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St. Paul — The Catholic Saint Who Hunted Christians Before He Became One · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

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  The road to Damascus is dry and hot under the midday sun. A man is walking it with a group
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  of companions or riding the account stone specify. Moving north from Jerusalem toward Damascus,
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  the great city of Syria. He has papers in his hand, official papers issued by the high priest
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  authorizing him to enter the synagogues of Damascus, identify any followers of Jesus he
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  finds there and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. He has done this before, and he
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  is good at it. And then, without warning, a light flashes from the sky, not a gradual brightening,
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  a sudden, total, blinding light that drops him to the ground. And a voice says, Saul, Saul,
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  why are you persecuting me? He says, who are you, Lord? And that word Lord in the original
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  Greek is simply a respectful address to a powerful unknown presence. He is not yet declaring
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  faith. He has no idea who he is speaking to. He is a man knocked flat by a blinding light,
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  asking the only question he can think to ask. And the voice says, I am Jesus whom you are
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  persecuting. That is the moment the word Lord becomes something completely different. He
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  used it as Sir. He will spend the rest of his life meaning something else entirely by it.
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  He lies on the ground, blind, in the dust of the Damascus road. The companions who were
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  with him are standing there speechless. They heard something. The accounts differ on exactly
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  what they experienced, but the man lying in the road heard a voice that knew his name.
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  He will be blind for three days. He will not eat or drink. He will sit in a house on a street
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  in Damascus and wait for whatever comes next. What comes next will change the world.
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  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. If you are new here, welcome to our
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  porch. Stick around and if this connects with you, subscribe so you don't miss next week.
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  We drop a new saint every Thursday. Before we get into today's episode, I want to take a
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  quick moment to acknowledge something. Last weekend was the 4th of July. And not just any
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  4th of July, the 250th birthday of the United States of America. I am actually up in South
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  Dakota on a work trip when this episode airs, so I recorded this a week early, but I did
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  not want to let that milestone go without saying something. To every American listener, and
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  80 % of you are Americans, I want you to know I appreciate you. I appreciate all of you.
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  I hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend. I hope you were with the people you love doing
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  something that felt like freedom, which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to introduce
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  today's story. Because the man we are talking about this week spent 30 years of his life
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  traveling the known world at enormous personal cost. Beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked. Because
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  he believed something was worth being free for. 250 years ago, a group of people decided
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  the same thing was worth it. Happy July 4th. Okay. This week, we are telling the story of
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  a known saint, one of the most recognizable names in all of Christianity. A man whose letters
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  make up roughly half the New Testament. A man who founded churches across the known world
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  on foot. A man whose thinking has shaped Western civilization in ways most people have never
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  traced back to their source. But before all of that, he was the most dangerous enemy the
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  early church had. His name was Saul of Tarsus, and we know him as Saint Paul. To understand
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  what happened on that road, you have to understand who was walking it. Saul was born in the city
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  of Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey, one of the most important commercial hubs in the
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  Roman Empire. He was Jewish, from a respected family. He was also a Roman citizen by birth.
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  which was rare and valuable. See, Roman citizenship came with legal protections and rights that
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  most people living under Roman rule simply did not have. It was, in practical terms, like
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  being born with a passport that opened doors most people couldn't get through. He was a
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  Pharisee. If you have heard that word and never been quite sure what it meant, The Pharisees
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  were the most serious and most rigorous sect within 1st century Judaism. Think of them
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  as the scholars, the keepers of the law, the ones who took every detail of their faith with
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  complete seriousness and expected everyone else to do the same. Saul was not casual Pharisee.
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  He trained in Jerusalem under one of the most respected teachers in the Jewish world. the
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  equivalent of getting your doctorate from the most prestigious institution in the country.
