By Debbie Blue
New Testament Reading: Act 9: 1-6 (7-20)
For Sunday, April 4, 2013: Year C—Easter 3
It's Influential Man Sunday, with Peter and Paul as the focal characters.
The texts for today could be read as the stories that justify their place in determining the course of Christianity. It's a good day (I think), to wonder what the story would be like with a different focus, with a few more voices—what about Tabitha who, according to Luke, was herself raised from the dead? Ah well.
Why Paul?
What we get is Peter and Paul (mostly.) Almost half the books in the New Testament are attributed to Paul (if not written by him) and half of Acts is given over to his deeds and words. Paul did the theology that has shaped much of Christian thought, though he didn't walk with Jesus, or eat his fish and bread.
Paul doesn't talk that much about what Jesus taught, he interprets the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ. Was it good theology? Why Paul?
Mythic Trope or Real, New Good News?
Is there something particular about Paul that qualifies him for such an enormous role? Luke might be trying to convince us that there is by relating such a dramatic conversion—a flashing light, a voice from heaven. Paul is struck blind and then miraculously cured. I don’t find the flashing light and the voice from heaven all that persuasive. It's too Cecil B. DeMille. I've read a lot of folktales—this sort of thing happens all the time.
I suppose it's hard to describe what happens in a conversion or a call, and Luke is probably just trying to do his best, but in his own letters, Paul never uses such mythic trope, though he does claim that Jesus appeared to him. The surface story in Acts is like a thousand other tales—is there something underneath that is like real new good news?
The Voice
I'm struck by the opening, where Paul is "breathing threats and murder." Imagine what that felt like in his esophagus. I feel like I'm going to suffocate just hearing about it. Paul believed he was zealous for God, but spent his time opposing people, a bit viciously. It doesn't sound like he was feeling the joy and the beauty and the freedom.
It's a little odd in this story how compliant Paul is to The Voice, he seems to take it in quietly. Being quiet is not very Pauline (later Luke will tell a funny story where Paul talks so long into the night, that a boy falls asleep and then out of the window). Is it just that Paul is silenced by the drama? Or does the content of the message stun him. "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Paul thought he was protecting God, protecting "goodness." It's like scales fall from his eyes when he recognizes he was not.
Beginning to Believe
His letters reveal that this struck a deep chord, "I do not do the thing that I want, but I do the very thing that I hate." Believing in his version of goodness led to judgment and violence, but by the grace of God he began to believe, we could move from self-righteousness to love, from judgment to mercy, from exclusion to embrace.
Perhaps there are moments when perception shifts, when something like conversion happens—and it isn't the same as being raised in the church. It isn't really about belief, exactly—it is the moments we are freed from judgment, self-righteousness, the incessant compulsion to denigrate others to bolster our perceived goodness.
There is no such thing as righteous violence. Paul is the apostle who will, more than anyone, try to convince us that we are not, actually, righteous—but we live and breathe and love by the grace of god. It can never be about "us versus them"—it is about oneness.
This is what enables him to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.
The Hardest Question
So. Why then does the voice of the church in Luke, so often sound like "us and them" where the Jews are concerned? How is it that Luke ends up telling a story that seems friendlier to empire than Judaism?
The implications of this historically are obvious. Christianity becomes the religion of The Empire (with all it's brutality in the name of Christ) and the Jews become scapegoats in truly horrific ways.
Were the seeds for this violence planted in this text, or does the responsibility lie with interpreters?
Debbie Blue is one of the founding pastors of House of Mercy in St. Paul, MN. Her lastest book, Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to the Birds of the Bible (Abingdon) will be released in August, 2013. She lives on a farm with her family, friends, and animals.
