The lectionary reading for Easter 3 in Year C is Acts 9, the so-called conversion of Saul/Paul. These readings from Acts are prioritized, so that we are encouraged to preach from them in this season (despite it coming before Pentecost!).
Is it right to talk about Paul being ‘converted’? What does this change involve—what is Paul turning from and turning to? Is he still a Jew?
And is this episode recorded by Luke merely for historical interest—or is there any sense in which this should be read as setting expectations for our own experience, either as a ‘Paul’ ourselves or as an ‘Ananias’?
The gospel reading for the week is John 21, the second miraculous catch of fish. You can find written commentary on it here, and the video discussion of the whole passage here.
On Similarities
You could see these three days of blindness and not eating like a baby in the womb, with him being born again through prayer and baptism. And, although this is not something that I had thought of previously, perhaps there are also parallels to be drawn between this period of three days and the time Jesus spent in the tomb.
In his conversion experience Saul died completely to the person he was previously, he entered either the tomb or the womb of blindness, as you prefer, and then he was born again or perhaps resurrected to a new life in Christ.
So the conversion of Paul is a wonderful example of the fact that in the economy of God no one is beyond redemption and conversion.
Those on the way to Emmaus were not struck down in a flash of light but they travelled beside him, or rather Christ travelled alongside them, until they were ready to see him in the breaking of the bread
Those two disciples had already been followers of Christ before the crucifixion, but they had to meet him again on the road in order to turn around and become his followers once more. They undertook a metanoia – a turning around, a change of heart.
So whilst we celebrate the conversion of Saul of Tarsus into Saint Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles we should not think of the moment of conversion for ourselves or for anybody else as being the end of the road – whether the road to Damascus or to Emmaus. Rather, as Paul himself discovered, it is only the start of a much greater and even more remarkable journey which lasts our whole lifetime and beyond and in which our repentance, our conversion and our submission to God should be a moment by moment experience which leads us from one degree of glory to another.
revpaulwhite.com/sermons-2015-yr-b/the-conversion-of-paul/
Many are looking for “life” everyone wants/needs to get a life.
Jesus offers that Life.Paul says of This Life following his conversion
Philippians 3:8-14
….I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
The persecution of the Church was but a continuation of the persecution of Jesus. Indeed, as Paul says to Timothy “2 Tim 3:12 Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.
Persecution filters out bad apples Mat 13:21 & Mark 4:17
Paul was in Damascus, then Arabia, and back in Damascus before traveling to meet the Apostles for the first time.
Like Jesus after his trials in the Wilderness he began preaching /declaring.For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus [not the Apostles]. 20 And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”
He then went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. 18 Then after three years.
Immediately after his conversion, he did not go to Jerusalem or consult with the apostles there. [Of course there were no theologians around for Paul}
Was Paul led of the Spirit into the wilderness?
Perhaps Paul was encouraged to cash in on his celebrity status straight away and return to Jerusalem. If only celebrity converts were encouraged nowadays to retire into obscurity before starting a new life?
On the wilderness uses by God.
Deut 8:2 And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.
Deut 8:15 Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint;
Deut 8:16 Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end;
2 Cor 8:8 I speak not by commandment, but by occasion of the forwardness of others, and to prove the sincerity of your love.
Some testings and trials are allowed by God to try/prove what is in your heart whether you will worship Him or not.
Saul persecuted both men and women, presumably because both men and women were influential in the church.
We tend to say that Saul was converted on the road to Damascus, but wouldn’t he have said that his conversion was when the scales fell from his eyes in Damascus? That would fit well with Gal 1:17, where Paul says, “I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus”. Here Paul seems to be saying that his calling/conversion was in Damascus.
I appreciate the way Tom Wright partly explains what was going on here in Saul’s Damascus road experience. As I read him, he suggests Saul was a ‘zealous’ Jew who saw persecution of Jesus-followers as a perfectly valid, God-given task. His ‘conversion’ on the Damascus road was during a dream/prayer while he was walking and meditating on the throne room scene in Ezekiel 1. Very unexpectedly the one on the throne in dazzling light who spoke to him was Jesus.
Speculative, but certainly possible. And it gives us an interesting back-story.
If you mean Saul experienced Jesus in a dream, then that doesnt fit with the description in Acts. It was clearly much more than that. And Paul himself compares his own encounter with that of the original disciples whom Jesus met following his resurrection.
Ah John, Theologians! Tom Wright is an amazing man, he actually knows what Paul was thinking when Jesus appeared to him, you could not make it up, but Tom can, very few calories here methinks.
Glad to know Alan, that unlike everyone else you are able to read the Bible absolutely ‘straight’ without any imagination (that is, without context) at all 🙂
Bruce Symons – Alan’s comment was reasonable in the context of an on-going discussion (over several threads) – and one wouldn’t really expect him to expand it into a long essay to make it bullet-proof against the sort of snide and facetious remarks that you have posted.