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  He was brilliant, disciplined, and by his own later account, more zealous for his faith than
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  almost anyone around him. Picture what that looked like practically. A young man of fierce
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  intelligence and genuine deep religious conviction, absolutely certain that he understood what
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  God required, and absolutely certain that followers of Jesus were a dangerous heresy that needed
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  to be stopped. Here is why he felt that way and why it actually made sense from where he
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  stood. The early followers of Jesus were claiming something that, to a devout Jew, was almost
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  unthinkable. They were saying that a carpenter from Galilee who had been publicly executed,
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  crucified the most shameful death the Roman Empire could administer was the promised Messiah,
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  the one Israel had been waiting for, the Son of God, and that he had risen from the dead.
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  If that claim was true, it changed everything. If it was false, and Saul was absolutely certain
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  it was false, it was blasphemy of the worst kind, a lie about God dressed up as the most
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  important thing that had ever happened. And Saul, believed it was his religious duty to
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  stop it. So he did something about it. He was present the day a man named Stephen was killed.
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  Stephen was one of the early followers of Jesus, dragged before the religious authorities in
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  Jerusalem, accused of blasphemy and condemned. The men who carried out the execution laid
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  their outer cloaks at Saul's feet so he could watch without getting his hands dirty. He didn't
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  throw a single stone. He just stood there and approved. And then he went further. He went
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  house to house through Jerusalem, dragging out men and women who followed Jesus and throwing
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  them into prison. He was not a bystander to the persecution of the early church. He was
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  its engine. He was so effective and so committed that the high priest, the top religious authority
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  in Jerusalem, gave him official written authorization to travel north to the city of Damascus and
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  do the same thing there. That is who was walking the Damascus road. A man who was actively,
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  intelligently, wholeheartedly certain he was doing God's will by destroying what would eventually
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  become the largest religion in human history. And God chose him anyway. He was led into Damascus
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  by his own hand, the most feared persecutor of the early church, helpless, blind, being
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  guided through the streets like a child. He was brought to the house of a man named Judas
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  on a street called Strait, a street that still exists in Damascus today, one of the oldest
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  continuously inhabited streets in the world. And there Saul sat for three days, blind, not
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  eating. not drinking, praying. Three days. I think those three days deserve more attention
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  than they usually get because what was happening in that house, in that darkness, in that silence
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  was a demolition. Everything Saul had been concerned about for his entire life was gone,
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  dismantled in a single moment on a dirt road. And now he was sitting in the dark trying to
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  figure out what was left. He had been certain Jesus was a fraud. He had been certain the
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  Christians were blasphemers. He had been certain that his persecution of them was righteous.
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  Every single one of those certainties had been demolished on a dirt road outside Damascus
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  in a moment he could not explain, could not rationalize, and could not walk back from.
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  He lay in that house for three days, in the dark, and The person who walked out of it
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  was not the same person who had walked in. Meanwhile, across the city, a disciple named Ananias
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  was having his own difficult experience. Jesus appeared to Ananias in a vision and told him
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  to go to the house of Judas, find the man called Saul, and lay hands on him to restore his sight.
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  Ananias' response is one of the most understandable moments in the story. He essentially says,
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  Lord, I have heard about this man. I know what he has done in Jerusalem. I know why he came
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  to Damascus. And you want me to go find him? And Jesus says, yes, he is my chosen instrument.
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  Ananias went, he found Saul. He laid his hands on him and said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus
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  who appeared to you on the road has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with
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  the Holy Spirit. He could see again. He got up and was baptized. He ate. He regained his
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  strength. And then he went straight to the synagogues of Damascus, the same synagogues he had arrived
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  with arrest warrants to visit, and began preaching that Jesus was the Son of God. The people who
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  heard him were understandably confused. Is this not the man, they said, who came here to arrest
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  the followers of Jesus? What is happening? What was happening was this. The most effective
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  persecutor of the early church had just become its most effective evangelist, and nobody on
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  either side was quite ready for that. Before we go any further, I want to address something
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  you may have already noticed, or maybe about to notice. Up to this point, I have been calling
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  him Saul. From here on, I am going to call him Paul, and I want to explain why, because it
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  is not what most people think. He was not given the name Paul on the Damascus road. Jesus did
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  not rename him the way he renamed Simon as Peter. Saul already had both names his entire life.
