April 10, 2016 – The 3rd Sunday of Easter
© 2016 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here.
It’s the guy who offers
to help when your arms are full but causes you to spill your groceries in the
parking lot as he tries to take them out of your hands. It’s the husband who
puts the butter back into the fridge because he didn’t know you had put it on
the counter to soften it before making a cake. It’s the mother who instinctively
licks her thumb before wiping the smudge off her thirteen-year-old son’s cheek
while his friends watch and laugh. It’s the lean-in for a kiss when the woman
you’re with just wants to be friends.
Have you ever known
someone whose intentions were good but who ended up being as wrong as wrong can
be? Has that ever been you? What do you do when you realize that everything
you’ve done has actually made things worse? How do you handle that moment when
you see for the first time that all of your parenting instincts have made your
child as neurotic as you? What do you do when you come face to face with the
fact that, despite working for everything that is good and right in this world,
the real villain in the story is you?
For Saul, that fateful moment
on the road to Damascus wasn’t just an epiphany that signaled a career change
or a dramatic religious conversion. It was a total and complete repudiation of
everything he thought had been God’s will for his life and for the world. Jesus
didn’t show up to invite him into a new faith and a new life. This was God
knocking him down and making him blind so that Saul could finally see that
every instinct he had was in direct opposition to who God is and what God is
doing in the world.
As you might recall, Luke
is the author of the Book of Acts, which we read throughout the Easter season. And
I love how he tells this story of blindness and sight. In the bible, stories of
blindness are never just about physical sightlessness. They’re about a
spiritual failure, too. “Though his eyes were open,” Luke writes, “he could see
nothing.” Remember how the prophet Jeremiah described the “foolish and
senseless” people of God as those “who have eyes but do not see?” Similarly,
Luke wants us to know that even though Saul may have lost his sight in that
blinding flash of light, he had been walking around for a long time with spiritual
eyes that could not see the truth. And how things had caught up with him! Now,
instead of leading the murderous cause against the followers of Jesus, Saul was
“led by the hand and brought into Damascus.” Once powerful, he was now
helpless. Once a champion for religious purity, he now couldn’t even take care
of himself.
We get further insight into
what sort of blindness this was when we read about Saul’s response to his
affliction. As a treatment, he chose a fast—no food or drink for three
days—because he knew that this was the sort of spiritual malady that a doctor
could not cure. In response to his blindness, Saul chose an act repentance, and
remember that repentance is literally a turning around—a change of direction, a
reversal of course. When Jesus met Saul on the Damascene road, he stopped him
in his tracks. His deep-seated blindness had finally broken through. He could
go no further. He had to start from scratch. He had to find a new path.
Enter Ananias, the
faithful though timid disciple of Jesus, to whom the Lord appeared in a vision.
“Get up and go to the street called Straight,” the Lord told him, “and…look for
a man of Tarsus named Saul.” But Ananias was familiar with that name, and the
sound of it filled him with fear. “Lord, I have heard from many about this
man,” he said, “how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.” But God
wasn’t worried about that. He told Ananias to go anyway and lay hands on this
murderous zealot because God had decided to use Saul’s passion for the faith to
bring God’s name to Gentiles and kings. And the most remarkable part of it is
that Ananias did what God told him to do. His every instinct had told him that
Saul was an irreversible, ironclad enemy of the Way. But, when God appeared to
him in a vision, Ananias could see what God was doing—enough to believe that
God could do what no one would expect and turn the life of the arch-persecutor
of the church completely around.
“Brother Saul,” Ananias
said as he laid hands on him, “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.” Notice that the offer of physical healing was inseparable from the
promise of spiritual awakening. And, as he prayed, “immediately, something like
scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and his sight was restored.” Something had
occluded his vision—a reptilian-like covering that had blocked his sight. Now
that it was gone, the transformation was as complete as it was instantaneous. Luke
tells us that “he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he
regained his strength.” Remaining with the disciples in Damascus, Saul
“immediately…began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son
of God’” This man who was determined to destroy the name of Jesus as a threat
to the way of Israel’s God was now hailing the same Jesus as the Son of God who
had come to save the world. Could there be an about-face more dramatic than
that?
Don’t lose sight of how
Saul found himself in that predicament in the first place. Of what was he
guilty except loving God too much? What was his sin except working too hard to
protect the faith that he held dear? For his whole life, Saul had been
faithful. He had said his prayers. He had gone to synagogue. He had worshipped
in the temple. As a Pharisee, he had kept not only the law but also all of the
extra traditions of his faith. His persecution of the church was a direct
outgrowth of his faith in God—the same God who was and is the Father of Jesus
the Christ. How could this be? How could someone who loved God as much as Saul
find himself not only failing to see what God was doing but actively,
determinedly, and zealously fighting against it?
How? Because, as is so
true when human beings try too hard to do what they think is right, Saul was
blinded by his own efforts. The efforts themselves were what had gotten in the
way. Jesus had taught that a right relationship with God was defined not by how
holy someone’s life was but by how God’s love could make even a sinner holy in
God’s sight. Jesus taught that holiness came from God, not from a life
well-lived. And nothing could be further from the faith that Saul had practiced
his whole life. Nothing could be more threatening to the faith Saul had
inherited from his ancestors. Whatever it took, he was determined to destroy
this ungodly sect, and it took a blinding encounter with the risen Lord to help
Saul see that his own best intentions had led him to miss the truth completely.
How often do our own best
efforts get in the way of what God is doing in our lives and in the world? In
fact, it is our very best intentions that push the truth of God’s unearned,
unmerited, undeserved love further and further away. Human instinct casts God
as a parent whom we would please, a teacher whom we would impress, a deity whom
we would endear to us with our very best. That is the reptilian blindness that
is indicative of the human condition. We believe our efforts are good. We
believe that we are judged on what we do and how hard we try, but the harder we
try to do good the harder it is for us to believe that God loves us no matter
what. Saul had given his whole life to doing what he knew that God would want
him to do, but, until Jesus showed up and stopped him in his tracks, he was
blind to the fact that he was doing the exact opposite of God’s will.
The death of Jesus shows
us what happens when human beings believe that God can’t get it right without
our help. Our instincts are flawed. Our eyes, though open, are blind. But the
resurrection of Jesus shows us that God won’t let our misguided intentions
stand in the way of what he is doing in the world. Let the light of Easter
blind you. Be filled with the Holy Spirit and let the scales fall from your
eyes. Admit to God that your plan for your life and the world—no matter how
well-intentioned—isn’t as good as the grace-filled plan God has in mind. Surrender
to the truth of the resurrection— that God’s love for the world isn’t a
reflection of our efforts or intentions but is given to us despite them.
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