I have to ask you one question: when you look at Christ’s death on the cross – do you see Him picking up the wages for your personal sin? And if so, do you inwardly accept that you deserved these wages? If you say ‘yes’ to both of these, then on this basis, do you ‘believe in Him’, that He has paid the price for your sin, so that you are ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven – and that you have entered into Life (through Him)?
You see, at the heart of it, faith is a moral issue – and not an intellectual issue.
As I indicated, what I read of NT Wright, he seems to be bypassing the Offence of the Cross (i.e. that we are sinners, each and every one of us deserving of the death that Christ died). Instead, he seems to be working on the ‘Covenant Community’ stuff, whereby ‘community’ is emphasised (*without* stating ‘community of forgiven sinners’) and the love of Jesus is emphasised (without stating ‘… which he expressed by picking up the wages for our sin in his death on the cross).
People who are extremely good at linguistics and grammar might tell me that NT Wright’s New Perspective on Romans does not diminish the Offence of the Cross; his view of covenant community really is a community of ‘forgiven sinners’ (emphasis on both words), but I have seen how New Perspective has been taken – and how it has been leapt on by church leaders to minimise and airbrush out the offence of the cross.
I have also read enough of it to understand that NT Wright was, at the very least, intelligent enough to understand that his writing could be taken in this way.
From my interactions with Alan, I believe that he has understood the Offence of the Cross. He has also understood that faith is a moral issue and not and intellectual issue – and that theologians, instead of doing what they are supposed to be doing (which is to clarify the moral issue), are working hard at obscuring the offence of the cross – so that you can get nice and close to Jesus, feel his Love and the fellowship of a nice cosy community – without inwardly accepting the extent of the radical evil within you, your own sinfulness – and that Christ’s crucifixion was necessary for you personally.
Alan – yes – note how N.T. Wright’s exegesis conveniently airbrushes out the ‘it is hard for you to kick against the goads’ verse and is in line with N.T. Wright’s happy ‘covenant community’ theology.
These theologians aren’t simply benign; they can be positively harmful – and destroy faith. When I had newly arrived in one town (in Sweden), I looked around for the church that was supposed to be most serious about Scripture. Very quickly, it seemed to me that the church had very serious problems; ‘conviction of sin’ (i.e. inward acceptance that Christ picked up the wages for my personal sin in the crucifixion – the crucifixion is what my personal sins warrant) was absent; instead, they were concentrating on a nice community feeling.
It wasn’t too long before I discovered that those running the show had picked up NT Wright’s ‘New Perspective on Romans’ – and used the guff about ‘covenant community’ as justification for junking the the central gospel message of sin and redemption.
I didn’t spend very long on this book – just enough to discover that it could provide them with sufficient background to junk the central gospel message, exchange the truth for a lie, and go down the God-forsaken road that they were on.
This was over 20 years ago – and I have tried to forget it – but I do remember than NT Wright started out by stating that Romans 1:16-17 was not the theme of the letter – to which I thought to myself – OK – just as long as he doesn’t diminish the importance of these verses – and then he did.
So what theologians come out with does have consequences – and the consequence here, with the emphasis on the ‘covenant community’ was that people searching, who might have had an interest in clear and plain biblical truth, were being sucked into the supposedly ‘serious’ church, the one being run by intellectuals who had read some books (and knew how to sound serious). They were being brought to some sort of faith, but it wasn’t the saving faith of Scripture.
I think youre being a little harsh towards Wright. See https://www.ntwrightonline.org/tracing-atonement-through-the-story-of-scripture/
PC1 – well, the goons running the ‘synthetic gospel’ church I referred to did use NT Wright’s ‘New Perspective on Romans’ as justification (!) for their false teaching. Peace with God, through membership of a ‘covenant community’ (in which one had to be wholly immersed) – without the member inwardly accepting that the crucifixion was what his own sins deserved – the wages due to him personally that Christ picked up on his behalf in the crucifixion. This is a false peace with God that bypasses Christ as Mediator – there is no salvation for those who follow this false gospel.
Of course, NT Wright wrote his ‘New Perspective on Romans’ in a reasonably clever way so that if you try pinning him down on something that looks false, he’s probably covered himself sufficiently that he can argue ‘no that’s not what I meant at all’.
But if NT Wright really is a man of faith, then I wonder what he thinks of his works being used in this way? If I were him, I would be approaching God in fear and trembling with 1 Corinthians 3:15 in the forefront of my mind.
The theology of the wilderness is fascinating. We hear of people experiencing “the wilderness years/times”
The significance of the wilderness has many aspects but God says
that He will/can make the desert blossom as a rose, turn it into a flourishing garden; it certainly seems to be so in Paul’s case and in our lives also
Go large, see //feedingonchrist.org/biblical-theology-wilderness/
Very fruitful. Shalom.
There may be echoes of the plagues, lighting and total darkness brought on as a result of persecuting God’s people as so that they might worship Him. Unlike Pharaoh, though prideful, Saul was humbled renamed Paul, and turned to worship God, in the risen Jesus.