Living our commission

The impact of Paul on the spread of the Way from the spiritual capital of the world, Jerusalem to the political capital of the world, Rome is, by many accounts, truly outstanding. The passages today from the Roman Catholic Lectionary provide some accounts of the way this Apostle to the Gentiles was the instrument of the universal call of God to all the nations praised by the psalmist. Friar Jude Winkler comments that there are 3 accounts of the conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. Our modern erroneous assumptions that bias us to expect a journalist’s approach to writing in the Sacred Texts and our academic suspicion that works which do not cite sources and attribute content are to be discounted make exegesis of these texts challenging. Some writers have attempted to use the various versions of the conversion of Paul to discredit the entire text of Luke. The Gospel from Mark is part of the longer ending which Friar Jude comments was likely added by a disciple of Mark to draw attention to the activity of Paul as made his missionary journey to Rome. The movement of the followers of Jesus to spread the Good News throughout the Empire was inspired by their experience of intimate relationship with Jesus and the acceptance of the task to teach and baptize all nations with which they and we are commissioned. The intimate contact of Jesus with Paul (using the Hebrew or Aramaic version of his name) placed the Jew, educated strictly according to the ancestral Law, in full realization that the people he was persecuting were so closely tied to God that he was receiving a Divine message from Jesus questioning his action. Friar Jude notes that within the preamble to this description of the conversion of Paul, Luke paints, for the Roman reader, the illegality of a Jerusalem Jew applying Jewish sanctions to people living in a different Roman province Damascus. The bias of Luke was to contrast the good citizen behaviour of the followers of Jesus, growing and commissioned to spread the Good News throughout the Empire, with illegal behavior of those Jews opposed to Him.