On the Road to Damascus Acts 9:1-31 by William Klock When I was a sophomore in University I took the first of several art history courses, where I discovered—I should say it was more like I was confronted by—Caravaggio’s famous painting of the conversion of St. Paul: Paul fallen from his horse, hands covering his face, his servants scrambling to figure out what’s going on and to help him, everything in darkness—except Paul, bathed in heavenly light. I’d read Act 9 who knows how many times before then. But seeing Caravaggio’s interpretation of that scene suddenly piqued my curiosity—made me wonder what really happened to Paul that day, what did he actually see, and why did it make such a powerful change in him. Paul, that day, became for me—I suppose after Jesus—the most intriguing character in the Bible and I wanted to figure him out, to understand him—I think, because I wanted a faith of my own like Paul’s, because I wanted to know the same kind of transformation, the same kind of passion, that Paul had after meeting the risen Messiah. And one of the things I came to realise is that Paul’s passion, his zeal didn’t start when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Actually, let’s call him “Saul” for now, because that’s where he’s at in Acts 9. Saul’s zeal was already there: for the God of Israel, for righteousness and justice, for the world to be set to rights. He truly hoped in the God of Israel, whom he knew to be good, and just, and faithful to the promises he’d made to his people. That was what it meant to be a Pharisee. Paul knew that his people had sinned, they had been unfaithful, they had engaged in idolatry. They had ceased to be a holy people, so the Lord departed from them. His presence—the cloud of glory—departed from the temple and then the people were conquered and exiled to Babylon. “You want to worship pagan gods,” the Lord was basically saying, “Fine, you can spend a few decades in Babylon living with the pagans and their gods and see how it works out for you.” And the people of Judah learned the lesson. They set aside their idols, they embraced the torah, and they longed for an end to their exile—they longed for the return of God’s presence. And they became a people of hopeful longing. It’s funny how experiencing God’s discipline so often gives us more hope, because it just underscores all the more his faithfulness—to do what he said, even if it’s making good on his promise of judgement. They knew his promises of restoration if they repented were just as true. And in the meantime, with no temple and with no visible manifestation of the presence of God, they did the best they could. They devoted themselves—the Pharisees more than others—but they devoted themselves to torah, to holiness. If they couldn’t go to the temple, they would become like the temple themselves—a holy people waiting for God to return to them. And when they returned to Judaea and rebuilt the temple and the Lord still did not return, the empty temple—all the more—became the symbol for their longing. And missing his presence, they would meditate on the very idea of the Lord’s presence. If they dared—and at least the later rabbis urged caution, based on the Lord’s warning to Moses that “no one may see my face and live”—but if they dared, some would meditate on Ezekiel’s weird and mysterious vision of the Lord in his heavenly chariot—not looking for some personal mystical experience, but out of a hope and a longing for the day when the Lord would return, when heaven earth, so long sundered by our sin, would be brought back together, for the day when the Lord’s people would once again live in his glorious presence. It was a longing borne of the absence of the temple and of God’s presence there. It was this passionate longing for the Lord’s return that fuelled the zeal of men like Saul of Tarsus. This zealous young Pharisee, steeped in Israel’s scriptures and Israel’s story, with a passion for the Lord and a longing to see his return. And in his mind, if anything was going to hinder the Lord’s return to his people, it was the new Jesus movement, these people who blasphemously believed in a crucified Messiah. It had to be stamped out. And so Saul supervised the stoning of Stephen. And now, as we get into Acts 9 [page 1090 in the pew Bibles) we find that he’s one of the chief orchestrators of the persecution of the early church. Luke writes: “Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out threats and murder on the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and requested from him letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that he could find people who belonged to the Way, men and women alike, tie them up, and bring them back to Jerusalem.” And along the way, I think that Paul was probably