Softened Scales

Acts 9:1–22 NRSV

Meanwhile 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 who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” All who heard him were amazed and said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name? And has he not come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?” Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Messiah.

I remember this story from my childhood. When my family really became Christians my mom went really really hard on our new identity. We read the whole bible together which I kind of remember, but what I remember even more was that she signed up for some automatic mail order thing that enabled us to acquire this entire series of VHS tapes that had animated bible stories.

The conversion of Saul must have been one of the first ones that we got because we watched that thing like it was going out of style. And we never got tired of it. So this story has really been big on my mind for all of my life.

I had heard the pastor and youth leaders and Dr. Charles Dobson from focus on the family talk about what it meant to get saved or converted to Christianity, but had never quite experienced such a dramatic change in someone. But the story of Saul helped me to understand the kind of thing that all of these people believed could happen when people experienced Jesus.

We are in a series of sermons called “Resurrected” where we are looking at the people who had profound experiences with the Risen Jesus and how their lives were transformed forever. We are seeing how these resurrection stories are just as valid for us today as they were for these first century people who encountered Jesus, and how we too are invited into the transformed life that Jesus’s resurrection offers us.

Now we’ve talked about quite a few folks that met with Jesus after the resurrection, but there is no one who had quite as rude of an encounter with Jesus (nor anyone who deserved and needed as rude of an encounter with him) as Saul of Tarsus.

Saul — whom you probably know more by the greek version of his name Paul — is perhaps one of the most complex characters in the Bible. But as we are going to see, that complexity is what makes the transformation that he experienced and the Gospel that he preached all the more compelling.

Saul of Tarsus was a devout Jewish leader. He was from the order of the Pharisees, which meant that he took the Torah — the book of the law — very seriously. Seriously to the point of extremism. He was, in his mind, living out his duty as a devout Jew.

But Saul wasn’t just an incredibly dedicated Jew, which by the way was a religion that you really needed to be born into. Saul was also a Roman Citizen — another privilege in life that one really had to be born into.

So when we look at the life of Jesus, and particularly the death of Jesus, we see 2 main groups of people that we blame for putting Jesus on the cross: The Pharisees who brought charges against Jesus and the Romans who sentenced him to death. And Paul identifies as both.

And we all know that being born into something doesn’t necessarily make you complicit in it… but that ain’t the case with old Saul. Saul is known for his brutal tactics when persecuting the followers of Jesus. In fact just a short time earlier Saul condoned the murder of the Apostle Stephen because of his insistence on preaching the Good News about Jesus.

So this is who we’ve got when we encounter our scripture today. Saul has killed already in order to preserve the purity of his religion and his worldview. And he is on his way to cause more damage in Damascus.

And then out of nowhere, Saul has a profound experience with the Risen Jesus. It is so profound that his heart is immediately set free, and his eyes are covered by scales that temporarily blind him.

The more that I read this and ponder this story the more that I think about the scales that Jesus places over Saul’s eyes. We don’t know the exact reasoning, but I believe that these are telling us something about what Jesus is showing Saul.

Saul had a heart that was hardened towards the world around him. Sure he was devout and believed that his extreme behavior was warranted because it showed the world how much he loved God and how seriously he took the laws of his religion, but he was deeply disconnected from love for God’s people.

Saul had a scaly hard heart. It caused him to oppress God’s people. And ironically this is the same language that was used to describe the Pharaoh of Egypt, who’s oppression of God’s people served as the foundational story of Israel (aka Paul’s People.) It was God who rescued and liberated Israel from this hardened heart of Pharaoh, and It was God who shows up again to rescue God’s people from Saul of Tarsus.

So I think Jesus let those scales move from Saul’s heart to his eyes so that for a few days he can really meditate on what his condition truly was. That for 3 he could really understand how wrong he had gotten it all — even if he was deeply convicted that he was right.

