The road to Damascus
Paul's conversion
Saul has papers. Official letters from the high priest authorizing him to travel to Damascus, find anyone belonging to the Way — men or women — and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. He is not freelancing. He is the authorized instrument of institutional religion doing what institutional religion does when it feels threatened.
He is almost there. Damascus is close. And then the road disappears in light.
Not sunrise. Not a torch. A light from heaven, brighter than the midday sun, so intense that Saul falls to the ground. And a voice: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
Note the pronoun. Not my people. Not my followers. Me. Jesus identifies himself completely with the people Saul has been dragging from their homes and throwing into prison. Every chain was on him. Every cell was his.
Saul asks who is speaking. The answer undoes everything he has built his life on: I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
The man he has been hunting is not dead. The execution did not work. The tomb did not hold. And he is not angry — at least not in the way Saul expects. The voice that knocks him to the ground also gives him instructions. Tells him to go into the city. Tells him he will be told what to do.
Saul gets up. Opens his eyes. And cannot see.
The most dangerous man in the early church stands blind in the road to Damascus, and everything he thought he knew is gone.
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what to do.”
— Jesus to Saul, Acts 9:5–6
“As he traveled, it happened that he got close to Damascus, and suddenly a light from the sky shone around him. He fell on the earth, and heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Jesus didn't ask Saul to evaluate the evidence and make a considered decision. He knocked him off his horse in the middle of the road.
Some conversions are quiet. Some are violent. The God of the Bible seems entirely unconcerned with which kind yours was, as long as you end up on your feet, moving toward the city, waiting to be told what to do next.
What Saul lost on that road — his certainty, his credentials, his entire framework for understanding God — turned out to be the thing that was keeping him from God.
Sometimes the most merciful thing that can happen to a person is to be left blind in the road with nothing left to hold onto.