NOTES for Act 9:6

What happened to Shaul on the Damascus road could be described in three words: a meeting with Christ. A meeting in a certain sense the first in the history of the Church, but by no means the last: the experience of such or similar meetings has been described more than once in Christian literature. But Shaul, the future apostle Paul, became the first. No, of course, he was not the first to see the risen Christ. Before him there were other apostles, and not only they. But he was the first who met Him risen after Pentecost.

It turned out that He, in essence, had not gone far away at all. That He can always be nearby, and if we do not always see Him, it is only because with our spiritual sight we cannot look into the depth of the Kingdom. Then He approaches its very boundary, the boundary that separates the Kingdom from the world not yet transfigured. And we see Him and meet Him. Later, having become with His help inhabitants of the Kingdom, we learn to see Him where He is most often, in that depth of the Kingdom which the Bible defines with the words "at the right hand of God" or "at the right hand of the Father." Jesus' meeting with Shaul, who had not yet become either Paul or an apostle, was such a meeting at the boundary. Why with him, the persecutor of the Church?

A hint of an answer may be the fact that Shaul was a disciple of the very Gamaliel who interceded for the apostles in the Sanhedrin. He was a disciple of a man who could in no way be a persecutor of those whom Shaul persecuted. He could not be anyone's persecutor at all: Gamaliel's breadth and openness are comparable with those characteristic of Hillel, the founder of the school to which Gamaliel belonged. What then? Did the disciple fail to assimilate these qualities of his teacher? Hardly, for then Shaul would have left Gamaliel much earlier. Another hint may be Shaul's rather frank account, after he had become Paul and an apostle, of his attempts to realize in his own life the ideal of the living Torah.

We find such an account, for example, in Romans and partly in other Pauline letters as well. It is an account of failed attempts to become perfect. Such failure can drive a person to despair, to a serious spiritual breakdown. It can make a person hard and intolerant, turn an initially open seeker of the way of righteousness into a harsh legalist and rigorist ready to persecute anyone who seems insufficiently orthodox to him.

This, it seems, is what Shaul became after his spiritual failure; otherwise it is difficult to explain how a disciple of Gamaliel could turn into such a fierce and implacable opponent of those whom Gamaliel himself treated quite calmly. But originally Shaul was seeking precisely the way of righteousness, precisely the inner Torah and sanctification in all their fullness. And no one except the One whom Shaul, without knowing Him, hated, could give him this. That is why Jesus Himself came out to meet His fierce hater and persecutor. He, as none of the people did, saw that when Shaul found what he sought, he would cease to be His opponent. He would become Paul, apostle and witness of Christ.