Saul, another of his names, by which he is known in this story) loathes the very name of Jesus. When the early Christian movement began and the apostles proclaimed that God had raised the crucifed Jesus from the dead and that he was the true Messiah of Israel, Paul was among those who opposed this new thing and saw it as a betrayal of the Jewish people and blasphemy against God. So Paul is bitterly hostile to the followers of Jesus. Recently he was standing by, approving, as a crowd murdered Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Now Paul is on the way from Jerusalem to Damascus to round up Christian disciples and throw them in prison.
But Jesus is seeking Paul out, and finds him, meeting him powerfully at the height of Paul's furious opposition to him. There is a strong note of rebuke in the words of Jesus: 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?' This encounter is hardly a comfortable moment: Paul is blinded, disorientated; his life is completely overturned, his direction reversed. But Paul would soon understand that within this shattering experience, this 'no' from Jesus Christ, stopping Paul in his tracks, condemning his present way of life, within this 'no' the deeper reality is the gracious, forgiving 'yes' of Jesus Christ, turning Paul round, freeing him, opening his eyes, opening him up to a new life. That is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. And Paul's experience of this grace is the foundation on which the rest of his life is built.
Paul also learnt another important lesson on the Damascus Road. Jesus doesn't ask him 'Why are you persecuting my disciples?' but 'Why are you persecuting me?' In persecuting the disciples, the Church, Paul is persecuting Jesus himself. This realization of the presence – and the suffering – of Jesus in the Church became fundamental to Paul; in his letters he will often tell the Christians he addresses that they are 'the body of Christ'. Jesus Christ is identified with his people as a person is identified with his or her body. So in encountering Jesus and coming into relationship with him, Paul was also encountering the Church, the community of Christians, and, whether he wanted this or not, he was now also in relationship with them. Soon Ananias, a disciple in Damascus, a member of the Church, the body of Christ, will come to Paul to underline this truth. Jesus does not give himself to us as isolated individuals but as members of his people, the body of Christ.
Of course Paul knew that he had encountered Jesus in a unique way, which was perhaps necessary to turn him round and launch him on his unique mission. Other people wouldn't come to believe in Jesus in the same dramatic way. Paul knew that. But in his Damascus Road experience there was an underlying pattern relevant to all people. For us, as for Paul, it's not a case of us seeking God in our goodness or holiness, but of God seeking us out in grace. As Helen said last week, everything begins with God: God knows, God loves, God calls us before we begin to know, love and respond to God. This is the way grace works.
And there's a very important way in which Paul's experience of grace is reinforced. As he lies in bed, overwhelmed by what has happened, he is visited by Ananias. Ananias is one of the Christians Paul was coming to round up and stick in prison. Imagine what this must have been like for Paul: what could he expect from the people he was treating so harshly? But Ananias calls him 'Brother Saul', lays hands on him, prays for him, and heals him. In a gentler way, this must have been almost as significant for Paul as his dramatic encounter with Jesus. Just as the Jesus whom Paul despised came to him to establish a new relationship of love, so a Christian – one of those Paul had regarded as scum – embraces Paul as his brother. This too was grace, and it showed Paul that God generally makes his grace known in the world not through zapping people directly, but by sending people like Ananias, people prepared to take the risk (at times a very frightening risk) to love in a Christlike way, so that God's grace is made real, embodied for other people.
So Paul experienced grace, both in his encounter with Jesus, and in his meeting with Ananias. And this happens to Paul not in the end for his own good - though it certainly is for his own good - but rather for the good of others. When Ananias is reluctant to go to Paul, the Lord says to him: 'Go, for [Paul] is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.' The grace of God has come to Paul for a wider purpose; Paul is to make known the name of Jesus Christ among all people. He is to be an instrument, a channel, with God working through him to bring his grace to other people. And the pattern for Paul, and for all of us as we seek to let our lives be shaped by the grace of God, will be the life of Christ himself, who was the suffering servant of God.
So, to conclude, what would Paul want to say to us today?
He would say what he always said: 'Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ'. He would want us to share in his experience of grace (and the peace which it brings), the experience which began so dramatically on the Damascus Road and continued in a different way through the behaviour of Ananias. Paul would want us to know that although we are hostile, disobedient, indifferent to God, God reaches out to us in grace in many ways. We hear the message of God's grace in the words of Scripture, and in the unfolding of God's word through Bible studies, through lectio divina, even sometimes through sermons. It's good also to remember at this time when we cannot celebrate the eucharist together that another means of grace is the sacramental bread and wine, the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus. We long for the day when we can again celebrate the grace of God as we share in the bread of life and cup of salvation. We also know God's grace through the love of others, as Paul did through Ananias, and we pray that we may be channels of God's grace to others. As St John writes: 'Nobody has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.' (1 John 4:12)
On this day when we thank God for St Paul, he would want for each of us and for us as a church that we should know ourselves to be embraced by God's grace, and for that grace to be shaping our life as a community. But Paul would also prompt us to be outward-looking, to be concerned for those who do not share in this fellowship; for those who might think themselves unworthy of any grace; for those who have never heard of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, or who might long ago have heard those words but have forgotten them or have come to look down down on them as irrelevant or childish, or as totally discredited by the shameful failures of the Church. Paul would have a concern for them all; and he would encourage us to ask ourselves how, day by day, we might more fully share with those around us the reality of the grace of God in our Lord Jesus Christ.
David Marshall