HOMILY FOR THE FEAST OF THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL (1)

HOMILY FOR THE FEAST OF THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

HOMILY THEME: PAUL’S ORDINATION : A DEATH BLOW ON TRADITION?

BY: Fr. Benedict Agbo

HOMILY: * Act 22 : 3 – 16, Mk 16 : 15 – 18.

‘I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting’. And that was the lietmotif of Paul’s conversion which we are celebrating today. Someone, ‘educated according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God as you all are this day’, has been found guilty of persecuting Christ. Mhhh! Is that a death blow on tradition? By no means. ‘What shall I do Lord?’. He was led into Damascus where Ananias, a devout man according to the law, ministered to him. But this time, not strictly according to the law. But led by the spirit, he said : ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight’. Before then we were told that Paul was harangued into conversion by a phenomenal experience of the ‘Holy Ghost fire’ – something that traditional conservatism would ordinarily question today : ‘A great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. And I fell to the ground and heard a voice…’. He was baptized and went ahead to link himself to the traditional apostles who laid hands on him empowering him ( through ordination) to be a bishop and veritable herald of the gospel to the Gentiles.

That ministry required a little bit of education beyond the dogmatic and conventional theology. Hellenism was to become one of the greatest challenges of early christendom. Left alone, the conservatives would have destroyed the Church but the spirit of Christ is the spirit of controlled progressivism. Going by tradition alone, Paul’s ordination could have been questioned, the sacraments of Christian initiation would have been bedeviled by the quicksands of Jewish traditions of circumcision, the priesthood of Christ could have been stampeded by the structuralism of traditional Jewish priestly theology. Paul’s conversion cannot be said to be a death blow on traditions but a necessary checkmate at a time that the Church needed it most. As the death of St Stephen mirrored the love and death of Christ to St Paul, 2 Cor 5 : 14, so does the death of millions of Nigerian Christians today mirror the love of Christ that unites us to a common cause of evangelization. Our prayer for Christian unity insists that there must be a melange between the conservatives and the progressives among us. We must be careful today neither to fashion out an image of an over conservative Church unamenable to changes, nor a freelance Church where everything goes.

May God bless you today!
FR BEN AGBO.