In Light of New Creation--May 9, 2025

 

In Light of New Creation--May 9, 2025

Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. (Acts 9:10-19)

To be a follower of the risen Jesus is to live your life now in light of a promised future--even when it seems crazy or sounds like utter nonsense to the rest of the watching world.  And it will mean daring to live as if the Jesus way of life really is the best possible way to live our lives, even when it violates the world's rules of common sense and conventional wisdom.

This scene, from the story many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, is a case in point.  We looked yesterday at how Saul of Tarsus was on his way to go round up Christians in Damascus because he saw them as dangerous religious heretics (worshiping Jesus) and political dynamite (since Rome executed Jesus as a would-be king).  And even when Saul was literally trying to wipe out the fledgling movement of Christianity (so young, we were still just called "the Way"), the risen Jesus got a hold of Saul, revealed himself to the zealous persecutor, and called him to be a part of the Jesus movement, too.  Jesus--whose community Saul was actively trying to eradicate--chose Saul in love, precisely at the moment that Saul was Christianity's worst enemy.  You can't read the Damascus Road story without at least acknowledging that much.

Now, from one standpoint, this is precisely the sort of thing we should expect from Jesus, since a cornerstone of his Sermon on the Mount is the call to love our enemies.  And of course, when Jesus says things like that, he grounds it in the way God loves even God's enemies, "making the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous" as well as giving rain to both the well-behaved and to stinkers.  Maybe we could also say that the risen Christ can see into Saul's future and knows the kind of person he can become once Jesus gets through to him.  But of course, Jesus is Jesus--he's the Son of God, and we tend to assume that he has the capacity for infinite love or the perspective of the future.  The hard part is here in this later scene in the story when an ordinary Christian disciple is called upon to love Saul even while he's an enemy, too.

And that is a tall order.  When "the Lord" appears to Ananias and tells him to show compassion to Saul and to help him regain his sight, Ananias does a double-take.  He can't believe that he's being asked to help out an obvious enemy.  He protests to Jesus, "Lord, I've heard about this man..." and you can tell he is looking for any way out of the difficult calling to show compassion for this person who has been so cruel to the nascent church.  It's a perfectly reasonable response; he's basically saying, "I'm not suggesting that I should hurt him further now that he's lost his sight, but come on--do I have to actively help him?  Won't that just enable him to hurt us more?"  But Jesus' response to him is clear and unambiguous: this is a time to take seriously the call to love enemies.  This is a time to live now in light of the full and future Reign of God when enemies are reconciled and evil is overcome by goodness.  It is not enough for Ananias to believe that "some day in the future, in the sweet by and by" we will have peace; rather, he is called to do good for his enemy Saul in the present moment, because of that promised future.  Those are the stakes.

This is one of the things I love about this story.  It faces with full honesty just how difficult it must have been for the early Christians to help Saul, much less to welcome him into the body of Christ given all the blood on his hands.  And then the story says, "But as hard as it was, they did it.  The early church made the choice to take Jesus seriously and they loved their enemies, even Saul." This wasn't some abstract or hypothetical concept of an enemy, and it wasn't just about being nice to slightly irritating coworkers or the family member who always gets you in a mood.  This was about full refusal to answer evil with evil and completely commitment to show good to the ones who were causing them harm.  And they early church stepped up and did it, even though it surely must have looked like utter foolishness to the surrounding culture.  Surely the Respectable Religious Authorities back in Jerusalem must have thought that the Christians had made a categorically stupid error in letting Saul live.  Surely the average citizen of the Empire would have thought it sounded ludicrous to help your enemy out.  But even if everyone in the surrounding culture thought they seemed like losers for doing it, the early Christian community committed to loving their enemies and seeking good even for those who wished them harm.  This was not an optional thing for Ananias and the rest of the First Church of Damascus--this was a matter of taking Jesus seriously.

In our lives as well, we are called to live in light of what Jesus says about how God's Reign operates, even when it sounds laughable to the world around.  Because we believe that there will be a day when wolves and lambs lie down together in peace and swords are beaten into plowshares, we commit to answering evil with good and hatred with love.  Because we believe that God's promised new creation has begun in Jesus' resurrection, we do not seek to destroy our enemies but to love them.  Because we believe that God can transform death into life, we hold onto the hope that God can also turn our fiercest adversary into a friend, through the power of self-giving love.  In other words, like Ananias before us, we are committed to the difficult but indispensable work of living now in light of the new creation that has begun with the empty tomb.

We should be prepared, however, for the world (which is still woefully behind the curve) to ridicule us or call us losers and weaklings for not insisting on killing our opponents or fighting their hate with more hate.  We should be prepared for people to say that enemy love "just isn't how the real world works" and "It's just not practical" to extend compassion to those who have been labeled a threat to you.  Of course the world will say it's foolish--that's always how Caesar reads reality.  Empires cannot conceive of a new creation in which brute force isn't the driving engine.  Emperors, kings, pharaohs, and demagogues cannot possibly imagine a world in which love wins the day without resorting to hatred or evil.  The powers of the day cannot think of anything more permanent or final than death, and they insist on having and using the tools to dole it out whenever they feel threatened.  And to the conventional wisdom of the world, you've gotta hit your opponent before they hit you, rather than even consider the possibility that an enemy could be transformed into a friend.  But here from the earliest memories of the church onward in the book of Acts, even to the present day, the church has been called to live in light of the future--that future in which death itself is destroyed, enemies are reconciled, and weapons are beaten into farm tools.  We live now in light of that future, the same way we believe that Jesus' own resurrection is the beginning of resurrection for all of us, and the in-breaking of God's new creation.

Who might the living Jesus call you to show compassion to today? And where might our Easter hope lead us to the edge in the day ahead? Who might be the Saul we are called to be Ananias for right now?

Lord Jesus, give us the strength, the courage, and the hope to live today in your kind of love, even for enemies.