Today the Holy Church celebrates that moment on the Damascus road when everything turned around for Saul of Tarsus. Imagine what it was like to sit in that inky blackness for three whole days and be forced to see how you'd gotten everything wrong. How your zeal for the law had not produced righteousness at all - how instead your heart had been filled with hatred! The very opposite of what the law required. Worst of all, how your zeal for the law had found you not on God's side, but persecuting and attacking Him. To the man sitting in despair then of every getting anything right again, along comes the timid Ananias to tell him that Jesus, far from discarding him, has a use for him. Baptized, nourished (Eucharist?), and given sight, Saul the Zealot for the Law becomes the Great Apostle Paul, witnessing forever to this central fact:
"But now a righteousness apart from the Law has been manifested, to which the Law and the Prophets bear witness, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." Rom 3:21
The zealot of the law becomes the preacher of faith, who wishes only "to be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith - that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead." Phil 3:9-10
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