Conversion of St. Paul

THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

“Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision; but shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.”—Acts xxvi. 19, 20.

Was this the only effect of the vision which St. Paul saw on his way to Damascus? If he had said that after that journey he began to defend the faith of Jesus Christ in Damascus, Jerusalem, and throughout the coasts of Judea, and then among the Gentiles, we might have understood that a great change was wrought in him. But was it a change, that he called his countrymen to repent? was it a change, that he thought Gentiles had a still greater need of repentance than they? These questions are closely connected with those which I have been considering since the Epiphany. They are directly suggested by the Festival of this day. They concern the force of the word Conversion, and all the acts and effects which have been associated with that word, from St. Paul’s days to our own.

A careful reader of the Old Scriptures cannot have doubted that Jews might be urged to repentance. All the Prophets must have mistaken their function if the children of the Covenant were exempt from that necessity. In every discourse and song they had exhorted the people to turn to Him from Whom they had deeply revolted. Saul, the pupil of Gamaliel, could not suppose that there was less occasion for such appeals in his own day than in any former days. No Rabbinical prejudice, no fervent Jewish conviction, will have tempted him to that opinion. Why were they the slaves of Rome, if the nation were in its true state? Why were multitudes ignorant of the Law, and living like heathens? Why was this sect of the Nazarenes making such progress? All the signs of the times showed that there was something very wrong, which needed to be set right. He will have dwelt upon the degeneracy of Israelites, who were forgetting the barrier which separated them from the world, who could tolerate a sect which, if its doctrines were pushed to their consequences, might destroy that barrier altogether. To bid Israelites repent of this degeneracy was natural and desirable. Was it not one of the sins of the Nazarenes, that they hindered publicans and sinners from repenting, by mixing with them and telling them that the highest blessings were designed for them? He would have reminded them that the punishments of a future world were in store for them. When the new teachers pretended to speak of repentance, they joined it with a strange and contradictory announcement, that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

But before Saul visited Jerusalem, he must have conversed with Greeks in Cilicia; he must have known something of the moral debasement which was connected with their worship; he must have felt how monstrously that worship was opposed to all that he as a son of Abraham had been taught to revere. Might he not conjure those with whom he traded or conversed, to leave their abominations? Might he not tell them that they would be admitted to join the pure services of the Temple at Jerusalem? To such a reformation I cannot doubt that the zealous young Hebrew will have invited many an inhabitant of Tarsus; he may have promised himself that when he was better instructed in the wisdom of the Elders, he should be able to press it with greater effect upon greater numbers. He might have preached then, it should seem, repentance and turning to God to all those who were comprehended in the words of this passage, even while he was persecuting to the death those that believed on the name of Jesus Christ.

And yet, if St. Paul had changed this language for the phrases which would have squared better with our notions of his conversion, I do not think he would have been equally consistent with himself. If he had told Agrippa that he was changed from a Jew into a Christian, he would have belied his own repeated assertion, that he was maintaining his position as a child of Abraham, that he was fulfilling the work of a child of Abraham when he was preaching the Gospel. If he had said that he was brought by the light from Heaven to acknowledge the mission of Jesus Christ, which he had before denied, he must have explained what he meant by the mission of Jesus Christ, and then, as I have endeavoured to show you lately, he must have described Him as the Image of the Invisible God, and as sent to show forth that image to men. Perhaps that account of his teaching may help us to understand this account of his conversion, and the result of it.

I apprehend that Saul of Tarsus may have counted it lawful, desirable, meritorious, to bid Jews or Gentiles repent; but that repentance will not have meant for him what it meant for the Prophets. It will not have meant “turning to God.” How much Jews should repent, who did belong to the Covenant; how much Gentiles should repent, who did not belong to it; what the signs and processes of repentance in each case ought to be; what particular crimes in either case demanded a greater repentance, or made repentance impossible; what the respective effects of it would be, when it was satisfactorily performed upon the one class or the other,—upon all these points, I doubt not, he had taken conscientious pains to inform himself, and had arrived at definite conclusions. But if the thought ever presented itself to him, “This expression, turning to God, is the explanation of repentance, not repentance of it,” what a number of strange and troublesome doubts were at once suggested! Who is to turn? By what agency or influence is the turning to be effected? And, lastly—darkest thought of all—to whom is Jew or Gentile to turn? Where is the Being he is to meet? How can they meet? Was it not wise, is it not safe, to muffle up such awful inquiries, which may lead one knows not whither? Were not the doctrines of repentance a harmless substitute for them? Saul might lose himself in controversies respecting them, without ever coming face to face with Him, Whose presence made Moses exceedingly tremble and quake.