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  Saul was his Jewish name. Paul was his Roman name. Having two names like this was completely
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  normal for a Jewish-Roman citizen of this era. The reason the name shifts here is simply that
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  his story is about to shift. He is moving from the Jewish world of Jerusalem into a broader
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  Roman and Greek world, and in that world, Paul is the name that traveled better. So, that
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  is what we will call him from this point forward. Same man, different road. Here's the part of
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  Paul's story that most retellings skip over, and I think it's one of the most humanly honest
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  parts. When Paul tried to join the disciples in Jerusalem after his conversion, they were
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  afraid of him. Of course they were. These were people who had watched their friends and family
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  members dragged from their homes by this man, who had fled Jerusalem because of him, who
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  knew his reputation for breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. That's
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  the actual phrase the scripture uses. Breathing out murderous threats. That is who he had been
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  weeks or months earlier. And now he shows up saying he has converted? It took a man named
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  Barnabas, one of the early disciples, known for his generosity and his willingness to vouch
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  for people, to stand up for Paul and explain what had happened on the road. Barnabas brought
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  Paul to the apostles. He told them the story. He made the case. Slowly, painfully, Paul began
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  to earn the trust of the community he had been trying to destroy. I think about what that
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  must have felt like. To know what you had done. To walk into rooms where the people looked
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  at you with fear, legitimate fear, earned fear, fear you had personally given them every reason
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  to have. To know that no matter what you said, the only way to demonstrate that you had changed
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  was to change, visibly, consistently, over time, in the places where it was hardest. Paul did
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  not seem to shrink from it. He seems, if anything, to have leaned into this discomfort with the
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  same energy he had brought to everything else in his life. Within days of his baptism, He
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  was already arguing in synagogues that Jesus was the Christ. People tried to kill him almost
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  immediately. They would keep trying for the rest of his life. What Paul did in the 30 years
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  after Damascus is, by any historical measure, extraordinary. He traveled constantly, by foot,
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  by ship, through weather and terrain that would challenge a fit young man. And Paul was not
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  young. and was not, by all accounts, physically impressive. He describes himself in his letters
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  as unimpressive in person and his bodily presence is weak. He suffered from some kind of chronic
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  physical ailment that he called a thorn in the flesh and he prayed repeatedly to be healed
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  of and never was. But he pressed forward anyway. He was beaten with rods three times. He was
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  whipped with 39 lashes, five times. He was shipwrecked, three times, once spending a
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  night and a day floating in open ocean. He was stoned and left for dead. He was imprisoned
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  multiple times. He was in danger from rivers, from bandits, from his own people, from the
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  Gentiles, in cities, in the wilderness, at sea. But he kept going. He planted churches across
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  the Mediterranean world, such as in Galatia, in Philippi, in Thessalonica, in Corinth, in
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  Ephesus, in Rome. In cities where nobody had heard of Jesus, Paul arrived with nothing,
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  no money, no political connections, no army, no institutional support, and left with a community
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  of believers who would sustain and grow for centuries. He wrote. His letters to the Romans,
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  to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Thessalonians, to others, are among the oldest
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  documents in the New Testament, written within 20 years of the resurrection. They wrestle
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  directly and honestly with what it means to live as a follower of Jesus in a world that
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  does not share that commitment. They are pastoral and theological and personal and occasionally
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  very funny in a sharp, exasperated way. He wrote, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens
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  me. He wrote, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,
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  neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything
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  else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God. He wrote these things
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  from prison. He was beheaded in Rome. probably around 64 or 65 AD under the Emperor Nero.
