Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle
Today is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul. It is hard to think of St. Paul without first thinking of him lying flat on his back after the Lord decided it was time to talk some sense into him. Arguably, he has one of the most intense conversion experiences of anyone in Scripture. We see that there is power in it too. He uses the radical change that Christ wrought in his life to make clear that Christ is the Son of God. However, I think most of us have a decent level of familiarity with Paul's part in his conversion, let's turn our eyes instead to Ananias.
The value of looking to Ananias is that most of us are not called to be a Paul. Yes, we are called to be disciples and to witness to the gospel, but if you write an Epistle to the New Yorkers or to the San Franciscans I wouldn't count on us adding a 28th book to the New Testament. While we won't be called to write scripture, we will be called to serve one another. We will especially be called to serve those that we might regard as enemies. When Ananias received his call to minister to Paul, he questioned God about him and the “evil things” he had done. You can imagine him falling out of his bed when God told him who he was going to. The Lord reaffirmed His command and Ananias went to Paul. Upon arriving he didn't treat him with disdain or some form of Christian elitism. Rather, he called him brother. Then he called Paul to believe in Christ as well as to receive Baptism and have haste in doing God's will. Ananias did all of this believing that God can do great things. We need that same attitude. We need to have the belief that God can do great things, even in those that we might assume have the hardest of hearts. We need to be willing to sincerely call them brother or sister; and to invite them to seek and follow the will of God in their lives. And we need to do it like Ananias, where our own pursuit of God's will is what led us to them in the first place.
Granted we might not hear God telling us who to go to with the clarity Ananias did. However, we can seek for God's will in our lives through Scripture, counsel, the Sacraments, and prayer. As Christians we need to do this, not just because it is good, but because it is the great commission. When we neglect this role, who knows how many Pauls we leave untended? People who have an unexplained encounter with Christ, who just need to now encounter Him through another human being so that the scales can fall away and they can repent and be baptized. So often we want to blame the other person for their lack of change, for their lack of conversion and repentance. But, who knows how many Paul-like conversions our modern day church is missing because we aren't responding to our call to be like Ananias? Because we aren't witnessing to Christ by being His Body here and now as His Church. Not just in word and title, but also in action and deed.
On this Feast of St. Paul's Conversion, let us celebrate the great work that God did through him by opening our hearts a little more to the reality that God might call us to be the first disciple someone meets after an encounter with Christ. Let's pray that we can be to them as Ananias was to Paul. In other words, let us pray that we can be ‘from Jehovah’, just as Ananias means.
- Spencer Hargadon