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Revealed in Us—as Us
To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face
with everything.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the DayIf you’ve spent time in church, you’ve probably heard the story of Saul’s
conversion, as told in the book of Acts. It actually appears three times
throughout the book (9:1–19, 22:5–16, 26:12–18), to make sure we don’t miss
how pivotal and newsworthy it must have been, and still is.
For years, Saul had savagely persecuted those who followed the way of Jesus.
He was on his way to Damascus to do just that when, suddenly, he was struck
down and blinded by what the text refers to as “light.” Then, out of that light,
he heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Saul responded, “Who are you?”
And the reply came, “I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me.”
The deep and abiding significance of Saul’s encounter is that he hears Jesus
speak as if there’s a moral equivalence between Jesus and the people Saul is
persecuting. The voice twice calls the people “me”! From that day forward, this
astounding reversal of perspective became the foundation for Paul’s evolving
worldview and his exciting discovery of “the Christ.” This fundamental
awakening moved Saul from his beloved, but ethnic-bound, religion of Judaism
toward a universal vision of religion, so much so that he changed his Hebrew
name to its Latin form, Paul. Later, he calls himself the “apostle” and “servant”
to the very people he once disparaged as “pagans,” “Gentiles,” or “the nations”
(Ephesians 3:1, Romans 11:13).
Paul, or perhaps a student under his training, says that he was “given
knowledge of a mystery” (Ephesians 3:2) that revealed “how comprehensive