25^th January, Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul

Before the risen Lord appeared to Paul on the road outside Damascus, he was a very religious person. As a devoted Jew, he really wanted to do God’s will. That is why he persecuted the members of the church. He saw them as Jews who had gone off the rails and who could easily lead other Jews astray if they weren’t stopped. Yet, in persecuting this group of Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, he was actually persecuting Jesus himself who was God’s beloved Son. This was the discovery he made when, Jesus, the risen Lord, appeared to him in a bright light and Paul heard Jesus ask him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Jesus didn’t ask Paul, ‘Why are you persecuting my followers?’ The risen Lord identified himself so closely with his followers that to persecute them was to persecute him. Paul was persecuting the members of Jesus’ body. We are all members of the Lord’s body. We are now his hands, his feet, his eyes, his ears. Later on, Paul would write to the church in Corinth, ‘You are the body of Christ and individually members of it’. Earlier in that letter he wrote, ‘when you sin against the brothers and sisters (the members of the church)… you sin against Christ’. Paul learned a lesson on the road to Damascus that he never forgot. We meet the risen Lord in each other. We serve the Lord by serving one another; we reject the Lord by rejecting one another. Through baptism, each of us is a member of Christ’s body, which gives us a very special dignity. It also gives us a very special calling. We are to allow Jesus to come into the world through us. He wants us, needs us, to be his hands and feet and eyes and ears and mouth. ‘Christ has no body now but yours’, in the words of St Teresa of Avilla.