Daily Lesson for January 25, 2018

Today we remember the Conversion of St Paul and draw our Lesson from Philippians chapter 3 verses 4 through 9:

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 

In St Paul’s conversion we see the death of a righteousness zeal based in race and clan and tribe and the mythic ideal of a person who wears the white hat in fighting against all the so-called “bad guys”, and a deep realization of one’s own inner inconsistencies, blindness, prejudice, and unrighteousness. Paul discovers his need for grace on the Damascus Road, where he finally sees his own blindness in persecuting the righteous in the name of the righteousness. In a word, this is blasphemy — doing the world of evil in the name of God. Struck blind, Paul sees his own mistaken way and “converts” — meaning he changes. He comes to see his own blind spots. He comes to know himself from a place of humility — as a chief sinner saved by grace.

Reinhold Niebuhr said the final enigma of history is not how good is to defeat evil, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of our righteousness is to be overcome.

It was Paul’s righteous indignation and sense of superiority that were in fact the sources of his actual unrighteousness. His conversion led him to place of accepting himself and others with a righteousness that was not of his own or even of his own people. It was the righteousness that only those who know they are unrighteous can ever find. It was the righteousness that comes — not by law and order, or clan, or racial group, or religion — but by the grace of God alone, neither earned nor entitled but solely received like bread placed into the hands of a blind beggar.