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FROM A READING FOR JUNE 5, 10TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
'He said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother...' -- Galatians 1:14-15

Though we have four biblical accounts of Paul's conversion, Sunday's Galatians (1:11-19) passage contains the only one actually written by Paul himself. The other three sometimes contradictory accounts in Acts were all composed by Luke.

Like almost all of Scripture, this Galatians passage is triggered by problems. The Apostle recalls the event because some in the Christian community are questioning his work with Gentiles. They don't object to his converting non-Jews to the faith of Jesus, as long as he first converts them to Judaism -- something Paul not only thought unnecessary, but also (as we'll see in a couple of weeks) totally against basic faith in the risen Jesus, who isn't a Jew or a Gentile.

What's interesting is that Paul is convinced his call to evangelize Gentiles came as an essential part of his encounter with the risen Jesus years before, on the road to Damascus. Paul isn't downplaying the historical Jesus' Jewishness because, as some of Paul's critics claimed, he'd been a "bad" Jew himself.

On the contrary, Paul's able to boast, "I [once] persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it." He's the most unlikely person to hold the opinions he now holds. At one point in his life, he could have been regarded as a "super Jew."

Completely changed
"[I] progressed in Judaism," he writes, "beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was even more a zealot for my ancestral traditions" -- the very traditions he's now claiming that Gentile Christians don't have to keep.

Paul answers his critics' objection that he hasn't received permission from the Church's leaders to do what he's doing in two ways: First, he doesn't need their permission; he received his Gentile ministry directly from the risen Jesus. Second, he eventually did check with the Jerusalem leaders, and they had no objections to how he was evangelizing Gentiles.

Though we're not certain what happened on the road to Damascus, whatever Paul's encounter with the risen Jesus consisted of, it created a whole new life for him. He began to live something he never lived before. His entire value system was turned upside down.

No wonder Jesus' followers enjoyed narrating stories of Jesus resuscitating people from the dead. In some sense, they were narrating stories which described their own experiences.

Resuscitated
The Gospel resuscitation stories differ from the narrative of Elijah resuscitating the widow of Zarephath's son in our I Kings (17:17-24) reading. Probably none of the sacred author's readers identified with the boy the prophet brought back to life. This event was simply proof that the word Elijah proclaimed was actually Yahweh's Word.

But when the Gospel Jesus resuscitates Lazarus (Luke 7:11-17), Jairus' daughter and the widow of Nain's son, the readers, because of their own experiences of coming to life in Jesus, zero in on the resuscitated persons. They, like the chosen three, have also been brought back to life.

In the 1970s, when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ray Moody studied people who had died and been resuscitated, they discovered that these people were more interested in relating to others than they had been before. Paul demonstrated that in relating to Gentiles, whom he seems to have just tolerated before his life-giving encounter with the risen Jesus.

These resuscitated individuals also shared another characteristic: they no longer had any fear of dying. In some sense, they'd already been there and done that. Perhaps some of our fear of dying comes from our lack of dying as other Christs here and now.[[In-content Ad]]

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