"When he had
come to Jerusalem,
[Saul] attempted to join the disciples; and they were all afraid of him, for
they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, brought him
to the apostles, and described for them how on the road he had seen the Lord,
who had spoken to him, and how in Damascus
he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus." [Acts 9:26-27]
Grace will change your eyesight. Be prepared.
And--just in case it weren't equally obvious--once your eyesight has been changed by grace, your heart, your social circles, and your priorities are in line next to be changed, too.
Grace has a way of changing the way we see the people we called our enemies.
This is one of the things I have to come to love about stories like this scene from Acts--we get a glimpse of the real, slow but steady, real-life messiness of what it looks like when people who have been grasped by Grace slowly have their vision changed. It's a moment that I don't think ever made it into childhood Sunday School flannelboard lessons, but it's the kind of story that we desperately need to hear.
The story of Saul/Paul's dramatic encounter with the living and risen Christ on the road to Damascus is one of those stories that most church folk know. It's got everything--supernatural special effects, a dramatic conversion, and a fast-paced plot as the guy who was going to round up Christians and imprison them ends up becoming a follower of the same Christ he was persecuting. But after that powerful one-on-one moment with Jesus, there was the difficult and thorny question of what anybody else in the Christian community was going to think of this guy.
After all, everybody had heard of Saul of Tarsus, at least in the local Jerusalem Christian community. They had heard of him, and they were afraid of him. He had first come to public notoriety when an angry mob started to stone a young Christian named Stephen and Saul offered to hold everybody's coats while he nodded approvingly. And then this Saul nursed his hate of the still fledgling Christian movement, even getting authority to round up any "followers of the Way" (that's what they called us first, before the title "Christian" came along) to be bound in chains, imprisoned, and likely beaten or worse... because they were followers of Jesus. Saul was good at what he did, and he had a passion for it. He was responsible for plenty of suffering among the early Christian community, and everybody knew his reputation.
So when all of a sudden, out of the blue, the news comes that this same guy has now come to faith in Jesus, it was hard for the early church to know what to make of it. And to be honest--as the book of Acts is refreshingly honest here in the retelling--there were a lot of those disciples who didn't want to let Saul in. They couldn't believe he had come to faith in Christ. They were afraid it was all a hoax, this newfound "faith" Saul supposedly had. They saw him as a danger to themselves and to their children. They were afraid if they dared open their tables or their lives to him, he would betray them and have them jailed or beaten or killed like Stephen. All with good reason, mind you--they weren't trying to be mean to Saul... they just knew everything Jesus publicly stood for and didn't want to get themselves killed if possible. But sure, there had to have been anger, frustration, resentment, and doubt going through the minds of those early Christians. And all they could see when they looked at Saul or heard his name was anger, was fear, was the impulse to keep Saul out for everybody's safety. They saw a threat when they looked at Saul, and they really and truly struggled to dare to believe that even the Spirit of God could break open his hatred-hardened heart.
And then there is this guy named Barnabas. And good ol' Barney (who had been introduced earlier in the book of Acts because of his amazing generosity selling his family homestead and giving all the proceeds to help feed people) sees things differently. More to the point, he sees Saul differently. Instead of seeing him as Public Enemy #1, or as someone beyond redemption, Barnabas sees this former enemy of the church as someone beloved of God. And not only as someone beloved of God, but someone claimed by God for a mission. Barnabas allowed the Spirit to change his own vision, so that he could see Saul, not as an adversary to be fought, but as someone held in the grip of grace. That allowed him to acknowledge not only what Saul had done but also what God was going to do through him.
This is it, folks. This is how the Christian community is called to live in the world. This is how Grace changes the world--the mercy of God gives us new eyes. And the new vision no longer sees the world divided up into "us" (you know, the good guys) and "them" (you know, the bad guys... the other... the stranger... the enemy...). But rather the new vision Mercy gives us sees that God's goal is to transform those we call enemies into friends. The Kingdom struggle is not for "my group" to win out over "your group," but rather for all of us to be transformed, and for all of us to be made well. When I allow the Spirit to change my vision, so that I see even people I strongly detest as people beloved of God--people whom God is capable of transforming, just as God is at work transforming me, too--it does something to the old hate and fear inside me. It makes me able to love. It makes me able to seek the well-being even of people I was determined to hate. That's exactly what Barnabas attempted when it came to this violent young man named Saul.
And it worked.
It worked in Saul's life--because when Barnabas stood up and vouched for Saul, the other leaders gave him a chance, and it changed the course of the next 2,000 years of history. But Saul's story was not a fluke. At the heart of the Kingdom of God is the idea that love transforms enemies, just as Christ loved us "while we were enemies" of God and died for us. At the heart of the Gospel is the notion that God uses our love to transform those we see as enemies. That's why, for example, when Dr. King talked about his philosophy of gospel-inspired non-violent civil disobedience in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he was always clear that the goal of the cause was not to punish or hurt those who opposed King and company, but for all to be transformed. Those who had been forced to sit on the back of the bus not only needed to see change come, but those who had cheered for segregation and Jim Crow needed to be changed as well, in their hearts. King never forgot that in his movement--it was always about seeing even the most hardened segregationist as someone imprisoned by their own hate and needing to be set free. That's how mercy changes our vision--it reveals that the "enemy" is a child of God, too, and often in deep need of transformation. That breaks the grip of the old "us" versus "them" thinking and instead sees us all as candidates for God's power to make us new.
It took a good while from there, perhaps, for the rest of the followers of Jesus in the early church to accept Saul with all of his baggage. It's worth noting that this change, this new start, this welcome to Saul was a bold move for the early church. It would have certainly been easier to keep Saul out because he was no doubt an enemy of the church. It would have been easy to write Saul off as a loss. It would have been easier to threaten and cajole Saul. And instead Barnabas does the hard work of leading the rest of the Christian community to see Saul in a new light and to act accordingly.
Dear friends, that is the hard work that you and I are called to. We are called to love--and to let love change the universe by letting it change the way we see others. Today, see someone you don't like as a beloved child of God... and see how that changes the day.
Lord Jesus, help us to see as you see.
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