I remember back in about 1970 or 1971, going with a group of young people from our church to Perry Lakes stadium for a crusade – at that time I was pretty sure I didn’t want anything to do with this church stuff, so I remember being just a bit apprehensive about the world-famous evangelist’s powers of persuasion. It was certainly powerful stuff – for a start, as big a crowd as you could muster for an Eagles vs Dockers Grand Final – we sat somewhere up near the back, looking down at the stage across a sea of heads – and the preachers were state of the art – the personal testimonies, the polished arguments and the inevitable emotional appeals all leading up to the high point of the evening – the altar call – where it seemed hundreds and hundreds of young people made their way forward to the stage, accepting the invitation to give their lives then and there to Jesus – all this, however, was lost on me – not that I didn’t feel the emotional pull or the persuasive suggestion to get up on my feet and go down the front to give my heart to Jesus – the problem was that I recognised that that was all it was – no euphoria of conversion for me that evening, no Damascus road encounter with the risen Christ.
Even in everyday speech we use the term ‘seeing the light’ as a shorthand way of talking about an experience that completely turns us around, makes us see everything from a new angle, changes our views on something completely.
It’s a story that starts – not in the first dramatic weeks after the resurrection but perhaps as early as two or three years later. Christian Jews haven’t yet decisively separated from mainstream Judaism – in fact that wouldn’t happen for decades yet - but amongst the immigrant communities, the Greek-speaking, foreign-born Jews in and around Jerusalem problems were on the way. The synagogues had always welcomed a few non-Jewish guests, Gentile ‘God fearers’ – and it was this lot, when they started to hear and respond to the Christian message, that started all the problems. If Gentiles wanted to be Christian, did they have to become Jewish first? Did they have to be circumcised, did they have to follow the Torah and obey the food laws? Arguments like these seemed to be behind the events that led up to the stoning of Stephen and the immigrant communities’ rapid exit from
What happens to Paul on the road to
So what’s the point? We know, of course, that this brilliant, argumentative, conflicted man goes on to be the most effective missionary ever of the Christian church. In fact, without Paul, it’s hard to say whether there would even be a Christian church today. Without Paul’s brilliant ability to adapt the gospel of Jesus to the pagan cultures he encountered, it’s hard to say how Christian understanding of Jesus might have developed.
But, what’s important for us right now about how
Two things, I think. Firstly, that it’s about more than just conversion. Certainly it starts with the psychological experience of finding a whole new meaning to your life, but it goes further than that. Because what we see in Paul’s experience – as in the experience of Peter in our gospel reading today – is that the transformation that comes from bumping into the risen one has got some strings attached. Not just the warm glow of having a personal Saviour but the urgency of realising you’ve got something important to do with your life. Running into the risen one is less about conversion than about call. Peter and Paul both demonstrate the reality that Christianity is not just a feel-good consumer option – not just a belief system but an encounter that’s got some implications for how you live. What brings us to faith is not persuasion but relationship – for us, 2,000 years later, the encounter with the risen Christ takes place within the context of the faith community – we see the risen Christ in and through one another – and how we live out our faith brings us into new forms of relationship with others. For Paul, of course, it meant recognising that what had seemed so important – the institutions of temple and Torah that defined the difference between Jews and pagans – were of no importance at all compared to the new community of Jews and Gentiles living together as people connected with one another because of the new life experienced in Christ.
Which brings us to the second point, which is that Paul’s new self-understanding based on encountering the risen Jesus – in a sense he sees his own life as being submerged in the death of Christ and re-awakening to a whole new way of being in the resurrection – it changes his orientation from the past to the future, from defensive and inward-looking to adventurous and outward-looking. It becomes less important for him to protect the boundaries of tradition, more important to recognise the newness of what God is doing, the welcome of God that is now extended to Gentiles as well as Jews, and to let go of anything that might stand in the way of that.
The resurrection changes everything – if we take it seriously we become people who are prepared to cross boundaries, people oriented towards the future, not the past – oriented towards new relationships and new possibilities, no longer anxious about protecting our traditions or preserving our sense of identity. It’s especially important, I think, because in a sense the church finds itself today in a similar sort of bind to the Jewish communities of Paul’s own time – living in a cultural environment that’s leaving us behind, changing so fast that we can’t build bridges any longer between our own traditions and the community around us. There’s a temptation to withdraw into defensive isolation – to feel threatened and to blame the secular world for not coming to church in droves like they used to – but I don’t think that’s the resurrection option.
The resurrection option that