Saul of Tarsus was not a villain. He was a serious man, a learned man, a man of deep conviction who believed with everything in him that he was doing the right thing. He was a Pharisee, trained in the finest traditions of Jewish law and scholarship, and he had concluded that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth posed a dangerous threat to the faith he loved. He had watched Stephen stoned to death and had approved of it. He had gone from house to house, dragging men and women off to prison. He was, by his own later account, zealous beyond his peers.

What Saul could not see — what his very certainty prevented him from seeing — were the people in front of him. They were not people to him. They were a problem to be solved, an error to be corrected, a threat to be eliminated. His theological precision, his clarity about right and wrong, had somehow drained the humanity out of every face he encountered. He knew what they represented. He did not see who they were.

And then the light. And then the voice. And the voice does not say what we might expect. Jesus does not tell Saul that his theology is wrong, or that he has misread the scriptures, or that he has violated the law. He says something far more personal, and far more devastating: "Why are you persecuting me?" Not my people. Not my followers. Me. Every person Saul had dragged from their home, every family he had broken apart, every man and woman he had delivered to suffering — Jesus had been there in every one of them. Saul had never been fighting an abstraction. He had been raising his hand against Christ himself.

Saul is struck blind. The man who was certain he could see everything — who had clarity about truth and error that most of us can barely imagine — suddenly cannot see at all. He has to be led by the hand into the city. He sits in the darkness for three days, unable to eat, unable to drink, unable to act. Before he can become Paul, before he can become the apostle to the Gentiles and the author of some of the greatest words in all of scripture, he has to sit with what he has done. The blindness is not a punishment. It is a gift. It is the only thing that could stop him long enough to be transformed.

We are not so different from Saul. We may not persecute anyone. But we know what it is to be so certain of our own rightness that the people in front of us stop being people. We do it with those who hold different political views, different theological convictions, different ways of living their lives. We see what they represent before we see who they are. Our certainties blind us, quietly and completely, and we rarely notice it happening.

Jesus tells Saul — and tells us — that the person in front of you is not an abstraction. That person is someone for whom Christ died. That person, in some profound and mysterious way, is Christ himself. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus says that whatever we do to the least of those around us, we do to him. The Damascus road is that same truth, arriving not as invitation but as confrontation. The call of the Kingdom is to see the face in front of us before we see anything else.

Our Father, forgive us for the times our certainties have blinded us to the people around us. Open our eyes to see in every person we encounter the face of Christ himself. And when you need to stop us in our tracks to teach us that lesson, give us the grace to sit still and listen. Amen.

This devotion was written and read by Jim Stovall.

Grace for All is a daily devotional podcast produced by the members of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee. With these devotionals, we want to remind listeners on a daily basis of the love and grace that God extends to all human beings, no matter their location, status, or condition in life.

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First United Methodist Church is a lively, spirit-filled congregation whose goal is to spread the message of love and grace into our community and throughout the world. We are located on the web at https://1stchurch.org/.