The Light That Knocked the Hunter Down

While Philip was riding south in a stranger's chariot, a young man named Saul was in Jerusalem, knocking on the high priest's door.

Saul had been there the day Stephen was killed, and he had agreed it was right. Since then he had gone from house to house, dragging out the people who followed Jesus and locking them in prison.

Now he wanted more. "Give me letters for the synagogues in Damascus," he told the high priest. "If I find anyone there who belongs to the Way, man or woman, I will tie them up and bring them back here!"

(The Way was what people called Jesus' followers then, because they said Jesus was the way to God. Saul thought it was the way to trouble.)

The high priest wrote the letters. Saul set off north with a band of men, breathing out threats the whole road. Damascus was nearly a week's walk away, which is a long time to stay angry, but Saul managed it.

They were almost there, at about noon, when a light blazed out of the sky, brighter than the sun. Saul hit the ground. The men with him froze where they stood.

Then a voice spoke. "Saul, Saul, why are you hunting me?"

Saul lay with his face in the dust. "Who are you, Lord?"

"I am Jesus, the one you are hunting. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men heard the voice. They looked all around and saw no one. There they stood, holding ropes for tying up prisoners, with no one to tie.

Saul got up and opened his eyes. Everything was black.

"I can't see," he said. "I can't see anything!"

So the great hunter, who had marched toward Damascus to drag people away, had to be led into Damascus by the hand. (He did get through the city gate, just not the way he had planned.)

They took him to a house on Straight Street. For three days he sat in the dark, praying, and did not eat or drink a thing. Jesus was alive, and Saul had been fighting him.

Across the city, the Lord was already speaking to one of his followers, a man named Ananias, about that house on Straight Street.

A light from heaven had knocked Saul flat, but light could not undo what he had done. Stephen was still dead. Jesus had asked, "Why are you hunting me?" because his people belong to him the way a hand belongs to a body, and every blow that landed on them landed on him. He had already carried the heaviest blow, when he died on a cross for the people Saul dragged to prison, and for Saul too, and came back alive.

Years later Saul, by then called Paul, wrote in a letter, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the worst of them." The hunter had set out to catch the friends of Jesus, and outside Damascus, Jesus caught the hunter instead. He did it to save him.