If Saul could always have been at the feet of Gamaliel, always among the Rabbis, this prudent course might have been always possible for him. But he was not a zealot. Books were not enough for him. He must act. The Law was sacred. Then the enemies of the Law must be put down. The Covenant with Abraham must be upheld. Then how ought a child of it to deal with those who were evidently undermining it? Saul cannot only talk of Repentance; he must go forth to make evil men repent by letters of the High Priests, by the sword and the prison, since these seemed the most straightforward and natural methods,—more effectual by far than any preaching which he knows of. It is in this contest with living men that he comes into contest with a man, of whom, as yet, he had known very little. When he returns, flushed and triumphant, from the synagogues, one is awaiting him in his own chamber: he has to encounter himself. And this is the nature of the encounter. The words, “Thou shalt not covet,” glare upon him as he reads those Commandments, which he has been punishing others for not keeping. The conviction strikes him, “Thou dost covet: thou art full of covetousness.” Another, a more tremendous thought, follows in quick succession. “This Law has made me covetous. I had not known lust, except it had so spoken to me. How can that be? Is this Law, which I proclaim as the Law of God, evil? Surely it has wrought all manner of evil in me. I should have been innocent but for this prohibition. I should have been alive without it; but it has taken away all life from me. What am I? An Israelite? A child of the Covenant? Nay, but one whom God, by this Law of His, is cursing; whom He is putting at a hopeless, impassable distance from Him.”

What was to be done? He could not go back to his school lore with much hope of comfort from it. But he might quell the restlessness of conscience by the restlessness of action. He might pacify the God who was at war with him, by doing services on His behalf. The experiment was plausible. And how much gratification there is to one who has cause of discontent with himself, to take vengeance upon other men! The conversion from such a purpose is assuredly as great a one as one can conceive. To be brought into fellowship with the men whom he had hated, to share their persecutions from those whom he had delighted to honour, was also a conversion. But what lay beneath each of these conversions? He himself was converted. He actually turned, not from something else, but from that covetous self, whom the Law pronounced to be dead, to One in Whom dwelt no covetousness. His spirit claimed to be joined to that uncovetous Being. His spirit claimed the righteousness and life of One Whom he had been persecuting.

His first question was answered. He had learnt what it is, in a man, that turns to God. He had learnt that it was the man himself; the man who has been losing himself in seeking himself; the man who finds himself when he renounces himself. He learnt, also, the answer to his second question, “Who converts or turns the man?” He found that it is God Himself Who turns him, God Who seeks after the creature He has made in His image, the child that has wandered from its Father’s house. He found the answer to his third question, “How is it possible for a man to turn to God?” That there is a Daysman between them; One in Whom God has always held intercourse with men; One in Whom men had always been able to call upon God; One Who, in the fulness of the times, had come forth to manifest God to men, and to make the sacrifice that atones man to God. And the last question was involved in these, “What manner of Being is it to Whom you turn?” The God and Father of my spirit, or, rather, of the spirit of a man that is in me; the God Who has been seeking and is seeking men, to bring them to Himself; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the brightness of His glory, and the express Image of His Person.

You will see, then, I think, in what sense it is true, that the conversion of St. Paul meant that he became convinced of the mission of Jesus Christ. It convinced him of that only, as he says himself, because it pleased God to reveal His Son in him; because he was brought to know that a Son of God was the Lord of his spirit and the Lord of man, and that this Son of God must be that Jesus Whom he had rejected as a crucified Man. You will see also, I think, why he necessarily connects this revelation of the Son of God in him with his preaching to the Gentiles. He did not know that there was such a Lord of man, till he knew that He was the Lord of himself. Then he could have no doubt; then there could be no limitation to his message. And the very highest form that that message could take was this: he could show to them of Damascus and of Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judea, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance. It was not a cruel, hard-hearted announcement that they were to repent, as it would have been if he had delivered it before his conversion. For then it must have meant, “You are to do that, under peril of God’s wrath and damnation, which I am quite sure you cannot do. You are to turn round to a Being of Whom I can show you no Image, of Whom I can tell you nothing, except that He has made a Law, and that He will exact the last penalty of it, and that you are utterly separated from Him.” I say, brethren, that the summons to repent, under such conditions as these, was a summons which no humane man and no honest man could have put forth without self-reproach, or without qualifications which made it abortive. And therefore, in fact, no call to repentance (in the sense of turning to God) did go forth from the Jews of St. Paul’s day, either to their own countrymen or to the Gentiles round about. Jews were invited to become strict Jews, and not lax Jews; to leave the society of Publicans for the society of Pharisees. Gentiles were invited to become Proselytes of the Gate, to abandon their own temples for the temple of Jerusalem. These were changes,—great changes if you will,—beneficial sometimes,—often, if we accept our Lord’s authority, even mischievous and destructive. But they did not necessarily, or in their own nature, involve the least turning to God; and as little did they involve the doing works meet for repentance, the bringing forth the fruits of gentleness, meekness, justice, purity, manliness. These might be recommended as good by Jews, as they had been recommended by Gentiles. But by what charm were they to be produced? How could the abandonment of one kind of worship for another—when the Object of worship was as equally unknown in the one case as in the other, when the worshipper was not the least brought within the range and sphere of His influence, supposing it were an influence for good—affect the spirit or heart of a man? What more could you do for him, than lead him to go through one set of acts instead of another set? The doer of the acts, the man, remains just what he was before. Whereas St. Paul, when he had once been turned to God himself, could say with all calmness and certainty, “I know in Whom I have believed. I know that it is a good God Who has converted me from a high conceit of myself, into the belief that I am not better than the worst of you. I know that what He is doing for me, He will do for you. I know that to be made right is the best thing for every man, and that it is His good pleasure to make you right.”

