Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle

Lectionary: 519

On that journey as I drew near to Damascus,
about noon a great light from the sky suddenly shone around me.
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me,
'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?'

Caravaggio's painting, "Conversion on the Way to Damascus," describes the moment the astonished Pharisee heard the Lord's voice and realized his own foolishness. According to Elizabeth Lev, the Counter-Reformation Church sponsored paintings which would portray the human fallibility of popular saints like Peter and Paul. Caravaggio (1571-1610) knew human sinfulness as much as any artist (and then some!) and took to the project with gusto. Rather than a sturdy saint with a book to represent his writing and a sword for his martyrdom, he twice described the Apostle in fallen, chaotic distress. (I have used one of the paintings in the collect on this page.) 

Saint Paul did not hesitate to speak of that incident as he announced the Good News of Jesus. His misguided zeal was as much a part of his gospel as the Lord's crucifixion and resurrection. Nor does the Church hide his misguided efforts as we celebrate this particular feast in addition to the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29. 

Just as Christianity must speak of the crucifixion of Jesus, our personal witness of the Gospel includes honest admissions of our misguided, sinful past. The gospels, beginning with Saint Mark, are very frank about Jesus's first disciples. They quarreled about which was the greatest among them; two went so far as to persuade their mother to ask Jesus to prefer them! They swore they would never abandon him hours before they fled in panic from the Garden of Gethsemane. One shed his clothing to save his skin and ran away naked! After the Lord had died, Jerusalem's wrath was spent, and calm had returned, but the Twelve still hid in the Upper Room, confused and terrified. 

And even worse, he was betrayed with a kiss by Judas Iscariot, the apostle who had been entrusted with the money. 

These memories are painful. Nor did the betrayals end with the first disciples of Jesus; every generation of the Church has experienced innumerable scandals, embarrassments, and criminal offences which sabotage our mission. They occur within the highest levels of the Church and within the intimate privacy of the poorest homes. 

But the Gospel is preached nonetheless and every generation sees new disciples raised apparently from these very stones. For, as the poet Alexander Pope said, "Hope springs eternal within the human breast / Man never is, but always to be blest." 

If we argue that the beauty and majesty of creation demonstrates the superabundant authority of God, we can also say that the mercy each of us have found in our lives -- his healing forgiveness of our sins and his benevolent, long-suffering patience -- prove beyond all doubt the Lord's astonishing goodness. That truth is all the more convincing when we attest to it before others.