“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake”

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer, and redeemer.

Friends, when was the last time we were changed – not encouraged, not reassured, but utterly undone?

Not the kind of spiritual moment that leaves us quietly confirmed in the person we already believed ourselves to be, but the kind that leaves us exposed: stripped back and brought to the very edge of our own competence.

When did we last meet Christ in a way that did not simply strengthen our convictions, but convert them? Not just in what we think, but in how we relate; how we listen; how we depend; how we learn to receive.

We are so used to speaking of the conversion of St Paul as a moment of blinding light and thunderous revelation that we often miss where the conversion actually takes place. Not on the road. Not even in the light. But primarily in what follows: the slow, humiliating, disorientating walk into Damascus. Not the dramatic fall, but the difficult rising; not the voice from heaven, but in the silence that follows.

For the decisive theological moment is not when Paul falls to the ground, but when he is helped up again and discovers he is blind and cannot go on alone:

This is the sacred ground of Paul’s conversion: the beginning of the unmaking. The moment the old self is rendered powerless, and a new self begins – not through triumph, but through dependence.

The road to Damascus matters – but it is the being led by the hand into Damascus that Paul spends the rest of his ministry making sense of.

For up until this point, Saul of Tarsus has been the very image of religious independence. Authorised. Commissioned. Certain. A man saturated in Scripture, fluent in tradition, confident in his inheritance.

He knows who God is. He knows what God wants. And he knows who stands in God’s way. He is not wandering; he is certain. He is not searching; he is decisive. And that certainty is precisely the problem.

Our first reading from Ecclesiasticus offers a portrait of such a wise scribe: one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High; who “seeks out the wisdom of all the ancients,” and “preserves the sayings of the famous.” It’s a beautiful portrait. But it’s also dangerous. For wisdom, unconverted, becomes control, learning becomes exclusion and scripture becomes weapon.

So, Paul is not converted away from Scripture. He is converted within Scripture. And what must be undone is the fantasy – the insidious lie – of independence: the belief that faithfulness means self-sufficiency; that holiness means being right; that truth is something we can carry alone.

The risen Christ does not argue Paul into the Kingdom. He dismantles him. And the dismantling is not complete until Paul accepts the hand that leads him into the city he intended to dominate.

So, the road to Damascus is not the end of Paul’s power. It is its unmasking. The walk into Damascus is its total surrender. To be led by the hand is to relinquish control of pace, direction, and dignity. It is to trust those we did not choose. It is to arrive not as a conqueror, but as someone carried. This is not incidental detail: it is theologically decisive.

And it speaks directly into the heart of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which concludes today. Christian disunity is sustained by the very same fantasy that sustained Saul: the fantasy that we can journey alone. That my tradition has enough. That my theology is sufficient. That my church can see clearly without the hand of another guiding it.

And it also speaks painfully – even prophetically – into the heart of tomorrow, as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Holocaust Memorial Day does not only ask us to remember the victims of Nazi hatred. It forces us to look, with honesty, at the long history in which Christians – through theology, preaching, and inherited contempt – helped to form the soil in which antisemitism could grow. It confronts us with the terrible truth that religious certainty, unconverted, can become religious violence.

We are not told whether Saul is an executioner; but we know he is a persecutor. Already convinced he is acting in the name of God. certain purity must be defended and threats removed. And that is why this conversion matters so much. The risen Christ refuses to let Saul keep calling violence righteousness. He is stopped in his tracks. Christ unmakes him and his sudden dependency forces him into humility – and then sends him back into the world with a gospel that can no longer be weaponised.

And this is why Paul can later write, as we heard tonight in Colossians:

“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

It is a startling statement – and a dangerous one, dangerous if misunderstood and dangerous if ignored.

Paul is not saying that the cross was insufficient. He is saying something far more unsettling: that Christ has chosen to bind himself to a body that suffers. A body that is unfinished. A body that is fallible. A body that requires community in order to become whole.

The mystery Paul proclaims is not Christ as private possession, but Christ among us. Not Christ as property, but Christ as communion. Not Christ as an idea to be defended, but Christ as a life to be shared – and sometimes carried.

Which means unity will not achieved by agreement alone. It will only be achieved by something far more costly: mutual dependence.

Paul, who once walked with authority, learns that the gospel advances not through domination but through vulnerability; not through purity but through participation; not through standing apart but through being bound together. And so when he speaks of being “rooted and built up in him” his words assume entanglement: shared soil, interwoven lives, a common life that cannot be lived alone.

Unity is not sameness. It is not the erasure of difference. It is the refusal of independence.

The Church will not become one by marching in step. It will become one by learning to travel at the pace of the slowest, the most wounded, the least seen — by discovering again and again that we cannot arrive where Christ calls us without the hands of others. And this is the conversion still demanded of us.

For we are very good at organising the Church. We are very good at defending convictions, histories, ecclesial identities. But we are less willing to be led. Less willing to be dependent. Less willing to receive the gospel from those we once presumed to correct.

Paul enters Damascus blind, silent, humbled. And there he receives the Church not as an enemy, but as his lifeline. Ananias must come to him. Hands must be laid. Sight must be given back – by another.

This is unity: not consensus, but conversion. Not agreement, but surrender.

So as this week draws to its close, the question before us is not whether we desire unity. Most Christians do. The deeper question is whether we are willing to be converted into it.

Are we willing to be led by the hand? Are we willing to let go of the fantasy of personal, theological, and ecclesial independence? Are we willing to discover that Christ meets us most fully when we arrive together – vulnerable, dependent, and unfinished?

Paul’s conversion did not make him strong. It made him faithful. And faithfulness, it turns out, looks like needing one another.

So may we, with Paul, learn to journey not as those who presume sufficiency on our own, but as those willing to be led – led by the hand into the life of Christ, led by the hand into the suffering of his body, and led by the hand into the costly, beautiful and unfinished work of unity.

Amen.