repeating the story in chapter 13 in a shortened form, saying that the men
saw the light but didn’t hear anything. It does not mean that he made a
mistake and tried to correct it, it must have been a deliberate contradiction to
point out a special insight, namely that seeing and listening, a realisation
through senses and a language interpretation belong together in a de eply
religious experience.
Those who have only the seeing or the listening are lacking an important
aspect. It might be that we can read a religious text, we can hear the words
but do not see the meaning with our hearts, and so we might lack faith, or if
we only have some religious emotion but no scripture or liturgy we miss out
on something important. Paul had experienced both, the seeing through his
senses and the hearing in what Jesus was telling him.
In the Book of Job there is a similar text when Job is described as a pious
man who tries to follow the law, but only once he calls out to God in his
misery he gains a real trust in Him, saying: ’Until now I only knew you from
hearsay, but now my eye has seen you’.
There is another message we can gain from Luke’s account when Paul
asks, ‘Who are you’. This can be seen as the moment of his conversion, as
the man, full of himself, turns to find out somebody else, he who wanted just
to arrest the anonymous people, followers of the new way, wanted a name,
a person to talk to him. Before that, his opinion which decided between good
and evil was more important than the human beings concerned. Here he
showed a serious interest in the person confronting him, a person with a
name. And he subsequently accepted help from others to lead him to
Damascus, the story has a consoling end.
The Lukas account shows us that we should not seek the truth of biblical
accounts in historical correctness but in what it can tell us today. It is an
account of experiencing God’s presence and what this can do to change
people, how it is a force of reconciliation. There is rarely a story like this,
relating to the name of the Syrian capital, more up-to-date than this one.
Brigitte Williams
For news of activities and events across the seven dioceses of the Scottish
Episcopal Church, check out the diocesan websites:
Aberdeen & Orkney www.aberdeen.anglican.org
Argyll & The Isles www.argyll.anglican.org
Brechin www.brechin.anglican.org
Edinburgh www.edinburgh.anglican.org
Glasgow & Galloway www.glasgow.anglican.org
Moray, Ross & Caithness www.morayepiscopalchurch.scot
St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane www.standrews.anglican.org
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