I think that you may now feel that there was no disproportion between the event which we commemorate to-day and the result of it,—at least not a disproportion of the kind you may have imagined. There would be one of a very different kind, if the accidents of St. Paul’s conversion, all the outward circumstances which denoted that which took place within him, were mistaken for the substantial part of it. The sound, and the glare, and the quenching of eyesight, would be most feeble and imperfect interpretations of the change which was wrought in his whole moral being; still more, of the moral change which his preaching was to produce upon the condition of the nations of the earth. He himself is most careful to save us from the vulgar error which would attribute such effects to such a cause. He records the events of his conversion several times, thankfully accepting these signs of a deeper process as most gracious and valuable for himself and for mankind. But when he tells us what was the signification of these signs, his language is that which I have quoted already: “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me;” or this: “Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all long-suffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting.”

In this last sentence St. Paul fully justifies the belief, that his conversion was, as to its law and principle, a typical one, and that the circumstances in it which are never likely to recur, were designed to fix that which is universal in it more deeply in our minds. Do I mean that we all have need of a conversion such as his was? I can only answer—Wherever there is aversion, there must, I conceive, be conversion. Wherever the eye shrinks from the light, there must be some power to make it turn to the light. If we are not conscious of anything which makes us unwilling to have our deeds made manifest, I cannot admit that unconsciousness is a decisive proof that there is nothing. I rather think that those who are most desirous of truth, feel most their inclination to be false, crave most for help against their falsehood. What is every act of confession, but an acknowledgment that we have yielded to a power which drew us away from the right? what is it but a prayer that we may be converted to the right? That, you may say, is not a parallel case to St. Paul’s, for his conversion took place once on the road to Damascus, and he had no need of any future conversion. I think that statement is only half correct. I think we are speaking more in his spirit if we say, that on the road to Damascus he learnt for the first time to know that there was perpetually in him an old Adam, which sought to hide itself from the presence of God, and that there was perpetually in him a second Adam, who turned to that presence as to its only deliverance. At any moment he might yield to the one; at every moment he required the help of the other to raise him and renew him. His conversion was the joyful recognition of an Almighty Friend, Whom he had suspected as an enemy. But it gave him no security, except so far as it took away from him all self-security, as it taught him that he was always dependent on this Friend, Who could and would sustain him. And his conversion created no chasm between his earlier years and his later. It brought into unity years that had seemed to be hopelessly asunder; for now he knew that God had been with him at Tarsus, in his Rabbinical studies, in his mental anguish. Periods that he would once have given the world to blot out for ever, were overshadowed by a Divine Love and Forgiveness, which made the memory of them precious to him. He saw that all events in his outward and inward history had been working together for good. He could see that he had been marked out from his mother’s womb as an Apostle to the nations, and that no wilfulness of his had been able to frustrate the designation.

