Conversion of Paul. Conversion of All?

I’m sorry that this is a week late onto the website, but am confident that many of my parishioners do manage to live a perfectly productive life without observing January 25th as the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, which celebrates his transformation from being Saul the persecutor of Jesus-followers into Paul the intrepid missionary traveller, inveterate Letter-writer, and principal architect of Christian theology.



This festival is categorically not about his abandoning one religion and embracing another. Paul did not take on a new religion so much as come to a fuller understanding of his old one. Specifically, he came to accept that God’s glory could be seen in the face of Jesus Christ (II Corinthians 4.6) – or as we might paraphrase it, he began to see that the essence of all reality was to be found in the life and person of this particular Galilean; and that the Cross of Christ (far from being the scandalous epitome of human failure and divine abandonment) was in fact the means of God’s carrying out the Rescue and Renewal of Humanity promised throughout the Hebrew Bible. (And we will have more to say about that during Lent.)



Paul’s encounter with Christ on the now famous Road to Damascus is told in chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles. We modern readers are naturally unwilling to accept stories of visions and supernatural run-ins with metaphysical entities, and we will need to read through our chosen interpreting lens. One authority, Professor Tom Wright, suggests that Paul, as he trotted along the highway under the scorching sun, might have been meditating on another vision of God, given to the eponymous prophet in Ezekiel chapter 1, in which a human being is divinely enthroned, illumined all around by fiery-bright lights and gleaming amber. When Paul raises his head and opens his eyes, he is met with the life-changing conviction that the hard shell of his certainty has been shattered by the very Christ he is travelling to Damascus to eradicate. Just like Ezekiel, Paul falls to the ground, is then raised up, filled with the Holy Spirit, and commissioned to preach the word of God.



The reason Paul is able to make this dramatic change in his thinking is that (as Cardinal Radcliffe says, quoting John Le Carré), Paul was a fanatic, and ‘a fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt’. I do wonder, as the world waltzes ever more wildly towards destruction, whether people who as yet claim no religious faith are beginning to suspect that there might be something in religion after all, especially as the certainties of societies built on liberal democratic capitalism seem to be slipping from us at an alarming rate. Perhaps their secret doubts are beginning to show. Perhaps they are starting to wonder whether a fiercely bold and selfless life of sacrificial love, as shown by Christ and imitated by Paul, might be needed increasingly as the world is led by violent and vainglorious leaders into a situation in which wealth, wellbeing and security are only for the few; with the rest of us abandoned to poverty, sickness and fear.



It is as we recognise this as our present trajectory that ‘Conversions’ like St Paul’s become ever more urgently challenging. If Christ really is who Paul says he is, then perhaps the time is coming when none of us can afford to ignore his claims a moment longer.



[Watch Cardinal Radcliffe's sermon on Paul at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWiaZmpW-5I]