Rider Off His Horse

T

wo years ago Joe and I hiked a fair distance across the city of Rome to get to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo to see two paintings by the famous Caravaggio. The hike was well worth every step. For hanging in a chapel so dark that one has to pay a coin to turn on a flood light just for a little while to see them, the paintings depict the crucifixion of St. Peter and the conversion of St. Paul. Peter is shown head down, the position in which tradition says he was crucified having refused to be affixed to his cross upright like Jesus. In the companion painting, Paul has fallen off his horse onto the ground. The viewer sees him too as head down.

Caravaggio, Conversion of St. Paul, 1601

Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St. Peter

That is the first of many clues that the artist has seized the core truth of Paul’s conversion. This is his moment of crucifixion—the earth-shattering experience of the Holy that amounts to nothing less than the death of Saul as he has been known by all including himself up to then. He later writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”[1] What Paul is talking about there is not just the incident of his conversion, though it is clear that that experience never left him. He is speaking of the way his whole life, his mind, his commitment radically shifted as a result. And that shift, we know from Paul’s own account, did not happen overnight. He tells the Galatians that though he once put his confidence in the Law those days are over as he sees that the only way one is made whole (“justified,” he calls it) is through a relationship (that’s what “faith” is) to and in Christ Jesus.

Quite frankly all of that sounds like so much religious talk, so divorced from everyday life, until I begin thinking of it in the terms and conditions of my own life. I invite you to consider, for example, what it is that you hinge your everyday life on. I’m not talking about your religious practices, which I don’t doubt you take seriously. But look at the things that keep the average person going. Any such general sketch would certainly be a dismissive caricature of the truth, but still I think we could probably say that for many of us it would be our need of basic survival. Will I have enough to eat? Do I have enough income to live on, and maybe even a bit more so I can do some things I want to? Am I secure? Will there be someone to help me should I need help?

We can go on from there. I can tell you that for most men I know the questions at the center of life are whether we can prove ourselves through our work, how well can we provide what we are expected to provide, how much we’ll be able to protect those who look to us for protection, and how well we’ll be able to perform in the various arenas in which men are expected to perform. Those questions dominate the way we live and the way we feel about ourselves, at least until we undergo a dramatic shift in the way we configure our lives.

And what about women? I can’t speak for women, but I can tell you what I observe. I observe that women value self-expression and find it devastatingly difficult to live in a world run by many men who both as individuals and as those who control systems consistently undervalue women, and sometimes devalue them outright. I observe women deeply devoted to home and children and friends in lifegiving ways. Women on the whole seem to me to value relationships not for what relationships can do for them but because they perceive themselves profoundly connected to others in ways that we men often do not.

I’m not arguing that these things apply to everyone, or that there is no interchangeability among those of different genders and sexual identities. But if you recognize anything that hints of your own life, then you can see what it is that your basic life structure is, and that is what I’m getting at. That is what the “Law” was for Paul. It framed his entire existence. It gave him his self-understanding. It provided for him a connection to what was the ultimate truth about his life. So when that was blasted open by this unexpected intrusion from the Risen Jesus, the old Saul breathed his last.

Interestingly, Caravaggio picks up on another piece of the story of Paul’s conversion. There are three accounts in the Book of Acts of this story, arguably the most significant event outside of the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the whole of Christian history. In this first one we learn that Paul lost his sight and was in darkness for three days. Who else was in darkness for three days? We can think of two. Most obviously Jesus: in the tomb until “the third day.” But don’t forget Jonah, the Old Testament man who spent three days in the belly of the fish, traditionally spoken of as the “whale.” Recall that Jesus is quoted as having once said that his generation would be given no sign but the sign of Jonah. Whatever else that might have meant or have come to mean, it is a definite reference to death and rebirth. So Paul undergoes what his baptism subsequently acted out and which he himself explained the symbolism of baptism to be: a union with Christ in his death. A whole new Paul is born, raised from the old life of obedience to the Law to a new life in union with the Risen Lord.

