An Epiphany of Grace
Vol. 57 No. 9 The Conversion of St. Paul (Epiphany 3) January 25, 2026
In the season of Epiphany the Church celebrates the manifestations of God’s glory in Christ—manifestations not confined to Israel, but extended to the Gentile world. It is fitting that within this season we commemorate the Conversion of Saint Paul. Paul’s conversion is itself one of the great epiphanies of Christ: the glorified Lord making himself known to a persecutor, and appointing him as the Apostle to the Gentiles. It is a turning point not only in Paul’s own story, but in the history of the Church—and yet, for all its uniqueness, it also reveals the essential pattern of every true conversion. What is manifested to Paul on the road to Damascus is meant, in its own measure, to be manifested in us also.
The New Testament introduces Paul—still known as Saul—at one of the darkest moments in the Church’s early life. At the end of Acts 7, Saul appears as an accomplice to the lynching of Stephen, the first martyr, and Stephen’s final prayer—“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”— is apparently unanswered. Far from relenting, Saul intensifies his campaign. Acts tells us that he “made havoc of the church,” entering homes, dragging off men and women to prison. His zeal does not remain local. At his own initiative, he carries the persecution beyond Judea, determined to root out what he regards as a dangerous heresy.
What drives this violence is not mere cruelty, but a desperate and misguided righteousness. Saul is zealous for the honor of God and the Law, yet his zeal is inseparable from anxiety about his own standing before God. He persecutes Christians not with judicial detachment, but with the compulsive energy of a man seeking to secure his own righteousness. In attempting to destroy what he believes to be blasphemy, Saul is seeking to establish himself as righteous before God. His very goodness—his zeal, his devotion, his moral seriousness—has become the instrument of his deepest sin.
It is this false righteousness that Christ shatters on the road to Damascus. As Saul journeys to extend his persecution, a dazzling light from heaven throws him helpless to the ground. From the light comes a voice of reproach: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” When Saul asks who is speaking, the answer annihilates every assumption he has lived by: “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” The one Saul believed to be a condemned impostor is revealed as the one whom God has vindicated and glorified. In persecuting the Church, Saul has been attacking God’s Christ himself.
The encounter leaves no room for negotiation. Saul’s response is immediate and absolute: “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” His former righteousness lies in ruins. He rises from the ground blind, led by the hand into Damascus, and for three days he neither eats nor drinks. The man who once boasted of his knowledge of the truth is now literally blind. The light he thought he possessed has been exposed as darkness. In seeking to establish his own righteousness, he has only brought condemnation upon himself. In those three days of blindness Saul learns that true sight can only be received as sheer gift. He waits, emptied of everything but need.
Thus Saul’s restoration is not effected by the Damascus epiphany alone. Christ truly and immediately reveals himself to Saul, justifies him by faith, and claims him as his own apart from any human mediation. Saul’s surrender—“Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”—is already an act of faith, a total yielding to the risen Christ. Justification is immediate, personal, and the free gift of grace. And yet Christ does not will that this immediate relation should remain solitary or abstract. He does not heal Saul in isolation, nor does he allow him to bypass the community he has persecuted. Instead, Christ deliberately incorporates Saul into his Body, the Church, and does so through visible, sacramental means. God therefore sends Ananias, a faithful Christian of Damascus, to be the human instrument of Saul’s healing and reception into the Church.
The significance of this is profound. Ananias is commanded to go to his enemy and bring him not condemnation but mercy. In obeying, Ananias embodies the love Christ commands; and in receiving, Saul submits in humility to the Church he once sought to destroy. When Ananias lays his hands upon him and calls him “Brother Saul,” the gospel is enacted before our eyes. Christ wills that Saul’s reconciliation should take an ecclesial form, and that his incorporation into Christ should be sacramental as well as spiritual.
Here the narrative itself teaches a theology that classical Anglicanism has always insisted upon: a both/and, not an either/or. Through his direct encounter with the risen Christ, Saul is justified by faith alone; but that same Christ unites him to himself through the Church and her sacraments. The immediate and the mediated belong together. Christ who meets Saul on the road is the same Christ who receives him in baptism. So also it must be for us: not just the inward relation to Christ, but also the outward sign and community, in which that faith is exercised and sustained.