The Real Meaning of St. Paul’s Conversion, Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
January 25, 2023
Acts 9:1-22, Ps 117, Mt 16:15-18

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today on this feast of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus — one of the most important events in the history of the world because of the impact this one man had, post-conversion, in spreading the Gospel all over the known world at the time and whose writings have deeply influenced all of Christian theology — it is important to understand what led to his conversion, what his conversion truly was, and what it means for our conversion.
• St. Paul’s shocking conversion was, at least partially, the miraculous result of St. Stephen’s prayers. When the first Christian martyr (after we could say John the Baptist and Jesus himself) was being stoned to death outside the Jerusalem Gate that now bears his name, the stone-throwing assassins were all laying their cloaks at the feet of Saul, showing that he was presiding over the execution. St. Stephen prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” as he was asking Jesus to receive his spirit, echoing Jesus’ own words from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” These prayers — Stephen’s and Jesus’ — were heard. God didn’t hold this sin against Saul. And Jesus Christ met him on the road to Damascus to give him by means of that forgiveness the gift of conversion.
• His shocking conversion was not principally the superficial change from being a persecutor of Christians to a proclaimer of Christ, from a murderer to a maker of the faithful. It wasn’t from an immoral life far from God to a moral one. As the late Pope Benedict XVI stressed, it was from a false notion of a holy life to a true notion. Paul had been from his young days a zealous follower of God. He had come down from Turkey to Jerusalem to study at the feet of the greatest rabbi of the age, Gamaliel. As a young man, he had such zeal to keep the community of Israel together that he made it his mission to try to stomp out the heretical sect that was dividing Judaism and blasphemously claiming that a carpenter from Nazareth not only was the Messiah but the Son of God, one who said he would destroy the holy Temple. That’s why he was terrorizing Christians. In the persecution of the Church, he was the furthest thing, for example, from Herod, who hunted down the baby Jesus in order to preserve his own privileges. Paul’s conversion was, rather, from an erroneous notion that we are saved by our external adhesion to all the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law, to the true one that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are saved by Christ’s work, not our own. We can also say, on the heels of the Sunday of the Word of God, that Saul, despite his scholarship, had a defective notion of what was contained in the Word of God and where it was leading. He was “kicking against the goad” (Acts 26:14), as Jesus said to him, meaning rebelling against the stick used to drive cattle, because he was not following where the “goad” of the Word of God was ultimately leading him.
• But those aspects of his conversion still do not lead us to the deepest essence of what happened to him and what is meant to happen to us. His conversion was a death and resurrection. After St. Paul met the Lord 137 miles north of Jerusalem in Damascus where the Christian community was strong, after he was blinded and needed to walk by faith, he was baptized by Ananias and the scales fell from his eyes, a sign not just of a capacity to see things in the new light of Christ that had previous blinded him, but a sign of death and resurrection. He would later write to the Romans, with words we hear every Easter Vigil, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-4). To convert means to die to the old Adam in us so that the new Adam might rise. That is not just a one-time sacramental act, but a lifetime moral one. St. Paul would himself testify to this when he would later write in his letter to the Christians in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). The metanoia, the revolution in the way we look at the world and live, the true conversion God is asking of any of us, and the deepest meaning of holiness is to die to ourselves so that the Risen Christ truly can live within us, reign within us, sanctify and save us and make us his instruments to co-redeem the world.  Holiness is union with God. Since we are saved by grace, and grace is not a thing but a participation as a creature in the life of the Creator, Christian conversion must be ongoing, because it’s based on a continuous encounter with the Lord, as he seeks in us to form us more and more in his image with our free fiat. It’s a death and resurrection. It’s a new life. It’s Christ crucified and risen living in us. Pope Benedict preached, “Paul never once interprets this moment as an event of conversion. … It was … rather a death and a resurrection for Paul himself. One existence died and another, new one was born with the Risen Christ. … This powerful encounter with Christ is the key to understanding what had happened: death and resurrection, renewal on the part of the One who had shown himself and had spoken to him. … In this deeper sense we can and we must speak of conversion. This encounter is a real renewal that changed all his parameters. Now he could say that what had been essential and fundamental for him earlier had become ‘refuse’ for him; it was no longer ‘gain’ but loss, because henceforth the only thing that counted for him was life in Christ.”
• St. Paul’s conversion brings us to consider our own. Many of us can have simplistic, superficial notions of conversion, in which we think it means basically just a minor course correction in our life, like the elimination of a bad habit. Others of us can think conversion is something we acquire through our own efforts of good deeds. Some others can think the goal of it is mainly to be a “good person.” But the ultimate meaning of conversion is to “turn with” Christ in every way, to adopt a new life, to live full-time in communion with him, loving as he loves, being willing to suffer and die with him and rise.  The feast of St. Paul’s conversion is a day on which we’re called to enter more deeply into Christ’s death and live a new life. It’s a day on which we learn how to live far more deeply by faith in the son of God who loves us and gives his life for us. It’s a day on which we pray for the conversion of those who are caught up in sins for which he was crucified, those who persecute Christ without even knowing what they’re doing, those who are persecuting his body and making martyrs across the globe. It’s a day on which we pray for the grace, like St. Paul, to be so thoroughly converted by the Gospel that we will say, “’Woe to me’ if we do not share this gift!” and go out to all the world telling the Good News, proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, baptizing and helping them to carry out everything Christ has commanded us.
• The great strength of Paul came from his encounter with Jesus Christ not merely on the road to Damascus but every time he, with the early Church, and in his own words, “took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”  The same Lord who met him at the city gates of that Syrian capital comes here to meet us at the altar today!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download