In the hand of Caravaggio, this truth is painted in light and darkness. The blinding light that strikes Paul has knocked him off his high horse. We see him lying on the ground in the foreground, his face in full light. Almost nothing else is visible, only the horse and one lone figure partly in the shadows, obviously a groom who is apparently oblivious to this moment and all that it means as he goes about quietly caring for the horse. The horse is gigantic compared to the grounded Paul, helpless, defenseless, utterly dethroned from his previous perch. Paul’s helmet has bounced off his head and lies in the dirt, his arms are raised forming an upside down triangle with his light-blinded face the nadir. Caravaggio invites us into this strange episode in a human life, struck by the light that enlightens every man including this unlikely fellow who so recently was denying the Light of Christ and working to douse its spread. Paul will come to embody that old promise of the Light to enlighten the Gentiles and thus will he turn the Way of Jesus into a path of transformation for all into a kingdom where there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female but where all are one in Christ Jesus.

If there ever were an Easter story that is cut out for you and me, this is it. The others, like the story of the Risen Lord fixing breakfast for a band of disciples returned to their old work of fishing, tell us that this mysterious figure who at first we do not recognize is both one who knows us intimately and one whom we intuitively know because he is our Food far truer than the fish we catch and cook.[2]

That in a real sense is what Resurrection is. Not the far-off event of some heaven in the sky, but the Presence of the Holy One who shakes our lives like thunder. Many Christians have imagined through the years that faith in Jesus by necessity begins with a conversion experience that can be described, deciphered, and dated much like the one that happened to Paul. Sometimes that is true. But far more ordinary is the truth that conversion is an ongoing resurrection that continues throughout life. Paul’s own account of his conversion, most graphically detailed in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, indicates that it literally took him years to work through the implications of his conversion experience to the point that he became the first major interpreter of the Christ event, especially to the Gentiles. He tell us that he immediately went to what we today call Jordan, a land of Gentiles in the desert he calls Arabia. After a stint of three years he returned to Damascus. After one fortnight in Jerusalem visiting Peter and a few of the other leaders, he returned to Damascus. After fourteen years had passed he had a revelation that prompted him to return to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus, ultimately launching the full-scale mission to the Gentiles with the blessing of the Early Church’s leaders.

Fortunately we have this autobiographical account that dispels any fantasy that resurrection to a New Life in Christ is a breeze. Paul’s life, like that of Peter and the other apostles, was anything but a breeze. He bore in his body the marks of Jesus’ crucifixion. He hardly wore the cross as a piece of jewelry or a cool tattoo but on his soul as the inspiration for and seal of a changed life. At one point he describes himself and his fellow workers in these words:

We have commended ourselves in every way through great endurance in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors sleepless nights, hunger;… We are treated as imposters and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.[3]

Life in Jesus is not all sweetness and light, but it surely contains sweetness and light. And it contains both, neither ignoring nor exaggerating all the sufferings that Paul enumerates and more.

Most of us are content with looking on the bright side of things despite the gloom we go through. Sometimes in truth that is the best we can do. But there’s more. Not more that we must do or somehow more that God expects of us. But more because it actually can be a noble and brave act to let go rather than to double down on being cheerful or positive or whatever we might try by way of dealing with trouble. It is the letting go that we see in Jesus when he is in the midst of the agony in the garden. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not what I will but what you will.”[4] It is the letting go that we hear Paul expressing to the Philippians:

Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him… I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death….”[5]

Paul sees that that is the way of living the resurrection, a resurrection that he lived from that day of his crucifixion when the heavenly vision and blinding light left him lying in the dirt of the Damascus road. He has learned to be abased and to abound, and to be content in whatever state he finds himself.[6] He has in himself and commends to us the mind of Christ Jesus who humbled himself to face and own his mortality, even though it meant death of a cross.[7] He knows and proclaims that there are only three things that abide after all else is done: faith, hope, and love. He knows that the greatest thing in all the world is love.[8] That is all the gospel we know, and all we need to know.

 A sermon  for the Third Sunday of Easter, Year C in the Revised Common Lectionary, on the text of Acts 9:1-20

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019

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[1] Galatians 2:19-20a, NRSV.

[2] John 21:9-14.

[3] 2 Corinithians 6:4-10 passim, NRSV.

[4] Matthew 20:22; Mark 10:38; Luke 22:42.

[5] Philippians 3:7-10, NRSV.

[6] Philippians 4:12ff.

[7] Philippians 2:5-11.

[8] 1 Corinthians 13:13.