THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
January 25, 1857
The passage: Paul tells King Agrippa that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but preached first to the people of Damascus and Jerusalem and all Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works fitting repentance.
Was this the only effect of the vision Paul saw on the road to Damascus? If he had simply said that afterward he began to defend the faith of Jesus Christ in Damascus, Jerusalem, Judea, and among the Gentiles, we could understand that a great change had happened in him. But was it a change that he now called his countrymen to repent? Was it a change that he thought Gentiles needed repentance even more? These questions connect with what I have been considering since Epiphany, and are raised directly by today’s Festival. They concern the force of the word Conversion, and everything associated with it from Paul’s day to ours.
Anyone who reads the Old Scriptures carefully knows that Jews could be urged to repent; the Prophets would have failed in their office if the children of the Covenant were exempt from that need. Saul, Gamaliel’s pupil, could not have thought his own day needed such appeals less than earlier ones did — no Rabbinical prejudice would have led him there. Why were they slaves of Rome, if the nation were as it should be? Why were multitudes ignorant of the Law, living like heathens? Why was the sect of the Nazarenes spreading? Something was clearly wrong and needed correction. He would have dwelt on the degeneracy of Israelites who tolerated a sect that, pushed to its conclusions, might destroy the barrier separating them from the world. To call Israelites to repent of this was natural. 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 the highest blessings were meant for them? He would have reminded such people that punishment in the world to come awaited them, and objected that these new teachers spoke of repentance while strangely announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.
But before visiting Jerusalem, Saul must have talked with Greeks in Cilicia, known something of the moral degradation tied to their worship, and felt how monstrously opposed it was to all he as a son of Abraham revered. Might he not have urged those he traded and spoke with to abandon their abominations, and promised them admission to the pure worship of the Temple at Jerusalem? I do not doubt the zealous young Hebrew invited many an inhabitant of Tarsus to such a reformation, hoping that once better instructed by the Elders he could press it on greater numbers with greater force. So it seems he might have preached repentance and turning to God to exactly the people named in this passage, even while persecuting to the death those who believed in Jesus Christ.
And yet, had Paul told Agrippa something more like what we expect of his conversion — that he changed from Jew to Christian — he would have contradicted his own repeated claim that in preaching the Gospel he was fulfilling his place as a child of Abraham, not abandoning it. Had he said the light from heaven brought him to acknowledge a mission of Jesus Christ he had formerly denied, he would have had to explain that mission as I lately tried to show you: Christ as the Image of the Invisible God, sent to reveal that image to men. Perhaps that account of his teaching helps us understand this account of his conversion and its result.
I suppose Saul of Tarsus counted it lawful, even meritorious, to bid Jews or Gentiles repent — but “repentance” for him did not mean what it meant for the Prophets: “turning to God.” How much repentance Jews owed, being within the Covenant; how much Gentiles owed, being outside it; what the signs of true repentance were in each case; which sins made repentance harder or impossible; what its effects would be once properly performed — on all these he had, no doubt, worked out careful, definite conclusions. But suppose the thought had struck him: “this phrase, turning to God, explains repentance — repentance does not explain it.” What troubling questions that would raise! Who is to turn? By what power is the turning done? And — darkest of all — to whom is one to turn? Where is this Being, and how can Jew or Gentile meet Him? Was it not safer to bury such questions under doctrines of repentance, and never come face to face with the One whose presence made even Moses tremble?
Had Saul stayed always at Gamaliel’s feet, among books and Rabbis, this careful avoidance might have lasted. But he was no mere scholar — he was a zealot, and had to act. The Law was sacred, so its enemies must be put down and the Covenant upheld. So Saul did not merely talk of repentance; he went out to enforce it by the letters of the High Priests, by sword and prison — methods that seemed far more direct than any preaching. It is in this struggle against living men that he collides with a man he had scarcely known. Returning triumphant from the synagogues, he finds someone waiting in his own chamber: himself. The commandment “Thou shalt not covet” glares at him from the very Law he has been enforcing on others. He is struck: “You covet; you are full of covetousness.” Then a still more terrible thought follows: “This Law has made me covetous — I would not have known lust except the Law named it. Is this Law of God, then, evil? It has wrought all manner of evil in me. Without this command I would have been innocent and alive; because of it I am dead. What am I — a child of the Covenant? No — one whom God, by His own Law, is cursing and placing at a hopeless distance from Himself.”
