An Instrument Whom I Have Chosen

We’re studying Paul’s missionary journeys on Wednesday evenings during the Easter season, at the suggestion of our deacon. At the first session last week, someone loaned me a book on Paul that “was too boring to read.” I made my way through the first chapter long enough to get the main thesis: Christianity would not exist as a world religion without Paul. Jesus himself was just another no-name revolutionary put to death by the Romans; it was Paul who turned him into the Son of God. And Nero’s blaming of the Christians for burning Rome put them on the map. If Nero hadn’t created martyrs, Christianity would have died out.

The underlying assumption of the author, which is never voiced, is that of course Jesus could not really have been divine. Such things don’t happen in our rational world. Somebody had to put that idea in everyone’s head. And who else but Paul? It’s an old, well-trod path, separating the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith, as though we can better know what happened in the first century than the people who were closest to it. We’ll use what they wrote, but then tell you what they really meant and what really happened.

What really happened is something strange on the road to Damascus. Paul never describes the event in his letters, but Luke gives three accounts in the Acts of the Apostles, one within the narrative and two as parts of Paul’s defense before his accusers. All of the accounts are a little bit different, which shouldn’t be surprising. All include a blinding light, a voice, and a commission. Paul’s commission comes through Ananias, a disciple who is sent into the lion’s den, as it were, to minister to this person who had been hauling Christians off to jail. (“Saul, still breathing threats and murder” is how the story starts.) When Ananias protests, God says, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen…”

Paul always said that he was an apostle, sent by Christ, who appeared to him “last of all, as to one untimely born.” He counted himself the equal of (and sometimes better than) Simon Peter. But Paul didn’t go through the grilling Peter did. Peter had denied he knew Jesus three times in order to save his own skin, so when Jesus treated everyone to a post-resurrection breakfast, Peter had to say three times that he loved Jesus. Each time Jesus gave him a commission to “feed my sheep,” ending with the same words he had used when he first called Peter: “Follow me.” Peter, too, was an instrument whom God had chosen.

All of us are instruments of God. All of us have been chosen by God. Some days we sit like Paul, blinded, waiting for someone to come and show us the way. Or like Peter, having to be reminded multiple times what it is we are called to do. Other days the way is clear and the road straight. None of this has anything to do with Nero and the burning of Rome. Nor was it invented by Paul. Instead, it's what God had in mind all along – that each of us would hear in our own way the voice of the risen Jesus Christ saying, “Follow me.”

3 Easter: Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19.