For this designation assumed that he was not an exceptional man, but was like all those to whom he was sent; that his aversion from God was like theirs; that the converting might of God was acting on them as well as on him; acting on them when, like him, they were kicking against the pricks; when, like him, they were choosing darkness rather than light. When and by what means the strife would end he knew not, and we cannot know. God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways as our ways. It is enough for us to understand who the combatants in all cases are. It is enough for us to know that it is the will in man which God and the devil are both claiming; and that it is the will which must submit to either. Then there will be no restless, self-tormenting, self-exalting questions, whether we have passed through some process which others have not passed through, whether we have acquired some standing-ground which others have not acquired. No past process can prove us to be right if we are wrong. No want of it can shut us out from the petition, “Save me from my wrong; be merciful to me a sinner.” No standing-ground can be safe for an hour or a minute which leads to any trust in ourselves, or to any putting aside of others as less holy than we are. It is the birth of a Cain which leads to the cry, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” When the Deliverer is born, the cry is that of a child to a father, “I am weak; undertake for me.” St. Paul is led by the hand, a poor blind creature. But He who leads him has said, “I will make thee a light to the Gentiles; thou must tell all others of their weakness and of My strength, because there is nothing which thou hast proved in thyself which I do not purpose to prove in them.”

We see, then, how little suddenness or excitement has to do with the nature and ground of the conversion, of which St. Paul is the historian and the example. There was a crisis in his life. There may be a crisis in the life of every one of us. There may be outward events which attach it for ever to our imaginations or our memories,—a journey, a still night, a death-bed. But the crisis of a fever does not determine the cause of death or of recovery. And this crisis is only the moment when we yield passively to a death which has been always stealing upon us and threatening to devour us, or put our trust in One Who has undergone death that He might deliver us out of the jaws of it. Whoever bids us wait for a crisis, or create one, bids us suppose that God wishes us to continue in evil, or that it is not the quiet penetrating energy of His Spirit, but a frantic action of ours, which delivers us from it. Both are heresies and delusions. The man who is most tied and bound by the chain of habit, should be told that he may at once defy his tyrant, and claim his redemption: the most helpless and purposeless victim of his own irregular impulses should be told that he may be strengthened with might by God’s Spirit in the inner man, till he has reduced all the rebels, that have risen against Him, into docile subjects. In every case, let the history of St. Paul’s conversion teach us that we are to interpret repentance, “Turning to God.” It is to have no other sense in our vocabulary. It is never to assume a signification which can lead us to ask, “How much of it will God demand? How much of it is sufficient to justify our faith in Him?” It must be always that which He gives, or it will be worth nothing; it will be a repentance to be repented of. It must always be his greatest, noblest gift. The turning of a spirit to Himself must be more than all rains or fruitful seasons. And yet we must assume and affirm constantly that this highest gift will never be withheld: it is treason against God to suppose that He ever denies that which is necessary to raise His creatures out of the evil and perdition which He hates, into the condition for which He has formed us. Let us learn, from the history of St. Paul’s conversion, that we cannot heartily believe in that love for ourselves which we do not confess to be for Jews and Gentiles; that is to say, for all the kindreds of the earth, for all men in every possible condition. Let us learn, from the history of St. Paul’s conversion, that it is disobedience to every heavenly vision of God’s goodness which has been granted to us, not to proclaim it as the inheritance of all men, as the mighty Power which can bring all to itself. Let us learn, from the history of St. Paul’s conversion, and from that preaching of his to the nations, which the Collect of to-day will not let us separate from it, what must raise the prostrate people of Europe, and throughout the world, to the liberty which is their rightful inheritance. The heaviest incubus upon them—that which makes every other possible and intolerable—is the notion that they have a God who does not seek to convert them to Himself, but Whom they must convert from His desire to destroy them; Who is not a refuge from human oppressors, but a more terrible enemy, from Whom they need to fly. When once this dark Phantom, which they are worshipping, is encountered by the true Image which St. Paul held forth to the world; when once Christian preachers are converted, as he was, from the worship of a dark God to the worship of a God of perfect light, and they proclaim that God as still living, judging, redeeming, it will be seen why the nations have failed while they have trusted in princes, while they have trusted in themselves; how it has been the gracious purpose of God to try them and sift them by sufferings, that they may learn to trust in Him. With that trust will come strength in place of weakness; union, of division; life, of death. The Master and the Serf will learn again, as they did in the first days of the Gospel, that they are heirs of a common salvation, brothers in an Elder Brother. In every city of Christendom, throughout its coasts, and then through it in the farthest regions of the earth, the news will be heard and welcomed, that God has not left the race which He purchased with the blood of His Son; that His Spirit of truth and love is doing battle with the spirits of darkness, and malice, and falsehood, that have rent it in pieces. And every ghostly form of superstition will hide itself from the brightness of His coming; and every tyrant will call on the mountains to fall on him, to save him from the wrath of the Lamb. And men will cast away the idols which they have made each for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats. And they will fear God, and give glory to Him, because the sound of His everlasting Gospel has gone forth; and all know that He Who has turned the hearts of His people back again, Who has united them and Himself, and therefore has united them to each other, is the One God, blessed for ever. Amen.