WE COME, on Saturday, to the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, that cataclysmic, utterly unlikely, and therefore utterly unexpected event that changed the course of history, both for the Church and the world. Even those who never darken a church door know what it is to speak of a “road-to-Damascus” experience, a Damascene conversion.
So much flows from this event, not least for a world polarised into opposing camps, eager to categorise others as enemies; for this feast is a reminder that people change: they change their minds; they change sides. The person whom you regard as dangerous, as “breathing threats and slaughter”, or, indeed, the person against whom you are “breathing threats and slaughter”, or, perhaps, tweeting threats and slaughter, may, at any moment, change so radically as to become your friend and ally.
As to Saul’s own conversion, that moment when Saul becomes Paul, it is no coincidence that it happens on the road to Damascus; for it was at the Damascus Gate that Saul not only witnessed the martyrdom of Stephen, but egged the others on, and held their coats for them while they were gathering the stones. And so it was through that gate, and past the place where Stephen himself saw Christ as he was dying, that Paul rode towards Damascus. And, when he, too, encountered Christ, and was literally knocked off his high horse, Christ did not say “Saul, Saul why did you assist in the murder of Stephen? Why are you persecuting my followers?’”, but “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
We can see, in that searching question of Christ’s, the origin of Paul’s entire theology of the Church as the body of Christ. As Paul came to discover, the road to Damascus was not his first encounter with the risen Christ; for, without knowing it, he had met and persecuted Christ, in the bruised and dying body of Stephen.
In some ways, it is a pity there’s such a gap between the Feast of St Stephen and the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, because the one is the seed of the other; for the blood of the martyrs is, indeed, the seed of the Church. Stephen’s dying prayer, “Do not hold this sin against them,” was answered emphatically by Christ when Paul first encountered the sheer grace of God, the grace of which he would become the great apostle, on that Damascus road. I tried to articulate something of that in a sonnet addressed to Stephen:
Witness for Jesus, man of fruitful blood,
Your martyrdom begins and stands for all.
They saw the stones, you saw the face of God,
And sowed a seed that blossomed in St Paul.
When Saul departed breathing threats and slaughter
He had to pass through that Damascus gate
Where he had held the coats and heard the laughter
As Christ, alive in you, forgave his hate,
And showed him the same light you saw from heaven
And taught him, through his blindness, how to see.
Christ did not ask “Why were you stoning Stephen?”
But “Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
Each martyr after you adds to Christ’s story,
As clouds of witness shine through clouds of glory.