Footsteps #5

It is possible to be absolutely sure, and absolutely wrong about what we believe. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Medieval Christianity and modern radical religions are two examples of that. Saul’s work of persecution in Jerusalem was soon over. The Brethren who remained had either eluded his search warrant or had been rescued from his power. The persecution had in fact caused those of “The Way” (the name Christian hadn’t yet been coined) to disperse to other cities – an act of providence in the spread of the Gospel.

 
The young Zealot was not a man to do anything by halves. If he had smitten one head on the beast it had grown up in new places. If he had torn up the heresy by the roots from the Holy City, the seeds had been blown elsewhere and landed in fertile ground. In his outrageous madness, he began to pursue the new sect to foreign cities. Acts.9:1-2 tells the story: Armed with his credentials, Saul started from Jerusalem for his journey of over 200km to Damascus. This journey would have taken about a week in those days, and this doomed Saul to a week of reflection. Reflection of the trials and scourgings, the imprisonments, and even the stoning of Stephen over which he presided. Reflections on the secret misgivings of what he was doing.

“Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest ² and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.” (Acts 9:1-2)

Day after day on the Damascus road he tried to rescue himself from his own thoughts as they wandered back over the past and gazed sadly into the future. Those were happy years in Tarsus; happy walks in childhood beside the silver river Cydnus. Happy hours in the school of Gamaliel, where there first dawned upon his soul the glories of Moses and Solomon, of the law and the temple, of the priesthood and the chosen race. Those were golden days when he listened to the promised triumphs of the Messiah, and was told how near was that day when the Christ (Greek for Messiah) should be exalted and when the strength of Rome would be shattered like a clay pot. Those splendid youthful dreams seemed to have now faded.