Canter Bridge

It is not only the New Testament’s explanation of grace that presses home the counterintuitive reality that no human being is beyond the reach of God’s grace. It is also its story.

But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. (Acts 9:1–2 ESV)

The Jesus’ movement’s archetypal apostle to the nations casts a long shadow over its pages. Paul—or Saul, as he is here identified by his Hebrew name—travels extensively, writes expansively, ponders well beyond conventional boundaries, shapes the Christian mind as no other New Testament author. If Peter, James, and John leave their fingerprints across the New Testament corpus, Paul pushes a large foot and a broad hand into its wet cement.

None invests more words in articulating the fact and the wonder of grace than the man so iconic that he can be identified merely by referring to the apostle.

Yet his words flow from his own lived story of having been ambushed by grace. The opening verses of Acts 9 offer up its prologue. They bear slow reading.

It can be guessed that Paul’s religiously motivated violence was largely aspirational. That is, its center of gravity rested on purpose, intent, and preparation rather than execution, even if we find the young Saul minding the garments of Stephen’s murderers and encounter him much feared by his eventual brothers and sisters in the newborn Christian faith. Yet it must not be doubted that some families were shattered by his bullish zealotry, young promise nipped in the bud, widows and orphans left to fend for themselves or be cared for by the new movement as it learned the ways of community and even communality. The verbal expression of violence by influential people rarely fails to create actual physical violence. Doubtless, it didn’t fail here.

Yet Acts speaks of him breathing threats and murder, of working his connections to officialize his violent scheme. Paul was a word guy as well as a man of action.

Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’ (Acts 9:3–6 ESV)

Can we but wonder that Saul should be turned?

Good gente might be expected to find their way into the new movement eventually, perhaps from time to time with polite reluctance about the cutting of ties and the felt betrayal of tradition.

But Saul?

Murderer, in word and inevitably in deed, even if he kept his own hands washed? Bestial exhaler of threat and violence?

If any man is out of reach, it is Saul, destined by his record and his lethal bullying to be shoved to the margins of grace or from time to time served up as a foil to it.

Saul, most definitely, is out of reach.

Yet his story comes to grace.

Which makes a way for mine.