Today, for the second week, we continue our journey in the Book of Acts as we will do throughout this Easter season. The passage we have just heard this morning may sound familiar to us, this story of Paul’s dramatic encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus (You may have noticed that the Apostle was still called “Saul” when that happened, but I am going to call him “Paul” each time, just to make it easier). Now if you remember, we’ve already talked about this story in January, when we celebrated the Feast of Paul’s conversion, a conversion which is fairly known to most Christians: Paul was a devout Jew, a pharisee, who used to persecute the blooming Christian movement after Jesus’s Resurrection. One day though, as he was heading towards the north of Judea to arrest more Christians and bring them to the religious authorities in Jerusalem, Paul had this powerful vision of Christ, and became this Paul we have come to know through his letters: a theologian, a missionary, an apostle.
Now the passage we heard today is a little different from what we have heard before. There are indeed several accounts of this episode of conversion in the New Testament, both in the Book of Acts and also several passages in Paul’s letters where he himself tells his own story. But I like the passage we have heard today because, again, it’s a bit different, and it’s different because it’s not just the story of Paul, rather it’s a two folded story with two characters and a lot of parallelisms: Two visions, two dialogues with Christ, two sending off. It’s not just the story of Paul, it’s the story of Paul and Ananias. Actually, I wanted to highlight the specificity of this telling of Paul’s conversion by choosing this picture for our bulletin, a picture where we don’t see just Paul “falling off his horse” on the road to Damascus, as painters have so often represented him. I preferred this humble icon of Paul receiving the baptism from the hands of Ananias, reminding us that the great teacher and preacher and builder of Christian communities had first to be taught, evangelized and received in the church. In fact, I don’t know how it is for you, but I often have this tendency to think of Paul as this sort of “lone wolf” genius and saint who had once this dramatic face to face with Christ, and after that he would just go from one place to another teaching everybody what to believe and what to do. And certainly some accounts in the New Testament can lead us to see Paul like that, I even suspect that he may have thought of himself that way, all modesty aside (See Galatians 1). But Luke, the author of Acts, tells us another story or rather another part of the story: not the story of a “lone wolf, lone saint“,but the story of two men and the story of a Christian community. And that’s why I think it’s very important for us to hear it again.
So let’s have a look at our text. I generally try not to bother you with the structure of our texts, but sometimes to be able to understand what a passage is about, it really helps to see how it’s written. And here it’s very striking: At the beginning of our passage, Paul’s whereabouts are introduced to the readers, then Luke describes how Paul has this vision, hears Christ and then Christ tells him to go in the city. And then, it’s like the story starts all over again, but with another character. Ananias is introduced to the reader, he has a vision of Christ, and then Christ talks to him and tells him to go and meet Paul in the city. The last part of our passage is the meeting of the two men and how Ananias ministers to Paul.
And so it’s very interesting to realize that Luke gives the same importance to the two characters. Suddenly, we don’t have only Paul in the spotlight, being this hero of faith who had this extraordinary spiritual experience (although Luke is always very admirative of Paul) but now we also have this Ananias, of whom we’ve never heard before and about whom we will never hear again, and yet he has this same revelation: Ananias sees Christ, hears Christ, obeys Christ and then go meet Paul, teach, preach to him and finally baptize him, this Paul who has been later called by many, along with Jesus, “the founder of Christianity”. What a call, and what a mission! Can you imagine, introducing Paul to Christian beliefs, when he is the one who later will write everything about our faith? I wish we knew more about this Ananias, because he must have been someone quite extraordinary. Yet, that’s not Luke’s point. I was reminded recently of this saying by John Wesley: There is no such thing as a solitary Christian, and I think that could summarizes pretty well what’s going on in the Book of Acts. It’s like Luke is saying: Yes, there are outstanding figures, leading characters in the church, but it’s first of about a people, a community of whom Christ is in charge.
So why is it important to us?
