The scriptures referred to are Acts 9:1-20 and John 21:1-19.
I’m only speaking as an amateur, but what an actor really loves in a part is a character with an arc. That is, you want a character who changes over the course of a play, movie, TV show, etc. You want him or her to be different, if only somewhat so, at the end than he or she was at the beginning. You want the character to be wiser, or deeper, or more conflicted, or less conflicted. Even if he is a villain, you want him to have learned something or revealed something about himself. In Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Raymond, was, by nature of his autism, unable to change. Tom Cruise, as his brother, Charlie, was the one to had to change, from a callous jerk to a man who not only learned to love his brother but to love him enough to let him go back to an environment where, Charlie realizes, Raymond would get better care. It’s a subtle performance with no big moment where his character suddenly reforms, just gradual change.
Of course, sudden change is fun for an actor. Scrooge’s total transformation on Christmas Day, if done right, should be both believable and delightful. And indeed we see both kinds of change in real people. Most people change over time, such as George Wallace, who seems to have sincerely changed from racist to a man who tried to make amends to the people he used to despise. Some make a dramatic 180 degree turn, such as St. Francis, the rich dandy and would-be warrior who gave his father's expensive clothes to the poor and tried to negotiate an end to the Crusades.
Today we see both kinds of change in 2 key men in the history of Christianity. In our passage from Acts, we read about Saul’s Damascus Road experience. We first meet Saul at the death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Saul was a zealous Pharisee, who believed the Messiah would return if every Jew would follow the law for just one day. Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah in his mind and the idea that faith in Christ was sufficient to save a person was an affront to him.
Now this heresy had spread to Damascus, a major city 60 miles north east of the Sea of Galilee. Located on 2 major highways, connecting Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean and the city with Arabia, it was often a staging area for armies. And the perfect place to spread the contagion of Christianity to the rest of the world.
So Saul sets out with letters from the high priest to the synagogues of Damascus that will give him authority to bring any Christians he finds there back to Jerusalem as prisoners. At this point, remember, all Christians are Jews. And Damascus had a Jewish population of up to 18,000.
The trip there from Jerusalem is 150 miles, almost a week’s travel. As Saul approaches his destination, a bright light flashes around him from heaven. Saul falls to the ground. And then he hears a voice. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Putting together all of Paul’s accounts of the event, his companions seem to hear the voice but not the content. Perhaps it sounds like thunder to them. Saul understands the voice and asks, “Who are you, Lord?” At first that sounds absurd. If he is unsure who is speaking, why is he calling the voice’s owner “Lord?” But the word could also mean the equivalent of “sir.” Then comes the reply, which will change forever Saul’s life. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
Saul gets up from the ground, blinded by the light. He is taken by his companions into the city, where he fasts from all food and drink for 3 days. While he is there, the Lord appears to a man with the quite common name of Ananias, one of the Christians Saul would have brought back to Jerusalem in chains. He is told that that not only is Ananias having a vision, he is also a subject of a vision by a man named Saul of Tarsus. Jesus wants him to heal Saul. Ananias has heard of this persecutor of the church and is not anxious to meet him. But the Lord has plans for Saul, his chosen instrument to spread the name of Jesus to the Gentiles and to kings and to the people of Israel. So Ananias goes to the place when Saul is staying. He greets Saul as a brother in Christ, lays hands on him and Saul can see once more—physically, that is. Saul lost his spiritual blindness on the road to Damascus. Soon he is proclaiming in the synagogues the faith he was trying to destroy, that Jesus is the Son of God.
Saul’s story is a conversion story of sorts, although he would not say that he had changed religions. He just saw that Jesus was the fulfillment of his Judaism. Peter’s story, in our passage from John, isn’t even close to a conversion story. For Peter, the change is more subtle.
