Saving Saul, Too--May 27, 2020
"Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' He asked, 'Who are you, Lord?' The reply came, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting...'" [Acts 9:1-5]
Saul doesn't know it, but he needs to be rescued from violence and danger, too. He needs to be saved... from himself.
Of course, at the very same time, those whom he was hunting down to arrest (or to do worse to) need to be rescued from the violence and danger Saul intended for them. And that's just the thing--in this moment, everyone is in danger of something terrible happening. Everyone is threatened, everyone is put at risk, by Saul's reckless fervor to stop the ones he believes are troublemakers--namely, the followers of Jesus. Obviously, those he plans to round up and bring back to Jerusalem in chains are endangered by his plans, but Sault, too, doesn't realize that he is destroying himself by this same course of action.
And the stakes are high indeed, all around. Saul, of course, thinks he is doing God's work by rounding up the followers of this new sect within Judaism--he thinks they are dangerous as well as heretical, because they believe that the Messiah has come and had already died at the hands of the Romans. It flew in the face of everything Saul believed about God, and he was sure--damned sure--that it was his responsibility to stamp out these dangerous disciples of Jesus who called themselves "followers of the Way." They were dangerous enough in his mind that Saul clearly thought it was acceptable to kill them without trial by mob justice if necessary--you'll recall that Saul is the one holding the coats for the lynch mob that stones Stephen to death just a little bit earlier in the story of Acts. And he smiled with approval while the mob did his dirty work for him, too.
What is most frightening to me about this whole scene is that, until Jesus gets a hold of him, Saul is convinced he is going good--that he is doing "justice" by rounding up followers of Jesus and killing them if necessary. Saul is convinced he has God's approval for what he is doing, and if some Christians, men or women, get killed in his pursuit of order, well, surely they are just collateral damage in Saul's quest for righteousness and social order. Regrettable, perhaps, but nothing to lose sleep over, in Saul's mind. Like Blaise Pascal so famously put it, people "never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." And here am I, a comfortable, privileged religious professional with a lot of the same perks that Saul had, and it occurs to me how easily I can be led to believe that such ruthlessness is acceptable--even noble!--if we believe it is being done in the service of "maintaining order" or stopping the ones labeled as "bad guys."
Sometimes I think we (at least we Respectable Religious folks) forget that our movement began as a persecuted minority, and that we were constantly seen, both by religious leaders and the empire, as a troublesome and expendable sect of people. Christians were assumed to be dangerous, to be likely to stir up a ruckus, to be disturbers of the peace, and to be inciters of riots. Once that picture gained popularity, it became easier and easier in one town after another (notice that Saul is going WAY out of his jurisdiction here to get to Christians in Damascus--modern day Syria!) to look away at the torture of Christians... or the arrest of Christians without charges... or the killing of Christians without a trial. And when we forget that it is our own story, we become callous and numb in the face of others who are treated the same way still today. You know there had to be people in the first century who invented excuses for why it must have been ok for Saul to round up suspected Christians and drag them off, bound, to stand trial in far away places, or even for those suspected Christians to die in his attempt to bring them to "justice." There were surely folks in the wider community who just muttered, "Well, those Christians must have done something wrong--otherwise, Saul wouldn't have wanted to arrest them!" Maybe that's even what Saul told himself at night: "These people are all trouble, and even if I haven't seen them doing something illegal, or if I haven't proven that they are bad, they've surely done something bad in the past, or are going to do something wrong in the future... so I'm justified." And it occurs to me just how easy it is for any of us to look away when it's someone else's son, someone else's daughter, and to assume, "They must have had this coming."
But no--it's my son. It's my daughter. It's your children. It's our aunts and uncles. It's our neighbors and acquaintances. We cannot compartmentalize the rottenness we don't want to have to look at and say, "Well, that's someone else." We are all threatened by the impulse to destroy the ones we label "other" because we are afraid of them. The fear itself is part of the problem.
And that's just it: Saul is endangered, too, by his own fearful violence. He is slowly dying inside from what he is doing to others, and he doesn't even know it. As much as the church was threatened by his quest for "righteous" justice, he was destroying himself, bit by bit, as he gave himself over to that way of thinking and acting. The more he hunted those troublesome Christians down, the easier it became; and the easier it became, the more and more numb he felt bout it... until the point came where he did not realize how much he was poisoning his own soul. He could not even realize that he had become diametrically opposed to the way of the God he was sure he was serving by his actions. He could no longer recognize that his means and his ends were all terribly misguided.
So Jesus interrupts him. Both for the sake of those he was going to hunt down, and for Saul's own sake--because everybody was in danger. Jesus came to rescue them all--stopping Saul not only spared the lives of countless families in Damascus that would have been ripped apart if he had carried out his plan, but it also set Saul free from the hateful path he was on. It was the beginning, for Saul, of a grand reversal that would end up bringing this persecutor of the church to faith in the same Jesus he had been hunting down. And of course, we have come to know him now as Paul, the apostle responsible for half of the New Testament and the great evangelist and theologian who got into lots of trouble himself bringing the news of Jesus to the rest of the empire. The rest of that journey is a story for another day, but for now, just consider how the living Jesus works to bring life all around--for the persecuted, and for the persecutor, for the church in Damascus, and for Saul who was out to get them. They were all endangered by Saul's quest for law and order, and they were all rescued.
This is how God operates in the world, and if we cannot see that, perhaps it is because we cannot see how many ways even we comfortable bystanders are entangled and endangered by the things that threaten and harm others. Perhaps we need to look daily down at our own hands, and to see that, a lot more often than we would like to admit, we are either holding rocks for stoning, or happily holding the coats of those in the mob. There are an awful lot of ways we are wearing Saul's sandals, whether we do it knowingly or unwittingly. That doesn't mean we are irredeemable villains--Saul, after all, is bound for transformation himself. But it does mean that we may have to look at places in our lives and hearts that we though we were doing just fine--or maybe that we were even righteous and noble and good--and ask God to empty our hands and to disarm us.
I know at least that needs to be my own prayer for myself today.
Saul needs saving, too, at that moment on the Damascus Road. And I guess I have that in common with him as well. Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a comfortable and complacent sinner dressed up in respectable religiosity.
Lord Jesus, I really want to follow after you. Where I am wrongheaded, turn me in your direction. Where I am hostile against your way and your beloved, break my hardened heart. And where I am clenching rocks to throw in the name of righteousness and order, disarm me. And embrace me at the same time.
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