meditating. Luke doesn’t fill in these kinds of details, but between his telling of the story here and Paul’s telling it later in his epistles, there are parallels with the accounts we have of Jews engaging in this practise of meditating on Ezekiel’s vision. Paul was a man of faith, a man of hope, a man who knew that the Lord is faithful to his promises. And so he knew the Lord would return to his people and I think Paul lived out that hope in the present by just this sort of meditation on scripture. Up and down with the rhythmic movement of what was probably a donkey—there are some stunning parallels here with Balaam even if this donkey never says a word—the hot sun beating down on him. Breathe in. Breathe out. Recall Ezekiel. Eyes closed, Paul pictures as best he could the four bizarre living creates, all wings and eyes, and the chariot wheels, somehow wheels within wheel all going different directions. He concentrated and mentally looked upward from the wheels to the crystal chariot itself, and then to the throne where Ezekial wrote that he had seen a figure not unlike a human, but gleaming with holy fire. I expect Paul had meditated like this before. Maybe it had never come to much. Just try it yourself. Try to visualise what Ezekiel describes. Good luck making sense of it. Or maybe Paul had done this many times before and had really been met by the Lord, the God of Israel through this kind of meditation. But this time was different. Luke goes on: “While he was on the journey, and was getting near to Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. He fell on the ground and heard a voice speaking to him. “Saul, Saul!” said the voice. “Why are you persecuting me?” “Who are you, Lord?” he asked. “I am Jesus,” he said, “and you are persecuting me. But get up and go into the city, and it will be told you what you have to do.” Saul, in his mind’s eye looks up: angels, wheels, chariot, throne—and then the figure on the throne—to his shock—is Jesus, the crucified Messiah, now risen from the dead and here. And Paul tries to tear himself away. No! He tries to open his eyes to escape the vision and realises that his eyes are already open. This isn’t a vision. It’s not in his head. It’s real. It’s really Jesus. And the sight is too much to bear—in so many ways. He throws up his hands as Caravaggio imagined him doing, as—stunned—he loses his balance and topples off his donkey. And the vision of glory is still there. Where Paul expected to see the God of Israel, there was Jesus and Jesus was asking, “Why are you persecuting me?” And Paul’s thinking that this just can’t be. “Who are you?” he asks, even though he already knows. And the figure of glory confirms it, “I’m Jesus.” And he might as well have said at the same time, “I’m the God of Israel, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” And again, “Why are you persecuting me?” And Paul, stunned, his whole world being rearranged and reinterpreted faster than he can take it in, he says nothing as Jesus tells him simply to go to Damascus and to wait. Luke says in verse 7: “The men who were traveling with Saul stood speechless. They heard the voice but couldn’t see anybody. And Saul, he been struck absolutely blind by the vision. So they led him by the hand and took him to Damascus. He went for three days, being unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.” I expect the gears in Saul’s mind were spinning away like never before during those three days. This man of prayer was suddenly praying like never before. If Jesus was alive, it meant he really was Israel’s Messiah. It meant that the Lord, in him, had fulfilled already the very promises that Saul so longed to see fulfilled. It meant that the Lord, in Jesus, had returned to his people. It meant that God’s new world had already begun. Paul, intelligent and deeply steeped in Israel’s scriptures, began the long, slow process of rethinking everything he knew in light of Jesus. Paul knew—really knew the story, the scriptures. I try to steep myself in those same scriptures and I’m like a watered down Americano compared to Saul. Saul was a dark, black, espresso—the kind your spoon will stand up in. That’s how steeped he was in God’s word. It wasn’t so much a “conversion” he experienced as it was a reorientation. The temple, the presence of the Lord, the place where heaven and earth meet, had finally come to Saul. And, too, those words of Jesus: “You’re persecuting me.” It meant that these people he’d been dragging off to prison, they were Jesus’ people, his covenant family, even in some way an extension of himself. God’s promises to Abraham and to Moses and to David, the words of the Prophets, it all spent three days spinning through Saul’s mind as he reevaluated everything in light of Jesus.
