The Gospel and the 2 Great Commandments
It struck me this morning that Saul’s conversion story in Acts 9 is just as much a story about his reconciliation with other people as it is a story about his reconciliation to God. After all, it is not God in some abstract sense that Saul curses in vs. 1. No, it is the Lord’s disciples whom he is “breathing out murderous threats against.” (1)
In other words, Saul’s sins are a violation of God’s law made tangible in his sin against the Lord’s disciples. It is precisely there, in that broken human to human relationship, that Saul’s sins against Christ exist and become incarnate, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4)
Here the 2 Great Commandments – love of God and love of neighbor – are shown to be so intertwined that separation is nonsensical.
Saul is a sinner against God because he does not love his neighbor as himself.
Saul is a sinner against other human beings because he does not love God with his entire heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Interestingly, I’ve never heard this passage preached this way. I always hear it as a ‘gospel’ passage whereby God reconciles Paul to Himself and Himself alone.
But this is only half the story – God tells Saul to go into the city and await instruction. Saul later encounters a group of disciples who are afraid of him; he then spends several days with them (19), probably seeking their forgiveness, learning from them, and healing a very broken relationship with them. It is this part of the story I’ve never heard from an Evangelical pulpit.
But if contemporary Evangelicals wish to maintain some moral authority in the postmodern world, we must begin to pick up this other side of this story. No longer can we permit ourselves to believe the gospel is just a spiritual reconciliation of “my” individual self and God. No, no, we must see that the gospel inescapably entails reconciliation between “me” and the larger community of human beings created in God’s image. The true gospel necessarily holds together love for God and love for neighbor.
June 8th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
What a great reading of this story – much more full and consistent with the whole gospel! Thank you sir.
This story is so often the paradigm for how we understand Salvation – especially as a crisis point. But if we were to read the story the way you suggest and STILL use it as a paradigm, I wonder what would happen to our evangelism.
June 8th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Great question. I wonder if it wouldn’t, for one thing, necessarily revive the value of Baptism and Eucharist in our midst – two rituals emphasizing the need and necessity of unity with both God and other people.