What was he to do? His schooling offered no comfort. He might quiet his restless conscience by restless action, pacifying the God at war with him through works done in His name. It was a plausible plan — and there is real satisfaction, for a man discontented with himself, in taking vengeance on others. Turning from that purpose was certainly a great conversion. So too was being brought into fellowship with the men he had hated, sharing the persecutions of those he had once honored. But beneath both these conversions lay a deeper one: he himself was converted. He turned — not from one thing to another, but from that covetous self the Law pronounced dead, to the One in whom no covetousness dwelt. His spirit claimed union with that uncovetous Being, claimed the righteousness and life of the very One he had been persecuting.
His first question was now answered: what in a man turns to God? He learned it is the man himself — the man losing himself by seeking himself, finding himself by renouncing himself. His second question was answered too: who converts the man? God Himself, seeking the creature made in His image, the wandering child. His third question: how can a man turn to God at all? Through a Daysman between them — One through whom God has always dealt with men, through whom men have always called on God, who came in the fullness of time to reveal God to men and make the atoning sacrifice. And the last question was answered in these: to whom does one turn? To the God and Father of the human spirit; the God who seeks men to bring them to Himself; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the brightness of His glory and the exact image of His Person.
You can see, then, in what sense Paul’s conversion meant conviction about the mission of Jesus Christ. He was convinced only because, as he says himself, it pleased God to reveal His Son in him — because he came to know that a Son of God ruled his spirit and all men, and that this Son of God must be the very Jesus he had rejected as a crucified man. You can also see why he connects this revelation with his preaching to the Gentiles. He did not know there was such a Lord of man until he knew Him as Lord of himself; then his message could have no limit. Its highest form was exactly this: he could show the people of Damascus, Jerusalem, and all Judea that they should repent, turn to God, and do works fitting repentance. This was no cruel demand, as it would have been before his conversion, when it could only have meant: “You must do this on pain of wrath and damnation, though I am sure you cannot; you must turn to a Being of whom I can show you no image, tell you nothing, except that He made a Law and will exact its penalty, and that you are utterly cut off from Him.” Such a summons, under such conditions, no humane or honest man could give without self-reproach or without qualifying it into uselessness. And in fact no true call to repentance — to turning to God — went out from the Jews of Paul’s day, to their countrymen or to the Gentiles. Jews were invited to become strict Jews rather than lax ones, to trade the company of publicans for that of Pharisees. Gentiles were invited to become Proselytes of the Gate, exchanging their own temples for Jerusalem’s. These were changes, sometimes beneficial, sometimes — on our Lord’s own authority — harmful. But none of them, by their nature, involved any turning to God, nor any bearing of the fruits of repentance: gentleness, meekness, justice, purity, manliness. Such virtues might be praised by Jews as by Gentiles, but by what power were they to be produced? How could exchanging one worship for another — when the object of worship was equally unknown in both, and the worshipper no more brought within reach of any good influence — touch a man’s heart? What more is this than making him perform one set of acts instead of another, while the man himself stays unchanged? Paul, by contrast, once turned to God himself, could say with calm certainty: “I know whom I have believed. I know it is a good God who converted me from high self-regard to the knowledge that I am no better than the worst of you. What He has done for me, He will do for you. I know it is best for every man to be made right, and it is His pleasure to make you right.”
You may now feel there was no mismatch between the event we commemorate today and its result — at least not the kind you might have imagined. There would be a real mismatch if the outward accidents of Paul’s conversion — the mere signs of what happened within him — were mistaken for its substance. The sound, the light, the blinding, would be poor accounts of the moral change wrought in his whole being, and poorer still of the change his preaching would bring to the nations. Paul himself guards us against this vulgar error. He recounts the outward events of his conversion several times, thankful for them as signs of a deeper process — but when he explains their meaning, he says: “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me,” and: “For this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all longsuffering, as a pattern to those who should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting.”
In this last sentence Paul confirms that his conversion, in its law and principle, was a typical one — and that its never-to-be-repeated outward circumstances were meant to fix its universal truth more deeply in our minds. Do I mean we all need a conversion like his? I can only answer: wherever there is aversion, there must be conversion. Wherever the eye shrinks from the light, some power must turn it toward the light. If we feel no unwillingness to have our deeds exposed, that unconsciousness does not prove there is nothing to expose — rather, those most eager for truth feel most their own tendency to falsehood, and crave help against it most. What is every act of confession but an admission that we have yielded to a power drawing us from the right, and a prayer to be turned back to it? You may object that this is not parallel to Paul’s case, since his conversion happened once, on the road to Damascus, and needed no repetition. I think that only half true. Better to say, in his own spirit, that on that road he learned for the first time that there was perpetually in him an old Adam seeking to hide from God’s presence, and perpetually a second Adam turning to that presence as his only deliverance. At any moment he might yield to the one; at every moment he needed the other’s help to raise and renew him. His conversion was the joyful discovery of an Almighty Friend he had suspected as an enemy — but it gave him no security except by stripping away all self-security, teaching him he was always dependent on that Friend. Nor did it split his life into two: it unified years that had seemed hopelessly apart, for now he knew God had been with him at Tarsus, in his studies, in his mental anguish. Periods he would once have erased forever were now overshadowed by divine love and forgiveness that made even their memory precious. He saw that all events, outward and inward, had worked together for good — that he had been marked from his mother’s womb as Apostle to the nations, and no wilfulness of his could frustrate that.