And this divine encounter with the resurrected Jesus changes everything for Saul. He is greeted by a man name Ananias who honestly has his own little come to Jesus resurrection moment in his submission to go and minister to this man who had been killing his friends, and when they meet the scales fall from Saul’s eyes.

And all the people that encounter this new Saul, this Saul who confesses Jesus as the Son of God are amazed, confused, and confounded. “Was this not the guy that was killing us last week?”

In a much later reflection about the grace of God, Paul writes to his apprentice Timothy

1 Timothy 1:12–17 NRSV

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Paul as he goes by now is not afraid to lay it out there like it was and is. Paul says, “I was the worst. And then something happened. I met him and he changed me forever, and he changed me for a purpose — to bring this message of God’s grace to the world.”

In the summer before my first year of high school I experienced this kind of Saul type transformation — this resurrection type change for myself. There was a pretty infamous kid in our middle school name John. I had gone to elementary school and all of middle school with John and I had watched John’s path of destruction unfold. He was a fighter, a drinker, started using drugs early, and was really a kid on a trajectory that could not end well.

But when that first week of school rolled around John came and sat with me and some of the other nerds he used to pick on in middle school at lunch. And he was not the same person. He told us about how he had encountered Jesus. He had a damascus road experience. It was kind of hard to believe.

But every day I would watch from my bus window as John walked across the school parking lot to the Baptist Church to go to see his pastor. After about a week I believed that John had changed in a profound way.

It’s almost ironic that this was the same time period that I was deconverting. John was on this path to new life with Jesus and I was walking the other direction. Like ships passing in the night John and I walked the same road, I was just walking it backwards.

But 12 years later I would have my own damascus road experience. Jesus would pull me out of the hole I had dug for myself. And now I understand what happened for John in the summer before 10th grade. Resurrection.

Saul’s story is a story that we have all been invited to share in. It’s a story of softened scales. How Jesus comes into our lives and causes the scales around our hard hearts to soften.

And listen, those scales… maybe some of them are just part of human nature. Sin has messed our world up something fierce. For some it’s worse than others. We don’t choose the world and the family that we are born into. And then we gradually just add scales as we experience this world and are hurt. We develop scales as we respond to trauma and as we respond to the cultural and historical moments that make up our present.

These scales protect us. They keep others out. They are our protective bubble that is makes up our worldview, our view of ourselves, and our view of other people in our world. And we love our scales. We think they are so pretty. We think they are the best, because we believe that we are just so right about everything.

This is Saul right? I’m the best Jew that ever did this thing and I’m going to scare this world into following my ways. I will end this church right here and right now. All in the name of God.

And we get down on Paul but we do this too. We’ve got our pet worldviews, our “non-negotiable” opinions that are rooted so deep in and around our hearts that we will literally harm the people around us that think differently than us all for the sake of being right.

Or maybe our scales are all a response to our messed up life and world. Our worldview is that the world stinks, life is pointless, and whatever vice we’ve clung to for relief from all this closes us off further and further from God and God’s people. The scales around our hearts harden and grow.

And all the while our hearts and screaming out from behind our scales for something new. And that something new is the Resurrected King of the Universe. The Christ, who comes and meets with us on the damascus road — wherever that may be for us.

And when we are willing to fall to our knees and just hear the voice of Jesus calling to us, then the scales begin to fall off. Maybe it’s profound and instantaneous like it was for Saul, or maybe it happens slowly over time. Regardless of the timeline, the truth is that when you and I meet with the resurrected Christ, our hearts are set free. The scales fall off, and we are able to love — to truly love God and the world around us.

All the mess of competing worldviews, extreme black and white thinking, brokenness, addiction, trauma, whatever it is can’t compete with the transformational love of Jesus. And this is the very good news of Saul’s conversion story for you and for me.

Whatever, whoever we are or were before we meet with the Risen Christ does not get the last word about us. The last word about us is that we are righteous, made clean, and marked for ministry to this world. And that’s a story that we can tell over and over again, and never get sick of hearing.