It’s after the resurrection and Jesus appears to the disciples and teaches them for about 40 days. He seems to come and go, as if he is weaning them gradually from his physical presence. During one of the intervals where Jesus is with his Father, Peter and 6 other disciples decide to go fishing one last time. And they have a miserable night. No fish. Then someone asks how they were doing and tells them to try the other side of the boat. They do so and soon their net is so full they can’t drag it back into the boat. It was this, I’ll bet, that clued John in as to who was the helpful guy on shore. He probably remembered another time when they had fished all night in vain. Jesus had come by in the morning and used the boat as a pulpit, where he could comfortably preach to the crowds without being mobbed. Afterword, Jesus told Peter to push out into deeper water and put out his nets again. Peter did so reluctantly and suddenly had so many fish his nets were about to burst. Jesus told them they would be fishing for people next.
John says to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Peter realizes the same thing. He throws on his tunic and throws himself into the sea, swimming for the shore 100 yards away. They haul in the fish and Jesus cooks them breakfast. And after that Jesus talks to Peter.
For once Peter is not his usual boisterous, boastful self. Jesus asks Peter if he loves him “more than these”, meaning either the trappings of his career as a fisherman or, more likely, meaning more than the other disciples do. Remember that at the Last Supper, Peter claimed that even if all the others fell away from Jesus, he would not. And yet he denied Jesus 3 times. When asking, Jesus uses the Greek word agapao which is love apart from that of family, romance or friendship. It is benevolent, charitable love, the love with which God loves us and with which we should love God.
When Peter replies, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” he uses phileo, a Greek word which means to be a friend to someone. After denying Jesus at the High Priest’s house, Peter cannot claim having a high, noble love for Jesus. He can only say he loves Jesus like a friend. Jesus’ reply: “Feed my lambs.”
Jesus asks again using the nobler word for love and Peter again can only say he is Jesus’ friend. Jesus says, “Shepherd my sheep.”
Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you love me like a friend?” This time he uses the word Peter prefers. Peter is hurt that Jesus asks again. ”Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you!” To which Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.”
It was too painful for Peter to realize at the time but Jesus was helping him. He had denied Jesus 3 times when given the opportunity to say he did know and follow him. When we look back on the last time we saw someone just before their death, our biggest regret comes if we said something harsh or hurtful. Peter’s last words in Jesus’ hearing before his crucifixion was “I do not know the man.” Now Jesus gives Peter the opportunity to tell Jesus that he loves him 3 times. Whatever happens from this point on, Peter knows he has made his true feelings for his Lord and friend known.
When we look at these turning points for these two men, it is interesting to compare and contrast them. Saul’s trajectory was truly turned by 180 degrees. His direction was changed, though his zeal was not. Once an enemy of Jesus, he became one of his greatest ambassadors.
Peter had not set out to be an enemy of Jesus but a follower. He had stumbled badly. He had failed out of fear. He didn’t need to be turned around so much as helped back onto the path from which he had strayed. While Saul’s change was a reversal, Peter’s was a return and restoration. Both changes were painful.
There is a reason people don’t like change. It is painful, whether just slightly or a lot. Some familiar things are lost. Change schools or jobs or towns and you lose daily, easy contact with certain people. Routines are upended, discarded, replaced. When we moved here, my son complained about the “viscosity” of the light. I’m not sure what he meant exactly, but things looked and probably felt different. There is comfort in familiarity. The unfamiliar is disconcerting...and dangerous. You can navigate the familiar easily. The new may have hazards you haven’t yet discovered. You need to be alert and learn your way around things.
For Saul this was obvious. He had switched sides. What he thought was bad is good now. What he thought was good is bad. He thought he was serving God but he now realizes he was fighting him. Now he can serve him. But how? Paul tells us in Galatians that after his Damascus experience, he went to Arabia, no doubt to get away from everything familiar and sort out the new situation he was in. He had to rethink everything he thought he knew about God, sin, righteousness, faith, obedience, and especially Jesus. He had to find out what his place was in this brave new world where the old rules no longer apply. Saul was literally looking at the world with new eyes.
For Peter it must have felt different, weird. In a way, things were going to be sorta like they used to be, but kinda not. Jesus was back and Peter was with him. And yet things had changed here too. This was not Jesus, the man called by God to proclaim new life. This was Jesus, once dead and now alive, changed, possibly not human, or more than human. It’s like meeting a friend from high school except he didn’t get bald and fat since then but lost the baby fat and is slim and handsomer than he was--times 1000. All the gospels indicate that Jesus was not immediately recognizable after his resurrection. It’s like the disciples had to look and say, “Oh my God, that is you! You look great!” Except no one had to say, “What happened to you, man?” They knew: he was dead and now he’s alive. That changes a person.