This designation assumed he was not an exception, but like all those to whom he was sent — his aversion to God like theirs, the converting power of God acting on them as on him, even while, like him, they kicked against the goads and chose darkness over light. When or how the struggle would end for them, he did not know, and neither can we — God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. It is enough to know who the combatants are: it is the human will that God and the devil both claim, and the will must submit to one or the other. Then there will be no restless, self-tormenting question of whether we have passed through some process others have not, or gained ground others lack. No past process proves us right if we are wrong; no absence of one shuts us out from praying “save me from my wrong; be merciful to me a sinner.” No standing-ground is safe if it breeds self-trust or leads us to count others less holy than ourselves. It is the birth of a Cain that says, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” When the Deliverer is born, the cry is a child’s to a father: “I am weak; undertake for me.” Paul is led by the hand, a poor blind creature — but the One who leads him has said: “I will make you a light to the Gentiles; you must tell others of their weakness and My strength, because there is nothing proved true in you that I do not mean to prove true in them.”
We see, then, how little suddenness or excitement has to do with the true nature of the conversion Paul records and exemplifies. There was a crisis in his life; there may be one in each of ours, attached forever to memory by some outward event — a journey, a night, a deathbed. But the crisis of a fever does not determine whether death or recovery follows. This crisis is only the moment we either yield passively to a death that has long been stealing on us, or trust the One who died that He might deliver us from it. Whoever tells us to wait for or manufacture a crisis is telling us that God wants us to stay in evil, or that deliverance comes not from the quiet, penetrating work of His Spirit but from some frantic act of our own. Both are delusions. Tell the man most bound by habit that he may defy his tyrant now and claim his freedom; tell the most helpless victim of his own impulses that he may be strengthened by God’s Spirit in the inner man until every rebel within him is subdued. In every case, let Paul’s conversion teach us to understand repentance only as “turning to God” — with no other meaning, never asking “how much of it does God demand, how much suffices to justify our faith in Him?” It must always be what God gives, or it is worth nothing — a repentance to be repented of; it must always be His highest gift, greater than any harvest. And yet we must affirm that this highest gift is never withheld — it would be treason against God to think He denies what is needed to raise His creatures from the evil He hates into the condition He made them for. Let us learn from Paul’s conversion that we cannot truly believe in God’s love for ourselves without confessing it also for Jews and Gentiles — for every kindred of the earth, every man in every condition. Let us learn that it is disobedience to the heavenly vision granted us, not to proclaim that love as the inheritance of all men, the mighty power able to draw all to itself. Let us learn, from his conversion and the preaching that followed it — which today’s Collect will not let us separate from the event — what alone can raise the prostrate peoples of Europe and the world to their rightful freedom. The heaviest burden on them, making every other unbearable, is the notion that their God does not seek to convert them to Himself but must be converted from a desire to destroy them — that He is not a refuge from oppressors but a worse enemy to flee. Once this dark phantom they worship meets the true Image Paul held forth; once Christian preachers are converted, as he was, from worshipping a dark God to worshipping a God of pure light, and proclaim Him as still living, judging, redeeming — it will be seen why nations fail while trusting in princes and in themselves, and how God has tried and sifted them by suffering that they might learn to trust Him instead. With that trust will come strength for weakness, union for division, life for death. Master and serf will again learn, as in the Gospel’s first days, that they are heirs of one salvation, brothers in one Elder Brother. Through every city of Christendom and to the ends of the earth, it will be heard and welcomed that God has not abandoned the race He purchased with His Son’s blood; that His Spirit of truth and love is battling the spirits of darkness, malice, and falsehood that have torn it apart. Every ghostly superstition will hide from the brightness of His coming; every tyrant will call on the mountains to fall and hide him from the wrath of the Lamb. Men will cast away the idols they made for themselves, giving them to moles and bats. They will fear God and give Him glory, because His everlasting Gospel has gone out, and all will know that the One who has turned His people’s hearts back to Him and to each other is the one God, blessed forever. Amen.