Well, I think it’s important because we live in a time where our churches face many challenges, and as we face those challenges we have this tendency to hope that someone will show up and make things right: Congregations do discernment to hire a charismatic leader; here in NC we’re in search of the “good candidate” to become our new bishop; Catholics throughout the world pray that the “right pope” will be elected…And yet as we do that, we kind of perpetuate this myth of the “lone wolf / lone saint“, downplaying the nurturing and transformative power of the community itself. The Dalai Lama said once: The planet does not need more successful people, the planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. And this is the job of all Christians, and it certainly fits Ananias’ job description. How did Paul become Paul? Christ sent Ananias to encounter Paul who was considered as an enemy by all the other followers of Christ: Ananias was a peacemaker. He came near Paul and laid he hands on him and Paul got his sight back: Ananias was a healer and a restorer. Then Ananias told Paul about who Jesus was and what he did, he evangelized him: Ananias was a storyteller. And all this he did because he loved Christ and he saw every human being as a brother: Ananias was a lover. And this is what we are all called to do: We are called to welcome one another, listen to one another, pray for one another, heal one another, instruct one another, feed one another. We don’t have to look further for hope, towards a hypothetical guide or leader, when we have Christ and we have one another, when we have this life we share with one another.
And if we do that well, this will be really transformative in at least three ways (from what I gather in the story)
1. That we live as a community is all the more urgent when we’re in a world where people are more and more lonely and isolated. If you think about it, in this culture, being a community is already, in itself a testimony. It may sound silly but once I was inviting someone to share a lunch at a church where I used to work. And this person who never went to church couldn’t get over the fact that nobody had to pay for the meal, she kept asking me: But who is going to pay for it? She didn’t understand that people would just bring food and share it. For us, we don’t even mention it or think twice about that, but for some it’s difficult to understand why people you don’t know would invite you to eat with them for free. The story said that Ananias welcomed Paul and fed him. That’s what Luke tells us the followers of Christ had been doing from the beginning: Breaking bread together. Just this little thing is already a powerful testimony when in a culture where people are defiant towards one another or are hesitant to do something that won’t benefit them directly.
2. Now when we think about being a welcoming church, we may have warm and fuzzy feelings. That’s part of it. But it does not mean that it is easy. In our passage, we see how much Ananias had to be obedient and brave. I think our times requires of us to be obedient and brave as well, even in everyday living. Not only people are lonely and isolated, but again, and maybe because they are lonely and isolated, they tend to fear each other, are suspicious, often see other as the enemy. Ananias had to take a first step towards a man who could have had him arrested and detained and probably tortured or even killed, we know that’s what happened to Stephen. Yet, Christ asked Ananias to overcome his legitimate fear and to look at the man not as an enemy but as a brother. You know how we say that people never change, well maybe some people don’t change because nobody trust them to change. Paul’s conversion would have been worth nothing if there hadn’t been an Ananias and then a community to welcome him. Of course it can be dangerous to be friendly to strangers, to trust someone who we don’t think has our best interests at heart, but it makes it much more easier when we do it in our community, as a community.
3. The last thing in this story we could be called to do based on Ananias’s example is to understand better our task of sharing the Gospel. I found it very interesting that most commentators said about Paul’s conversion that it was not about being converted from sin to righteousness, it was not a “moralistic” kind of conversion because Paul would have already considered himself very righteous according to God’s law. Rather Paul needed to awake to the presence of Christ and to receive him. There is this powerful image that after Paul meets with Ananias “something like scales fell from his eyes”. We live in a world that may be not so hostile to Christ, the problem may be that it does not know enough about Christ, and what we can do isto bring more information about the Gospel, explain how it makes sense, and help people come to a new understanding of themselvesand of the human experience through the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Paul’s conversion is a coming to new life after three days of darkness. It is indeed a story of Resurrection, this Resurrection Paul will never cease to preach and we, as followers, when we do that, are all witnesses of Resurrection.