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  He was approximately 60 years old. He had been a follower of Jesus for roughly 30 years, which
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  is about the same length of time he had spent not being one. He died on the same road, in
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  the same city, within a few years of the same emperor's persecution that killed Peter, who
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  was our saint from episode 1. The man who had once watched Christians die, died as one of
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  them, with, as far as the record suggests, the same absolute conviction he had brought to
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  everything else in his life. All right, back on the porch. The thing about Paul's story
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  that I find most striking, and personally uncomfortable if I'm going to be honest, is not the Damascus
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  Road. It's what came after it. It's the 30 years. Paul could have had the Damascus Road experience
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  and then just retreated, gone quiet, decided that his job was simply to stop doing harm
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  and live humbly and privately and just not make too much noise about any of it. mean, given
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  the damage he had caused, that would have been understandable, maybe even reasonable. But
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  he didn't do that. He went to the synagogue the same week. He went to Jerusalem. and made
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  himself known. He traveled for 30 years through beatings and shipwrecks and prisons and attempted
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  murders, building something in city after city after city. He seemed to understand that the
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  same energy, the same intelligence, and the same relentless forward motion that had made
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  him so effective as a persecutor, those were not bad things in themselves. They were the
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  tools. What changed was what he used them for. I think a lot of us look at our own histories,
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  the versions of ourselves we're not proud of, the harm we've caused, the people we've hurt,
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  the ways we used our energy and intelligence and drive in directions we now regret. And
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  we conclude that the right response is to become smaller, to hold back. to cautious and quiet
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  and careful in ways we weren't before. Paul is not telling you that your past doesn't matter.
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  He carried his past visibly. He mentions his persecution of the church in multiple letters,
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  never hiding from it. But he is telling you something specific about what to do with the
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  energy you have, not to suppress it, but to redirect it. The same fire just different direction.
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  I will be honest, I've been sitting with that question for myself since I started researching
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  this episode. There are things I have been cautious with, held back from, dialed down, because
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  of a version of myself I was not proud of. And Paul is asking me, and maybe asking you, whether
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  caution is actually the right response. Or whether the right response, is to take that same energy
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  and point it somewhere it can actually do something. So, the practical challenge this week. Think
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  about one quality in yourself that you have used badly in the past, or that you have been
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  suppressing out of guilt, and ask what it would look like to redirect it. Not to perform redemption
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  publicly, just to ask honestly and privately, what could this become? if I pointed it somewhere
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  true. And now it is time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Paul. Thank you that you
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  stopped a man on a road and asked him a question instead of writing him off. Thank you that
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  you chose as your instrument someone who had done real and serious harm and then used the
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  same qualities that made him so dangerous. builds something that is still standing 2,000 years
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  later. For everyone listening who is carrying the weight of a past they are not proud of,
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  remind them of Paul on the road. Remind them that the question isn't whether you have done
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  damage. The question is, what you do with the rest of the road. And for anyone who is afraid
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  to trust someone who says they have changed, give them the wisdom of Barnabas. the courage
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  to vouch for someone who deserves a second look. We love you, even when the road knocks us
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  flat. Amen. One more thing before we go. Paul is the patron saint of missionaries, evangelists,
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  writers, and journalists, which fits, given that he essentially invented the Christian
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  letter as a literary form. He is also the patron saint of tent makers, which is his actual trade.
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  the skill he used to support himself financially while he planted churches across the Mediterranean.
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  He made tents. He changed the world. He shares his feast day with Peter, June 29th, which
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  feels right. The fishermen who denied Jesus three times and the zealot who hunted Christians
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  for a living together on the same day. Two men who failed in ways that should have disqualified
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  them. Two men who became the foundation of everything that came after. His conversion on the road
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  to Damascus is also celebrated separately on January 25th, a feast day that goes back to
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  the earliest centuries of the Church. The day a man fell off his horse, heard his name called,
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  and never looked back. Well, that is episode 9 of Everyday Saints. If Paul's story hits
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  you somewhere, share it. One person, someone who might need to hear that the same energy
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  that drove them in the wrong direction can be redirected. That the fire itself is not the
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  problem. Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely helps more people find the show.
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  Next week, we go back to looking in places nobody else looks. Someone history almost completely
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  forgot. A story from a world most people know nothing about and a courage that is going to
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  stay with you. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the porch with us. See you next
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  week.