Testimony to Absolute Forgiveness
Anita John FSP
Paul’s story is a testimony to the absolute forgiveness that we are offered by Christ. If any man should have been condemned, it should have been Paul. He hunted Christians and sent them to prison, and perhaps even to torture and death. Yet, the Lord forgave him completely and made him one of the greatest servants in Christian history.
No life is useless or too far gone for God. He has a purpose for all of us and can forgive us no matter what, if we are willing to ask for His forgiveness and accept it as His gift to us. What miracle life might He have in store for you and me? Before Saint Paul’s conversion, he thought he was a very good man. He was full of zeal, convinced of the direction he was taking in life, and was very successful within the scope of the people who mattered to him. He had no idea that he was very misguided. Then the Lord entered his life, shook him up, blinded him, threw him to the ground and left him confused and unnerved for three days.
The About-Turn of St Paul
Fr John Rose, SJ
Conversion is a change of mind, and consequently, of life. In the human sense, it is getting off the wayward ways that only lead to harm, and on to those that take us to the goal that our being is truly seeking. There are significant persons in the New Testament who had a conversion experience after a personal encounter with Jesus—like Peter, Mary Magdalene and Zacchaeus—but none have been described at length, and so dramatically, as that of Paul of Tarsus. Its importance is so great that it is celebrated liturgically on January 25 every year, and this feast day enables us to appreciate what goes on in our own lives, a regular turning to God, and equivalently, to others.
Paul’s conversion is not to be understood in the ordinary sense, of merely turning from a bad to a good life. It could perhaps best be seen as a “Copernican” revolution. His conversion was not a moral one. No Jew could better him in moral behaviour, if what he tells about himself in Philippians 3:4-6 is to be believed. Nor was it a psychological one, even though what he says, “for I do not do the good I want, but the evil that I do not want is what I do” (Rom 7:19), could give that impression. In Romans 7, Paul is not making autobiographical statements, but making the “I” statements—those of a person who is caught up in a bind of having to fulfil the “law of God” at all costs.
