Converted by Love: The conversion of St. Paul
TODAY, the Roman Catholic Church commemorates the Conversion of St. Paul whose life can be explained in terms of one experience — his meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus. In an instant, he saw that all the zeal of his dynamic personality was being wasted like the strength of a boxer swinging wildly. He had perhaps never seen Jesus, who was only a few years older, but he had acquired a zealot’s hatred of all Jesus stood for, as he began to harass the Church by entering house after house and dragging out men and women, handling them over for imprisonment.
When, he himself was entered, possessed, all his energy was harnessed to one goal, to being a slave of Christ in the ministry of reconciliation and become an instrument to help others to experience the saving power of the Messiah. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5b), one sentence that determined his theology. In this passage, Jesus was mysteriously identified with people, the loving group of people. Saul – as he was known before he became Paul – had been running down like criminals. Jesus, personally saw the mysterious fulfillment of all he had been blindly pursuing.
Indeed, St. Paul’s life became tireless in effectively proclaiming and practicing the message of the triumph of the cross: Christians die baptismally to sin and are buried with Christ, they are dead to all that is sinful an unredeemed in the world. They are made into a new creation already sharing Christ’s victory and someday to rise from the dead like him. Through the Risen Christ, the Father pours out the Spirit on them, making them completely new.
St. Paul’s greatest message to the world was: You are saved entirely by God, not by anything you can do. Saving faith is the gift of a total, free, personal, and loving commitment to Christ, a commitment that then bears fruit in more works than the Law could ever contemplate.
May we be able to emulate the virtues of St. Paul, living everything to follow the will of the Father. May we all be inspired with his strong commitment to reconsider and follow where God wants him to be, as we continue our pilgrimage in this life.