Our Lady of the Mountains - Stanton at P.O. Box 727-1093 East College Ave., Stanton, KY 40380 US - St. Paul: All Paul's Teachings Traceable to His Encounter with the Risen Christ

by the Most Rev. Ronald W. Gainer

As we, the church, begin our annual pilgrimage of conversion from Ash Wednesday to Easter, it would be helpful for us to reflect in this article on the most famous event in the life of Paul the Apostle, his conversion outside the city of Damascus. This event was considered so important by St. Luke that he described it at three different places in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9;22;26). Reflecting on this decisive, transforming moment in the life of St. Paul can help us with the challenge of our on-going conversion, especially in the season of Lent.

The story of Paul’s conversion and call begins by depicting him as a man of considerable power, in control, with authority over the lives of others. He is on fire with a passion to eliminate his fellow Jews who have begun to follow “The Way.” Paul has a mystical experience. He’s thrown to the ground and a light from heaven dims his vision. He hears a voice ask him, “Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?” He has no idea who the speaker is and so he asks and is told, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” Then the voice tells him, “Get up and enter the city and you will be told what you are to do.” Paul is reduced to helplessness. He is blind, needs to be led by the hand and now, no longer in control, he is going to be told what he has to do.

Paul’s physical blindness symbolizes a deeper, more radical blindness. He had been blind to the truth, and now he needed to see everything in a new way, to see the truth that is Christ. The Lord sends Ananias, a Christian in Damascus, to minister to Paul. He asks for baptism and at once the eyes of his body and his soul are opened to Christ’s light and truth.

This mystical experience marks a radical change in Paul’s life. He will write in his letters that everything that he cherished, all that he valued prior to his encounter with the Risen Jesus, became as nothing to him. From that moment on, he would live for Christ and for Christ alone.

This encounter with Christ became the guarantee of Paul’s credentials as an Apostle. The original twelve had walked with Jesus during his public ministry and eleven of them encountered the Risen Christ after Easter. This moment for Paul constituted his call as an Apostle and throughout his ministry he would defend his authenticity has an Apostle because of this moment. In our spiritual lives, conversion implies that we have had some new experience of God’s love and grace, and we reason forward to accept a needed change in our life. With Paul it was the opposite that actually happened. As a Pharisaic Jew, Paul believed in the resurrection of the body at the end of time. He had this mystical experience of someone who had been raised from the dead and then began a process of reflection. He experienced Jesus alive whom he knew to have been crucified and buried, but now he is a living person. This experience could only be possible if Jesus had been raised from the dead. Jesus’ death, then, Paul reasoned was not just a miscarriage of justice, the pattern that so many righteous prophets experienced in Israel’s history, but his death had a unique, divine purpose. This was the beginning of the expected New Creation. Through this death and resurrection God accomplished the forgiveness of sins and restored humanity’s right relationship with Himself. This mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus and only this mystery brings a right relationship with God. This is the way that God has dealt with the misery of humanity’s sin. I am convinced that all of Paul’s teachings found in his letters and, indeed, his sermons as narrated by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles can all be traced to this dramatic, transformative experience when Paul encountered the Risen Christ on Damascus road. A great Pauline theme is the unity of all the baptized in the Body of Christ. This image and this truth must have been driven home to Paul by the very words he heard in his encounter with the Risen Jesus. Our Lord did not ask Paul why he was persecuting Christ’s followers or why he was persecuting his disciples but rather why he was persecuting Christ himself. From this Paul understood that Jesus has joined himself inseparably to the baptized. Our unity with Christ in his Body, the church, is his gift to us and whenever Paul learned of anything in the churches that threatened or contradicted that unity, he wrote to them, instructing what needed to be done as a correction. Paul’s letters urge us to treasure this gift and do all that we can to preserve and foster our oneness in Christ.

Lent is the time to hasten our on-going conversion to Christ. While we ponder this mystical experience of Saint Paul, we are not free to sit around waiting for lightning to strike us but rather we need to respond to all of God’s initiatives in an openness to His grace of God, allowing God to help us see in new ways the clarity of His truth. In the church God gives us to each other, to guide each other, to help each other see more clearly so that at Lent’s end when we celebrate the great events of Easter our encounter with the Risen Christ will also be life changing and fruitful.