But just like seeing that old friend who’s better than ever, you realize that you haven’t got more awesome since high school. In Peter’s case, he knows he’s gotten worse. He denied Jesus, ran off and didn’t dare show his face at Jesus’ public execution. Now Peter had done and said stupid things before. But this was worse. He let his friend down and just when Jesus needed him the most. So Peter is feeling guilty and awkward. He wants to forget all that and just pretend things are still the same. But they aren’t and deep down, he knows it.
For Peter, this isn’t about getting familiar with a whole new world. It’s more like going back to your home town after having failed spectacularly, after a scandal and disgrace, after getting out of jail or like returning home after having an affair. This is about how do you navigate what used to be familiar when you’re the one that doesn’t quite fit. Perhaps Peter’s desire to go fishing once more was his way of trying to recapture his life before he met Jesus and had everything turned upside down. Or the early days, when they were great friends and Peter hadn’t betrayed him.
In these situations, it helps to have a guide. In both of these cases, that guide is the risen Christ. For Saul, Jesus tells him he’s heading in the wrong direction. For Peter, Jesus tells him that he still wants him to shepherd his sheep. For Saul, Jesus is saying “Welcome aboard.” For Peter, he’s saying, “Welcome back.” But like a good guide, Jesus doesn’t say “This will be a piece of cake from now on.”
Most people only make changes when they have to. Usually they have to get to the point where not making the change is getting too painful to bear, and any pain the change creates will still be a relief from the worse pain of not changing. Jesus, to be fair, never pretends that change is painless. He tells Ananias regarding Saul “I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” He tells Peter the manner in which he will go to his death. He acknowledges that following him will take them through some rough terrain. He isn’t promising that it will be easy; just that they will make it.
To paraphrase The Princess Bride, change is painful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more. Want to learn a new skill? Spend 10,000 hours studying and practicing. Want to give up a bad habit? Change your lifestyle and maybe even your friends. Want a new life? Expect pain. Then attach yourself to someone who’s done it. Someone like Jesus.
Saul went from trying to kill new believers to crucifying the old man within and allowing Christ to make him a new creation. So much so that he stopped calling himself Saul, after the first king of Israel who came from his tribe of Benjamin, and started calling himself Paul, which means “little.” Perhaps this was his middle name. And perhaps it was a reminder to Paul that he was the last of the apostles to whom the risen Christ appeared and commissioned as well as, by Paul’s own estimation, the least of them.
Peter went from a guy who couldn’t confess to knowing Jesus to a guy who when explicitly told to stop preaching Jesus said, “We must obey God rather than human authorities.” Both he and Paul braved threats and imprisonment. Paul was whipped and stoned. Peter faced death for his faith, crucified head down. Paul met his death with his head on the chopping block. Both went to their deaths confident that beyond it lay a bigger change that would be, ironically, less traumatic. And that’s because this would not be a change in their perception or their direction but their arrival at their destination. Their journey would be over. They would be where they should be.
Paul, in prison, contemplating his probable execution, wrote, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He was not the same man who went charging up to Damascus, breathing murderous threats against those who followed Jesus. He had changed. He has become one of them and led many more to Christ. Whether his earthly life continued or his heavenly life began, he knew he would be either be serving Christ or in the presence of Christ and that was all to the good.
And in his first letter, Peter writes, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ…” This coming from a man who lied to save his skin when Jesus entered his suffering. But Peter had changed. And the cause of the change is hinted at in an earlier verse, when Peter says, “Above all, love each other dearly, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” Here he uses the word meaning not friendship but agapao, the word for higher love. That’s what changed him: Jesus’ love covered Peter’s sins. As he writes at the end of the letter, “And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen and establish you.” And the whole time, I bet Peter was thinking of that conversation after breakfast on the shore, when, in spite of what had happened, Jesus offered him again his love and his friendship and his trust in him to feed his sheep.
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